Quote Originally Posted by Mikey_R View Post
The bigger brain move would be to swap to the second, full HP target for as little time as possible between GCDs to allow the auto attacks to kill the low HP target.

Your scenario also fails to take into account any extra benefits from combo enders, for example, SAM stickers, the various PLD buffs, resource gains etc. that will be a bigger loss down the line than this simple 2 GCD scenario.

In the past, I was against putting them together, however, more recently, I am going down the path of, at least have the option to.

And, for anyone that claims, but you can miss the combo if they are on separate buttons, but you cannot on one, let me ask a question. When was the last time you seriously messed that up? I would bet, for anyone halfway decent at the game, they do not mess up that often, which means, whilst technically true, isn't a strong case against combo consolidation.
Another realistic scenario for a raid I was just thinking about would be the: boss going away on a phase change so you swap to the most instant damaging combo instead of the dot application one, so yeah that's true and I didn't think about it before even though I do this.
As for failing combos, honestly it's common people will fumble a combo now and then, I check a lot of those xivanalysis links posted on discords and you see it happen at least 2-3 times per raid night in ultimate prog, the biggest thing is even though failure rates are not high and non-branching combos are not hard at all on the surface they do still require a small amount of brain activity dedicated to keeping track of them while doing mechanics.

I do still think if their goal was to "reset" all jobs to prep for a huge rework by 8.0 to improve job identity then might as well remove non branching combos if their fate is to end up with pvp combos as an option.