Classes too similar and some have useless extra buttons. Needs big rework.

[CidHeiral]

They're literally not, though?

I played an Arms Warrior in a server first raiding guild for many years and on my own as recently as Dragonflight. Calling the class "cognitively bloated" might be the funniest sentence I've read all year. Writing long-winded over-explanations for simple things like Sweeping Strikes doesn't make them deep. You may fool some of the people here that don't know any better but we both know it's an incredibly simple class.

And XIV IS button-bloated -- or, better put imo, failing to significantly leveraging its variety of skills. It's not merely lacking interesting contexts for interesting play, though that is a huge part. The foundation of how most jobs are built up, especially via combos, does not lend itself to skills being individually or synergetically of interest, only pieces each of singular rote decisions.

I totally agree that FFXIV jobs are very boring right now and could use more interesting skills and decision making. I disagree that DRG's looping combo would need to be turned into two buttons to accomplish that, or that FFXIV jobs should emulate WoW class design.

[Shurrikhan]

I played an Arms Warrior in a server first raiding guild for many years and on my own as recently as Dragonflight. Calling the class "cognitively bloated" might be the funniest sentence I've read all year. Writing long-winded over-explanations for simple things like Sweeping Strikes doesn't make them deep. You may fool some of the people here that don't know any better but we both know it's an incredibly simple class.

raiding

M+

And there's half your Shatter vs. Crystalline Conflict difference in a nutshell, just in PvE.

Nor did I call the "class" (which Arms is not) cognitively bloated. I (with notable sarcasm) said that one could call those minitial optimizations cognitive bloat (despite their being pretty much exactly the goal of mantras like "easy to learn, difficult to master") simply because their relative reward is poor.

I disagree that DRG's looping combo would need to be turned into two buttons to accomplish that, or that FFXIV jobs should emulate WoW class design.

Cool. Literally not a thing I said to do. Even the latter isn't something I even hinted at beyond the likes of 'maybe these 7 buttons (True-Vorpal-Full-Fang/Drake-Bowel-Chaos-Wheeling) should be more than just seven rote parts of what amounts to the same action in 96+% of content'.

Which, yes, is a problem above and beyond a game's encounters themselves being dull; that failure to leverage those skills limits the actual design space available to us not to the dozen+ attacks we ostensibly have but the ~4-7 actions (ST-direct, ST-CD/DoT, AoE, 5-gcd bankable, stacked-CD-1+2+3, gap-closing attack, etc.) they actually amount to.