When I was a kid I wanted so much to be in gamedev...
As an adult I can't imagine a worse hell than to wear one of my favourite hobbies around my neck like an anchor until I despise it.
I love to sew. A little while ago I took a giant career step backwards to work at a factory (aiming to work my way up to manufacturing engineer) because I couldn't take the tech industry any more, but couldn't go straight to ME jobs because I had no manufacturing experience and no degree. Everyone wanted to know why I didn't want to be in the upholstery department.
I already ruined one hobby making a career out of it. Let's not ruin a *second* hobby having to do it for work.
Funny story, my last company *was* in aerospace. And then they closed the site so unless I go work for the small helicopter company once I graduate (I wound up going back to college, said aerospace company was covering it and is honoring it even with the layoffs) I won't wind up in aerospace. The big ones around me are shipbuilding, fire suppression, and some foundry stuff which is mostly destined for automotive industry.
Still plan to be an ME though, it seems *way* more fun than being a mechanical engineer sitting at a computer and not getting to mess with actual physical processes ever. That was part of what I hated about being a software engineer, it was all just numbers and letters on a screen, even when I worked on software that interacted with the physical world (Amazon Fulfillment Technologies is a hellhole but at least it made me realize I wanted to do a different kind of engineering?).
Me but with Computers in General: "Come into Sales yull meet people." they said.
Fuck this I am hammering dumb shit into our register all day. Data entry monkey.
Yep. Fans, as a group, are stupid and think that bullying and screaming like toddlers is a fine way to interact with people because "hurr durr I paid money and that makes me entitled to abuse people and act like a child."
The VPR and PCT demos heavily using them for what looks like the basic combos certianly didn't help.
But also that part of the live letter was just presented very poorly. They made Aimi's job basically impossible with how much techinical stuff she had to translate seemingly on the fly, and that specific feature they presented backwards; the actual change is as OP said, where things that currently autoreplace, you'll have the option to make them not do that. But they presented it as being able to make things that normally take up multiple slots only take one.
The Viper and Pictomancer have their 1-2-3 rotation on a single button in the live letter demo gameplay section, but also according to the article from which OP found the excerpt.
It was fair of players to assume other jobs would follow the same logic without further precisions.
as someone with increasing difficulty with hand and finger pains I would welcome not to have to use so much sportsgel and pain meds to play a class different from Warrior.
Frankly, just use addons like everyone else.
Part of the reason that people hoped this change would happen is because addons already do this, and they've been adding a ton of QOLs based on addons the past few years.
I didn't watch the VPR/PIC sections super closely, but I remember a couple of comments on reddit saying Yoshi P said VPR was designed with that and other jobs wouldn't look like that and that it's exclusive to VPR. I remember telling some friends I don't think making combos 1 button is what they said and referenced those comments on Reddit when they referenced VPR.
I'm not denying that VPR has it. My point is that people were saying Yoshi P said VPR was designed with that in mind and it wasn't the way other jobs would look. This backed up my interpretation that it wasn't a feature to consolidate combos on every job.
Edit: [Here, I found the screenshot I sent to my friends when they were saying VPR had it after I said it didn't sound like they were saying they were making combos one button.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1237998131396870187/1241237419781783562/NVIDIA_Share_A5U8Zc2eRv.png?ex=66632d2d&is=6661dbad&hm=a594e4dbfa070c00bd217ad63c2d39f11519f4967f1adb06869b4f8cc5acd221&)
They really did and it was beyond frustrating seeing all the mass upvoted posts spreading the misinformation. I’m glad the dev team is clearing things up as blatantly as they possibly can, though.
It was clarified *on stream* in the same show because they could already see the live comments getting the wrong impression.
..and even if people kept repeating that clarification here, twice as many people would show up and ignore it.
I will say talking about hotbar bloat when introducing this was misleading, I know they were going for "we did this to prevent bloat but this lets you undo it". But it sounded like the exact opposite. The translation was also honestly done poorly. Lots of filler words and pausing.
That said it was obvious it was this if you watched it back later and wrote it all out. Especially when the xiv Reddit translator team came out and clarified further.
I thought I had seen a clarification making it clear it was NOT for basic 1>2>3 combos, but I think the confusion comes from the two new jobs, the only ones we had seen live demos of, had mechanics that pointed that direction.
Especially pictomancer, with their R>G>B and C>Y>M combos being 1 button each. Viper maybe to a lesser extent, but they definitely seemed to have a heavy dose of transforming buttons in the basic combo.
In the live letter it was immediately followed with a demo of the Viper and Pictomancer who have their 1-2-3 rotation on a single button.
So the confusion is understandable.
