Quote Originally Posted by Tenken7 View Post
I agree with you 100% which is the reason why I wonder if there is a way to learn from PvP if only to alleviate the button bloat in PvE. A copy/paste would be disastrous for reasons you already mentioned but I wonder if some cleaning up would help. If anything, I would like to see the 1,2,3 combos reduced into one button since nobody ever starts with 2 or 3.
I don't know if combo consolidation is ever going to happen—no one posting here is likely to care too much about low-level combat feel, but I can see new players being pretty whelmed if jobs like PLD had nothing to do but press 1 for the entirety of ARR.

I also personally know a surprising number of endgame players who constantly lose track of their combo during fights—for them, at least, combo is still mechanically relevant even at level 90. I get the vague feeling that this covers more players than you might expect, at least if the occasional 25-minute Expert roulette means anything. For those players, it's more than just QoL: it's a DPS increase that was out of their reach otherwise, which is a weird thing to think about.

I think it'd be cool if non-branching combos and boring oGCDs got removed/consolidated, so that hotbar space could make way for faster, more demanding jobs. Unfortunately, Square seems to like removing abilities and replacing them with nothing, so I guess I'm okay with manual combos for now.