Quote Originally Posted by Rilifane View Post
Another downside to static rotations is that from the lack of meaningful interaction between skills you need to have more buttons for the same level of engagement than a rotation that has varying degrees of priority/ rng in it.
Keeping a buff up with a 123 every 30s isn't meaningful interaction between 2 and 3, you do it because it's always the only way to go about it and it doesn't modify your gameplay. A chance of a skill resetting the cooldown of another skill does and there is a more constant need to pay attention and react as opposed to "I know I have to press 123 for 30s and then I press everything else in this exact order". It's generally better for button economy and the wasteful use of hotbar slots that SE keeps going for ("this skill... but aoe!", "can only be used after this skill... but on a separate button!") makes the whole issue even worse.
They're putting the car in front of the horse by going "Too many buttons, we need to prune, let's delete this skill" instead of looking at why they feel they have to add so many stale fluff buttons in the first place. And you wouldn't need 5 buttons with a flat "use on cooldown, it's free potency" if the other existing buttons had meaningful interaction, give choices and leave a skill ceiling.
This is incidentally why I find the RPR design this expansion to be completely mindboggling in nature. I guess they tried to do a MCH variant for melee with a basic combo with no branches, but on top of it reintroduced a mechanic that's been consistently sniped out of other jobs like DRG for instance (a buff/debuff to keep up with one button/skill that's not included into any mechanics related to the skillset, and which already is a prime target for deletion in one expansion or another make room for other things). And the whole single target toolset has been duplicated into its AoE version, with every skill having its AoE counterpart, which bloats the hotbars so much while the job actually has an extremely simplistic rotation. They've completely avoided on purpose with that job to use the more common design by now consisting into adding AoE falloff damage to a lot of abilities that are shared between the single target and AoE sets in most jobs (some more than others), and which dramatically reduces that unecessary button bloat.

I just don't understand what went into the design of that job.