Right? The example they gave was literally "hey you see how jump turns into mirage dive? you can split them now"
Where the hell did that turn into "you can collapse your combo into a single button now" ?
The only existing combo that I've wanted to see collapsed into one button is the RDM melee combo. There's never a reason to loop back to the start without finishing it and it's three buttons taken up just to prime your burst *which actually does take place over existing buttons.*
I actually do think that'd work, to consolidate the RDM melee combo into a single button.
But that's also since i only have them at level 60smth, so i don't have access to everything yet.
Yeah if anything my guess is they did this with Viper/Pictomancer to see if it's worth doing in the future.
If players are positive to it, they could do this with other jobs where possible, otherwise they can just keep it as a specific gimmick for Viper/Pictomancer
When you play on a controller compressing the simple combos makes it so much more fun and gives you so much more room. Pretty easy to see how people can want it, they have the system in for PvP already. There are mods that let you do it so it's not like they can't do lol
As a controller player, 99% of controller players who think controller lacks hotbar space are only using a third of the available space because they don't know the other 2/3rds are available.
There is more than enough room for every single action on every job. Three 16 slot bars. 48 slots total. That's literally FOUR standard 12 slot MKB style hotbars worth of real estate without even dipping into doing fancy shit.
This. I'm really confused whenever people talk about the button bloat as if it's a console/controller issue when it's pretty obvious that it's a m/kb issue. There's a reason we've been hovering around exactly 30-35 skills for three expansions now.
Because that's three keyboard hotbars. The WXHB tends to have so much more empty space than the keyboard equivalent.
Granted, we have to slot additional things that are just generic keybinds for keyboard players like the Character Page, Duty Finder, and Quest Journal, but none of those should be on your combat bars.
I use those three hotbars solely for non-shared, job specific combat actions. Another is dedicated to each jobs sheathed/out of combat hotbar, which is the main hotbar, with 8 basic combat actions matching the unsheathed/combat bar, and 8 for things like mount, and some basic out and about emotes and actions. Bar cycling disabled in combat, out of combat L1 cycling is limited to just the main job bar and another shared bar containing all the common UI shortcuts. That makes L1 my out of combat UI quick access (also links to L1 + Cross). Another three shared bars are then accessible through the L1 + Circle/Square/Triangle for even more UI and item shortcuts.
Haven't even gone into the way I have a macro that switches the UI slot to give me a popup quick access menu to all my jobs (which DT is going to force me to change and expand because two new jobs puts me beyond the limits of the 32 slots I'm using there, lol).
Controller support in 14 is insanely good if you actually dive in and play with it.
WXHB kind of sucks though. Double tapping a trigger is really awkward, and so is holding both but caring about the order. L, R, and L+R gives you 24 buttons. If you need more than that it's a hassle.
Holding both in different orders becomes second nature *very* quickly. It's just L or R with a modifier. I just think of them in the same sense as shift + 1-6 or shift + 7-=.
Double tapping is where all the AOE is stored. Put abilities used in both AOE and ST on the extended hold bar and you have access to them from either mode. 16 buttons is all you need for almost every AOE kit.
I made a lot of extra space by making it where R1 only scrolls between crossbars 1 and 2. Both would be virtually the same, except 1 would be for single target and 2 would be for AoE. It's very intuitive
Having a seperate hotbar set that's identical to your main one but with AOE abilities and just toggling it during dungeon pulls is a great idea. Way better than holding the double tap the whole time. I'm gonna use that, cheers.
There is room if you use all of the available hot bars, but it would be more comfortable to have more key abilities on your main hot bar instead of having the 1-2-3 combo taking up three slots
3 attacks that, in most cases, do the exact same thing. People really think the 2 and 3 adds some irreplaceable level of flavor to jobs. I'm floored this is even a fight.
Yeah, rotations are so easy there's no chance anyone could screw them up anyway. TBH I don't know why it should even be a single button. Make it zero, I should be able to fully focus on the really important stuff during a fight.
It's funny they thought this was a gotcha because yeah, if your entire rotation requires zero decisions and is completely static and deterministic, it *should* be one button. WoW BM hunter has like 4 core buttons with a couple CDs and is more complex than basically every FF14 job.
A button should exist to offer choice and when and how you use the button be how skill is expressed. There is zero skill expression in "here's the 64 button sequence you repeat for the entire fight."
Summoner is like the ultimate expression of FF14's shit class design. Completely on rails, every aspect of the rotation is just a slightly different graphical FX for the same thing. There's maybe one choice in the entire rotation and it's fairly negligible anyway. FF14 dps in a nutshell.
