Quote Originally Posted by Osmond View Post
That’s a question the post have to answer themselves. What’s the limit of hot bars a job needs for it to make it fun to play. Solutions are a lot, but becomes bloated. Solutions are little, but becomes boring.
For starters, there are a number of things that can be done to condense hotbar actions already without changing much. For example, Holy, Art of War, Gravity, and Dyskrasia all currently exist as buttons that are nearly never usable against bosses, which is the vast bulk of meaningful encounters this game throws at us, and even in the exceedingly sparse number of fights where there is meaning to choosing AoE over single target, there are only ever 2 targets, meaning Holy III still isn't worth using, and the gains are so miniscule on Gravity II and Dyskrasia II that it's likely to have no actual impact on clear speed.

You could easily add some modicum of value to single target situations on these buttons that make them desirable over single target nukes, and suddenly we've gained another viable action in boss content without increasing the action count. For example, maybe after playing your Minor Arcana, your next Gravity hits 3 times, or Gravity applies a Trick Attack like selfish DPS debuff on all its targets, increasing the damage you deal to enemies by 5-10% for x seconds.

In other cases, we can talk about merging or pruning buttons. On Scholar, for example, you could easily have Whispering Dawn upgrade into Fey Blessing, for example, being a flat heal with a HoT attached, and give it a second charge. This makes it more competitive with Sage's equivalent Physis II which is blatantly superior to Whispering Dawn currently and prunes 1 button of Scholar's hotbar without losing anything.

These are just examples of ways to trim bloat and improve engagement with the tools we already have. In practice, it would be beneficial for more conscious thought to go into revamping each healer to have a more curated selection of tools that have interactivity--keeping button total lower while increasing the amount of options players have with the actions these jobs are given.