"Button Bloat"

[Aco505]

I main reaper and the job runs butter smooth. Button bloat comes from a combination of the number of available actions that one can take at any given point and the optimal flow of said actions. Dragoon is a hot mess but people generally don't complain much about it because it's been that way for a while. The one weird thing with reaper is the pre-pull harvest scythe prep, but it's not terrible.

And yeah I'd say dragoon has "button bloat" due to the number of OGCDs it has available before it gets into a rotation. It's progression is basically adding more buttons to it that don't really have any meaning outside of just another thing to juggle, and comparing that to reaper where the number of things that get juggled are quite well placed, it's kind of insulting.

Your initial post talks about how DRG is bloated because it has a branching single target GCD combo and because the AoE one is a three-step combo whose first step got upgraded in EW.

DRG is the only melee in the game with a 5-GCD weaponskill string, and it has 7 ST weaponskills in total. While unique, it's not so strange considering MNK and SAM have 6, NIN has 4 + Raijus and other GCDs, and RPR has 3 plus the positionals and other GCDs as well like Soul Slice.

AoE wise, it has three just like MNK and SAM, with NIN and RPR having two and the latter also having other ones to press relatively often such as Whorl of Death or Soul Scythe.

You also mention that there's multiple types of jump, but this is precisely an iconic thing of the job throughout FFXIV and all FF games in general. The only jumps that just deal damage and are not tied to a specific resource are Spineshatter Dive and Dragonfire Dive, but this doesn't mean that they don't have a purpose since theirs is precisely to be used under stacked buff windows, just like other abilities/CDs like Senei, Ogi, Dream Within a Dream, Hyosho, Double Down, Shadowbringer, etc.

Any other oGCD in the DRG's kit is tied to a resource with the exception of Life Surge.

That RPR is a job that flows very well does not change the fact that it has 6 buttons in their hotbar exclusively for AoE, which will cause (perhaps small) button bloat concerns in the future if they add more actions. This also happens to other jobs and is not an exclusive thing to RPR, which avoids this problem now because of how many of their actions change to others.

Posts such as this one (https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5925792) show that DRG is one of the jobs with the least amount of buttons to bind precisely because of a lack of AoE duplicates. It does have high APM due to the number of oGCDs in its arsenal despite being a slow GCD job though, but it's not unique in this regard as several other jobs are high in APM, too.

Therefore, I'd hardly say that DRG is a "hot mess" or that "buttons don't have anything to do with one another" when so many jobs also have actions that just deal damage and whose main purpose is to be aligned with buff windows: the job flows and feels great in EW and especially now with the animation lock changes. We could ask ourselves questions like "what do the Lemure oGCDs do besides adding a bit of potency in every Enshroud?"

It's fine for some actions to just deal damage. They make the job more cohesive and getting rid of them would feel skeletal, just like how many jobs feel before maximum level (e.g. RPR before getting Plentiful Harvest). However, their existence does not have to mean that the job is bloated.