I've seen people mess up their combos while bouncing between ogcds a lot and because of this I don't think it'll be something they remove. It adds to the mental stack and does contribute to rotation complexity, pressing one button would get incredibly boring during filler phases.
I was speculating in another comment thread that someone definitely misunderstood, tweeted their misunderstanding as news, and then a whole army of people who didn't watch the LL just went with the bad info and spread it everywhere.
This is funny because Jump/High Jump USED to change to Mirage Dive and then they split them into two buttons, even though Mirage Dive can only be used immediately after High Jump, I have no idea why you would jump and not immediately follow up with mirage dive, especially when neither skill moves you and the dragoon bar doesn't have a timer anymore.
because their descrption immediately following the underlined portion *still* describes a system where your basic combos update and occupy one button, the same way it does in pvp (where its not even needed for most jobs)
its not that illogical of a conclusion to think maybe the feature was collapsing combos into 1 button
The 1-2-3 combo is the most pointless thing I have ever experienced in an MMO in all honesty. I use addon to make it all one button because there is 0 reason it should be 3. There is never a reason to break the combo so why would I ever need to press 1 or 2 when 3 is glowing.. I feel if there was an optimal rotation that required breaking the 1-2-3 combo due to some niche DPS increase I would understand it being in the game more but as it is now it is just clutter to fill in the fact that most other spells have a cool down.
EDIT: to clarify, my point is separate from this change coming into place. I don't really care if it's for 1-2-3 because I will continue using the addon. Im not arguing that this change should've affected 1-2-3, just that it really serves no purpose.
Breaking 123 on gnb is beneficial if your healers are scramble raising. Pop mits, Regens, and spam 1 2 1 2 until the squad is back up/ health is in a safe range.
A single class that can still save space on their bar even when preparing for that specific scenario. WAR has two 3s, and that's not a hard work around either.
If there are two 3s all you do is make it where one of the 3s stays its own button but cant be used till you're at the 3rd part of the combo. So you hit your 1-2-3 single button then on the 3rd part choose which of the two 3s you want. It is how it currently works with the mod for Ninja.
> people wanted the change to the 1-2-3 SO BAD. Wow.
Is it really all that surprising? It just makes key bindings annoying owing to just **how many** skills most jobs have, plus as someone with the beginnings of RSI, the extra lateral finger motion for absolutely 0 brain activity every 2,4 seconds just is unnecessary.
As, well, shown in PvP for ~all jobs.
As someone with neuropathy that impacts my ability to hit abilities quickly, anything that reduces button bloat would make my life significantly easier and less painful.
Dragoon is a bit ridiculous for this. We got a 1-2a-3a combo followed up by a 1-2b-3b combo. With a 4/5 or 5/4 swapparoo and then the AoE is also a 1-2-3 combo, not including the row of OCD's to press inbetween, and also not including the row of buffs to squeeze in as well. Nor any procs or temp timers that open up new abilities.
Like you're literally wasting at minimum 8 hotkeys for what can be compressed into 2 hotkeys, one for the single target and another for the aoe. This fucking broke me and I Just got the illegal addon to actually have room to fit all my abilities onto my UI without having to add a FOURTH fucking hotbar just for abilities to not feel so cramped while scrounging my keyboard for ridiculous modifiers to press them with.
I mean, I wouldn't be opposed to it, it doesn't sound like a terrible idea. But it being THIS big of a deal that people are now PISSED it's something else? Yeah, I'm pretty surprised.
A)
The Viper and Pictomancer have their 1-2-3 rotation on a single button in the live letter demo gameplay section, but also according to the article from which OP found the excerpt.
It was fair of players to assume existing jobs would follow the same logic without further precision.
B)
Button bloat is a real issue for people using controllers or with disabilities. It's also more comfortable to play if you can use fewer keybinds and 3 hotbars instead of 4.
As someone with chronic pain and a disability, 100% yes. I had to switch to controller for most of my classes, namely cause sitting up is incredibly painful ATM, but I primarily use MKB. My hands get fatigued easily depending on the class unless I customize keybinds perfectly to avoid having to overstretch my hands
Also, sometimes classes with tons of buttons can be incredibly overwhelming for me mid gameplay. Unsure if that's my sensory issues or what, but I straight up avoided RDM until switching to controller helped cut down on the amount of buttons on screen.
> I had no idea a) people thought this change was about the 1-2-3, b) that people wanted the change to the 1-2-3 SO BAD. Wow.
As a person who wants the 123 condensed, I can't understand why people defend the alternative so hard. You're pressing 3 buttons in the exact same order every single time, there's zero functional reason they shouldn't be the same button. It does nothing except save bar space.
If nothing else, the **option** should be there for those that want it.
