Quote Originally Posted by Jeeqbit View Post
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.