Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
There is only one use for Midare: to spend it before your next Sen. There is only one use for Tenka: to spend it before your next Sen while in AoE. There is only one use for Shinten: to spend its Kenki before you'd overcap until dumping under raid buffs. Even Higanbana, Yaten, and Gyoten barely have two use cases.

Does that make all those skills, likewise, degenerate bloat?
Yes, actually. These are all "bad" buttons. You're getting close to a core problem with most DPS class designs in FFXIV (and in fact tanks and healers too but in different just thematically similar ways): They are mostly button bloat.

The core underlying class identity and design is incredibly minimal, and does not at all translate well into the main gameplay loop. The fact so many oGCDs exist in itself hints at this, as it shows a need to find "between the cracks"-space for more buttons to give people more to "do", as their core gameplay holds no mental attention as there's nothing to it.

So yeah, correct, virtually all such buttons are pointless for their respective jobs. And once you take them away, the static rotation exposed beneath the thin veneer shows how utterly simplistic it is, and that in turn shows just why static-rotation-type jobs just don't work well, at least for FFXIV. They really ought to be moving away from them more.

Take for example the core visual/lore/operational identify of Samurai. Casted melee attacks. How often do these actually even impact your gameplay feel at all nowadays? They do not. They are too fast, they aren't important enough, they are too variable in their placement specifically. They ought to be extremely restrictive moves, but go with the lore have huge payoff when you pull them off - in fact not being able to do should probably be expected to happen sometimes to account for the burst in power. Instead, Samurai has the same static-rotation GCD flow that autohotkey could play optimally for you, with the same filler oGCD spam as everyone else.

Those buttons you mention only exist to make you feel more busy while playing an incredibly mind-numbingly boring core gameplay. It's the equivalent of constantly having to tap on buildings to collect currency in mobile games, nothing more, nothing less. To a very small degree this is not problematic or unexpected, but in FFXIV these non-player-interactive filler buttons have become the vast majority of skills and hence hotbars are so bloated that this is noteworthy when people discuss the game to non-players.