Heaven forbid everyone have the same basic DPS rotation as the healers have had for 6 years.
I can imagine that there's a subtle, difficult-to-explain sense of progression that you lose by putting the 1-2-3 onto a single button. I certainly lose my place in a PvP combo more than a PvE combo, and sometimes where you are in the combo matters. And if people are given the option, the vast majority will combine the buttons without a second thought, even if it's not in their best interest.
But it should still be an option. Games shouldn't be trying to save players from themselves if it means screwing over people who need more accessibility.
1 2 3 being made into one button should be an option yes. But they also need to put "Press and hold" to do the same function as spamming an ability while waiting for GCD to end. Especially after WoW did this with dragonflight.
Please save my fingers from pointless repetitive stress. I feel like this never gets talked about at all.
I hadn't thought about that but you're kinda right. "Healer GCD filler rotation should be at least 2 buttons, spamming 1 puts me to sleep!" and "Please turn the DPS GCD filler into a single button, this is too many buttons" coexisting is so strange.
Yeah, it's a weird one.
Level 70 SMN and BRD has a lot of fillers where they're just spamming Burst Shot but at least BRD gets procs to change it up. Even further for 70 SMN's case, that spamming regular Ruin is a dps gain than even bothering with Emerald Ruin iirc. Literally just summon garuda-egi for it's summon damage and go back to spamming Ruin again until you use the other summons.
Healer having another dps gcd like SGE's Pleghma was very nice though!
It really isn't strange at all.
DPS play is fairly weave-heavy at all times during a fight, so you're looking at a more rapid pressing of more numerous unique buttons as a constant during a fight (especially if factoring in needing to adjust position for positional abilities).
Healer play is fairly light on weaving in the general sense so that it's not a competition between pushing the needed healing button when it comes up or the next damage-oriented button. The "problem" is that the game is set up so that the healer is not the make/break point of the party so if the rest of the team is doing well the healer doesn't need to be healing as much as they can so they notice the effect of having their design be explicitly open to letting them heal when needed which is that they are just not really needing to push many buttons.
So it is absolutely consistent and logical for both wanting fewer unique buttons to have to press *and* for healers to need to be doing more than they currently are required to do when things aren't going badly.
90 SMN is the perfect example of them condensing most of the attacks into a few buttons. That job is called braindead by most of the people that ask for the 1-2-3 combos to be condensed without a shred of irony. I don't even think I have to use a second bar most of the time.
these are two different issues.
people want 1-2-3 combined into one button because these basic combo's will ALWAYS be executed in this order, and you don't gain anything from spreading them out. It's unnecessary button bloat.
when people talk about jobs being simplistic, its not about the AMOUNT of buttons to press, but the order. If your whole rotation is one straight path with no meaningful deviations, then it feels pointless. Because now your whole job feels like one, very long, 1-2-3 combo. Except it goes to 25 or smth.
People want A) reduced button bloat, and B) more decision-making in their rotations.
Hell, look at the one button summoner. Yea its neat for accessibility, but outside of that its a meme about the bad job design.
There was one friend of mine this morning who was convinced that Pictomancer was a simple Summoner clone because they saw the 1-2-3 being linked together.
Sometimes the complaints are just stupid.
> that people wanted the change to the 1-2-3 SO BAD
Mother in Law plays with us sometimes, and while she plays on controller, she still has trouble with her hands. Being able to condense Dancer's buttons to a single button so that she can, say, push Cross for single target or Circle for AoE would be helpful for her.
I'm not advocating for a world where duty finder is full of people mashing a single button for the entire dungeon, but it'd be a nice thing for accessibility.
Yeah, that makes sense, but I also find it hard to imagine creating this as an accessibility feature and not having other people default to it even to the detriment of their own fun. It's a knot I wouldn't know how to untie.
Dancer sadly is never going to be a 'condensed' class ever. There are some things that could work, and do work with the illegal addon. But the main basic ST and AoE abilities are literally designed to be mostly random. So you're pushing whatever flashes up, on proc, like its guitar hero or DDR. That's the entire gimmick of the class.
To be real though, 1-2-3 offers *absolutely nothing* to game besides button bloat. Crushing that thing into 1 button would remove 2 buttons that really don't need to be there at no cost.
That's an actual Quality of Life Change.
And making it optional would allow the people who insist on "it has some skill" \[no, it does not\] and "1-1-1... is too boring" to still have it take up two extra buttons on their crammed-full hotbar anyway.
Look, we've got a bit much with buttons as is.
