Quote Originally Posted by Astrus View Post
This might just be me but 8/10 "Role Play" Duties where we play as an NPC with the neutered version of a Job available to the WoL feel like the absolutely worst mandatory content in the game for me. It doesn't do the Job justice, it doesn't do the character justice most of the time and it just isn't fun in any way.
The one outlier is the Thancred stealth mission. That one actually shook things up enough to be interesting but the ones that are plain combat? I'd almost rather watch that happen in a cutscene than suffer through the "gameplay".
"In From the Cold" is my personal example of this system working because you're meant to feel powerless, so it fits the narrative.

But, this problem doesn't end with those solo duties. It's really dumb that I had fewer effective action options as a healer doing the MSQ for certain face-offs against long-standing antagonists than I had doing the level 20 quest back in ARR where I had some NPCs I could heal and crowd control I could use to turn the tide of the battle.

As for the 1-2-3 thing and why it was more engaging (beyond having various combo routes) than having them all on the same button, the time which your actions remained comboable was much shorter for a long time than it is today, something around like 7 seconds (it's like 30 seconds now), and there were often actions that you'd need to apply on a new target when you started attacking it, oh, and NEW TARGETS would show up to boss fights at every level of content (even solo MSQ stuff), so you'd have much more organic reasons to want to be able to just restart your combo whenever instead of being locked into finishing them. Obviously, that hasn't been the world we've played in for some time, so I don't think it's unlikely that they're drifting towards what OP wants, slowly but surely.

Having all the buttons on one button won't really make the jobs any less boring than those NPC duties, though, and they'll probably just give you more random oGCD 'deals damage) actions you have to press every 30/60/120 seconds once they 'quality of life' away the buttons. Or, all of our jobs will be drawn into the DNC/SMN singularity so we can quality of life our way through the MSQ and just hurry up and get back to afking in Limsa. Gameplay in my video game was such a drag, anyways.