Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
There are nearly no circumstances where swapping between AoE and single target attacks has any sort of interesting or meaningful decision-making that warrants having entirely divorced AoE buttons rather than just baking AoE into single target gameplay.
Right, which is why all the pruning of stuff keeps getting on my nerves so much. Like as an example, look at NIN or RPR. We've got 3 gauge spenders for each, Gluttony/Bloodstalk/GrimSwathe for RPR, and Bunshin/Hellfrog/Bhava for NIN. There's no reason really for NIN to even have Bhava, when they could theoretically just have Hellfrog do double damage to the primary target. But at the same time, the Gauge is so hollow and bland in terms of what it's useful for atm, removing ANYthing from it would have catastrophic ramifications. If we look back to SHB, the Fairy gauge for SCH had Blessing (10 gauge cost, 60s CD) and Union (basically super-embrace, 10 per tick). Now they removed Blessing, it's just the Union gauge. Might as well remove the bloody thing. Which is the issue we now see with SAM thanks to Kaiten's removal. You don't need to worry about holding gauge for Kaiten because it's gone now. You don't need to worry about holding gauge for Senei/Guren because Ikishoten is also 2min CD and gives twice as much as their cost. So the only 'thought' is 'don't overcap, dump in buffs'