simple way to reduce button bloat without changing gameplay

[Avoidy]

I do agree that some bloat exists. I think addressing this correctly involves looking at these jobs and thinking about what they're actually intended to do, and then cutting out a lot of unnecessary fat that's just there for no reason. Bard for example, has an ogcd called sidewinder. It's just there to be pressed when it comes off cd. It doesn't add anything to my enjoyment of the job. It's just yet another thing I can't forget to do. If it were removed and its potency were simply added to my kit in some other way, I could place something else there and nothing of value would be lost except for a skill I hit every 60 seconds because it's there. Or if they want to keep it, it should have some kind of synergy with the rest of my kit. AST's minor arcana is similar. Since it's luck oriented, I can't strategize around it. I press it because it's there. If it's a damage card, I just press it again during my burst. If it ceased to exist, I genuinely wouldn't care and I could place a different skill in its place. Every job that people think of when they consider "bloat" is generally loaded down with extra crap like this where you press it because it's off cooldown, but it doesn't really accomplish much or add to your enjoyment of the game. The problem is when the devs go in to clean it up, they're so out of touch that they remove things that feel integral to the job's gameplay loop. For example, in endwalker they tried to examine AST's purpose and address complaints about it, and wound up removing the entire divination minigame from the job's gameplay loop, in favor of a personal buff that (afaik) nobody asked for. Or with bard, they killed the dot procs so now dots feel like an annoyance, a thing you do just to do, and not something that feeds into your job's gameplay identity by allowing you to fully utilize your songs. They might as well remove bard's dots entirely now, since they serve no purpose other than to be pressed manually once, and then kept up in the future with ironjaws. And even then, within the scope of the job's kit, they accomplish nothing.

idk man, I think there are ways to do this but they're really hard and require a lot of thought and a deep understanding of how the job plays so that you can surgically remove unnecessary crap without angering longtime fans of the job, and atm SE just doesn't have what it takes to do that. If AST and DRG aren't completely gutted in 7.0, I'll be pleasantly surprised; I get really nervous when these devs talk about streamlining jobs because they lack the subtlety and care to do it right imo. btw For those of you asking for a 1 button combo system, peep the healer section to see how positively thrilled they are about mashing [1] through an encounter. It's boring as hell, but I honestly bet we'll get it anyway, sooner or later, and there won't even be an option to revert it.