QoL and reducing number of the buttons suggestion

[caffe_macchiato]

People forget that this is Final Fantasy XIV, a ten-year old game running on a 19-year old engine. The engine was designed for machines far less powerful than the present. This limits the kind of challenging multiplayer content that Square Enix can design. This is why raids all have the same mechanics like stack-spread and in-out. So the only challenge that Square Enix can give the player is pushing many different buttons at once. It requires no additional processing power to split abilities into different buttons despite doing the same thing. So Square Enix has to do this, otherwise people will see through the game's fatal flaw. And it works, as many people love 1-2-3 gameplay because moving your finger one step makes you feel accomplished. FFXIV will never change and this will likely be Square Enix's last MMO because of how popular it is.

[strawberrycake]

People forget that this is Final Fantasy XIV, a ten-year old game running on a 19-year old engine. The engine was designed for machines far less powerful than the present. This limits the kind of challenging multiplayer content that Square Enix can design. This is why raids all have the same mechanics like stack-spread and in-out. So the only challenge that Square Enix can give the player is pushing many different buttons at once. It requires no additional processing power to split abilities into different buttons despite doing the same thing. So Square Enix has to do this, otherwise people will see through the game's fatal flaw. And it works, as many people love 1-2-3 gameplay because moving your finger one step makes you feel accomplished. FFXIV will never change and this will likely be Square Enix's last MMO because of how popular it is.

People have made due in Modding older Engines in games for all types of stuff, stop making excuses for them when they're professional devs.

[Espon]

People forget that this is Final Fantasy XIV, a ten-year old game running on a 19-year old engine. The engine was designed for machines far less powerful than the present. This limits the kind of challenging multiplayer content that Square Enix can design. This is why raids all have the same mechanics like stack-spread and in-out. So the only challenge that Square Enix can give the player is pushing many different buttons at once. It requires no additional processing power to split abilities into different buttons despite doing the same thing. So Square Enix has to do this, otherwise people will see through the game's fatal flaw. And it works, as many people love 1-2-3 gameplay because moving your finger one step makes you feel accomplished. FFXIV will never change and this will likely be Square Enix's last MMO because of how popular it is.

Not sure where you're pulling these numbers from. Being an old game designed for low end computers has nothing to do with this. World of Warcraft is far older and designed to run on junk computers and yet has more engaging classes despite having far fewer abilities and no 1-2-3 button combos. Why? Because it's not afraid to use RNG, forcing you to constantly adapt to what abilities you should be prioritizing over others. If you aren't prioritizing properly, your DPS drops. There is also no 2 minute burst meta so classes don't need to fit into this perfect 1 or 2 minute rotation so everything lines up.

If this game allows fractions of a second in macros, you could auto-play most jobs to perfection. It doesn't matter how many buttons or combos your job has if you never have to react to anything except what the boss does and just need to hit things in the same order over and over. It's why I think more jobs should play like Red Mage or Dancer and less like Summoner, it's more fun to react to what's needed instead of memorizing a long string of button presses.

[ForsakenRoe]

If the OP wants to have their 1-2-3 filler condensed to one button, SMN and the healers are right there to experience said gameplay

But a lot of people are now complaining about how hollow the gameplay of those jobs now feel, so I would prefer it if they didn't remove more buttons. If they changed 1-2-3 into 1-1-1 and added two new cool buttons in the 2-3's place, sure, but this is SE. They removed Kaiten and replaced it with {nothing}, so we have to fill that gap with Shinten instead to keep our kenki under control. They removed the secondary DOTs from healers and replaced them with {nothing}, instead compiling the damage into the one main DOT and increasing it's duration to 30s, making the healer rotation a static 'press DOT once per 30s, then press filler 11 times in a row, repeat' unless healing is required, in which case, throw out one of your 4-5 completely free OGCD tools to instantly counteract the damage

[kaynide]

But a lot of people are now complaining about how hollow the gameplay of those jobs now feel, so I would prefer it if they didn't remove more buttons. If they changed 1-2-3 into 1-1-1 and added two new cool buttons in the 2-3's placee

Honestly that'd be my take: Make the core rotation that every job has as a backbone brain dead easy and/or dumb, but give a lot of oGCD abilties that need to be managed/used in specific situations, or make the brain dead 1-2-3 branch into meaningful options. Samurai specifically should have more things it can do with Kenki, and removing Kaiten was an awful decision. I dunno, maybe an oGCD that gives a random empty Sen at the cost of Kenki. Options are good. Meaningless options, not so much.

Unfortunately the game mechanically peaked around SB...and any complexity that was fun to work with in HW/SB is gone.