Button Bloat

[Jeeqbit]

Summoner still got Physik that heals 400 HP and doesnt scale.

These examples are still nothing compared to Heavensward and Stormblood.

I think they are intending to remove Resurrection from Summoner because they wanted to if the rework was a success, which it is considering how many of them you see in duties. So maybe they will remove Physick as well.

Cure and Benefic are obviously still meant to be relevant from a design perspective even though experts ignore it.

And Shield Bash has been kept for job identity reasons. There aren't a whole lot of examples of bloat compared to the first expansions this game had, tbh. What they kept was deliberate or because of job identity, and they even eventually removed things that were part of job identity such as Fluid Aura, so they will probably eventually do it with Shield Bash tbh.

I say specificly BUTTON bloat , not SKILL bloat, you can have a lot of skills, but my keyboard only got so many buttons i can manage with one hand.

Some people do want it to just be a few buttons like PvP, but for whatever reason, FFXIV made lots of actions/abilities part of the game's "identity". In my years playing, I've seen some people say that the large amount of actions is why they play, because some games keep it extremely simple.

[Taranok]

They have aimed to keep the button bloat about the same in every expansion, so if you think it's bad now, it would have been much worse after 4 expansions if they hadn't been keeping it balanced.

Hahaha, no. If this were true, BLM would still be in the 28 button range like it was in stormblood (including anything you might conceivably want on your bar, including things like food or potions.) Classes like SAM prove they've actually forgotten the lessons of heavensward, and a solid third of classes have more buttons now than the worst class did in heavensward.

Xenoglossy, Senei, shoha 2. Even things like reaper's 'of death' skills and, especially, soul sow/harvest moon, show that they really forgot about the concept of button bloat and have added a ton of bloat since the SB enshrinkening.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, they've also homogenized addle and feint into basically being tacticians while giving all healers more 10% mits to layer with tank's reprisal. Let's just conveniently forget the sheer amount of mits tanks have in general and how 1 mit is never good enough under most conditions.

No, right now this is the worst the bloat has ever been, just not universally by raw button count. Buttons being useful does not stop it from being bloat, which is especially frustrating as well.

Also, this isn't intended as a strawman so much as a tangent launched off of the false belief that the devs try not to bloat out. Even a cursory knowledge of the game or, say, BLM's history shows they've forgotten about the problems of bloat. To the point where I know some players actually have macros just to swap hotbars between AOE and ST skills because it's that ridiculous right now.

[Jeeqbit]

To the point where I know some players actually have macros just to swap hotbars between AOE and ST skills because it's that ridiculous right now.

I have such macros, but I had them in Heavensward too. I don't see how they would solve it other than to do the 100% to target, 50% to all others thing.

[CidHeiral]

There was another thread about this fairly recently and almost everyone who complained about button bloat in the thread later exposed themselves as having no clue how to bind their abilities properly.

For reference, here are the number of buttons for each job currently. Every job has around 30 buttons give or take, with SMN having the least at 25 and SCH having the most at 35.

[rawker]

SCH having the most at 35.

Does this cover pet commands? 3 hotbars is not enough for me. Yes, i also have Repose on my hotbar and i find ways to use it.

[CidHeiral]

Does this cover pet commands? 3 hotbars is not enough for me. Yes, i also have Repose on my hotbar and i find ways to use it.

Not sure, but the post says this: "Scholar (+2) - As a pet job, SCH has a ton of actions that are not assignable to hotbars. SCH gains two new abilities in EW: Protraction (like a targeted Thrill of Battle) and Expedient (AoE mitigation + Combat Sprint). SCH's hotbar is going to be somewhat difficult to manage with 35 unique actions. On the plus side, Summon Selene and Summon Eos are essentially the same button, and one can be removed. You can also consider removing Repose, which sees little use in high-end combat currently."

[ZiraZ]

Does this cover pet commands? 3 hotbars is not enough for me. Yes, i also have Repose on my hotbar and i find ways to use it.

Probably, its the only way it could reach 35 keys. I'm guessing they are only adding the 2 useful pet abilities since the rest are completely useless.
As for bloat I don't feel like there is bloat on any job right now, some spells rarely ever get used but I would not consider them real bloat, it's more like the upgrade system failed those abilities and left them to rot when they should have been merged into something else by max level and can just be ignored. 30 abilities seems like the golden spot for me.

[rawker]

Probably, its the only way it could reach 35 keys. I'm guessing they are only adding the 2 useful pet abilities since the rest are completely useless.
As for bloat I don't feel like there is bloat on any job right now, some spells rarely ever get used but I would not consider them real bloat, it's more like the upgrade system failed those abilities and left them to rot when they should have been merged into something else by max level and can just be ignored. 30 abilities seems like the golden spot for me.

Obligatory hotbar setup


Hmm.. this may look bloated to some but it's actually fine and makes sense... unlike uh...


yeah. i didn't even bother changing the default hotbar setup. I despise EW SMN.

For SCH, I have a hidden hotbar where Sprint is in there. I should kept Return, and Teleport from SMN hotbar for padding. Ugh. Such an eyesore

[Moqi]

It's so weird that they have the ability to merge combos but would rather delete abilities than do that in PVE. The only reason I can come up with is that they don't want to do it because it'd make the leveling experience lackluster (more than it already is) by not having a new shiny button on the hotbar, which we only get more dynamic abilities at later levels.

[TheOperator3712]

It's so weird that they have the ability to merge combos but would rather delete abilities than do that in PVE. The only reason I can come up with is that they don't want to do it because it'd make the leveling experience lackluster (more than it already is) by not having a new shiny button on the hotbar, which we only get more dynamic abilities at later levels.

On the former point, I can see a few other reasons they might not want to. Like branching combos, and it is still technically a possible point of failure/stress. On the latter point, I don't think that is a good reason as to why. If pvp'ing combos meant that the leveling experience became worse, they could just move some abilities to lower levels. They need to do that anyways really.