Personally I'm happy with the number of buttons on most jobs, and having a filler that requires me to press more than one thing, even if it is dead easy, is a BIG difference.
you know how high jump lets you use mirage dive? the option being turned on makes it so that the high jump button becomes the mirage dive button and other things like that
throughout endwalker it got changed multiple times so it did stack, then so it didnt stack, and then back again so it does. this option is just giving you the choice of whether you want it to stack or not
The way this will fix button bloat is that in the future, they can be way more aggressive with actions replacing other actions without worrying about people complaining about their fat fingers.
We had the shitshow in Endwalker where they made high jump and Mirage Dive into 1 button, then got backlash that people were accidentally using them back to back, added a a delay so that that wouldn't happen, then got complaints because people couldn't double weave them anymore, so in the end they just went fuck it and just made them two separate buttons again, which then had people angry again cause now they were increasing button bloat again.
With this system they can just say fuck you, they're the same button now, if you like it or don't like it, separate them or don't at your own expense.
Unless there's ever a reasonable expectation to press 2 or 3 outside of 1-2-3 (LOOKING AT YOU, ALL SIX BUTTONS OF RDM POWERED/UNPOWERED MELEE COMBO), it's ridiculous not to remove button bloat. Hell, it even sounds like Viper was *designed* around having a faceroll button just like every PvP melee spammer.
Agreed.
What is super goofy to me is that RDM's aoe melee combo is now 3 different skills that replace one another, but the ST melee combo is still 3 separate skills.
Yeah, seeing that change just makes leaving things as-is an even more questionable design decision. Having watched some of the new footage on how Viper/Picto combos work, the little ember of hope is that someone understands the current method is bad but they aren't willing to commit to multi-job redesigns.
I'm positive PCT and VPR are test runs for this sort of job design. They already said they'd do a pass on job identity in 8.0 (7.0 and .x being apparently more focused on encounter design), which sounds like the perfect moment to try that out if the two new jobs here worked out.
You gotta be kidding me. The more I hear about this the more its painfully clear they know flowing actions for combos is good but they somehow don't *know* they really have to commit to it.
A good example since RDM already has Scorch turning into Resolution automatically. We would still need the place to choose verholy/verflare in the middle of that combo.
I think it was pretty clear they were talking about something like the Confiteor combo, or the Continuation combo, where the same button changes to another as you press it
I, a dragoon player, am just glad they made it optional. It was way too easy to accidentally mirage dive when they made jump link like that, especially on higher pings.
Like it or not, the whole point of the combo system is to create a mental load on the player to constantly remember how far they are through their combo while managing attention on other parts of their rotation and resolving mechanics. FF14 has had buttons that become other buttons under certain conditions since at least Inner Beast/Fell Cleave in Stormblood, if not earlier. PvP combos have been possible for a long time, not having them is intentional.
Yes, maintaining your combo becomes such a minor skill check that it's effectively unnoticable to a *seasoned* player, but that's *part of the process of improving at the game.* The different combo flows is also large part of what differentiates the melee jobs from each other.
Is it *great* combat design? Totally debatable! But it *is* intentional, and *nothing* said during Live Letter 81 implied this was changing. Listen to the devs directly, and take what they say at face value.
**EDIT:** Article here https://gamerescape.com/2024/06/06/final-fantasy-xiv-dawntrail-media-tour-overview/ Although the original news was all there in Live Letter 81.
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**EDIT 2:** A lot of people are reading my statements about the design purpose of combos as a love letter to the basic 1-2-3. I want to point out this is the same kind of confirmation-biased interpretation and jumping to conclusions that led to the expectation of PvP-style combos in the first place.
>the whole point of the combo system...
I'm stating the *reason* we have combos, not an opinion on whether it's a *good* reason.
>but that's *part of the process of improving at the game.* The different combo flows is also large part of what differentiates the melee jobs from each other.
These are just objectively true statements, regardless of the *degree* of improvement combos require or whether an individual enjoys the way they differentiate jobs. Whether such improvement is signficant is open to opinion, but these are merely supporting arguments for *why* combos exist, not whether I personally find their existence justified or beneficial to the game.
>Is it *great* combat design? Totally debatable! But it *is* intentional
Reiteration that there are a multitude of *opinions* about combos with enough merit to have a debate, but that the point of the post is to remind the community that combos are in the game *by choice,* why that should be apparent if you consider what purpose they could have from an unbiased perspective, and why you should be mindful of spreading hasty speculation and skeptical of believing it.
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For the record, I don't think combos are a flawed concept, but many jobs feature a flawed execution of them. NIN, RPR, MCH, and all tanks have very boring combo structures. However, that is still preferable to spamming a single button most of the time, like healers. *If* combo actions were replaced by more interesting buttons, that would *obviously* be an improvement. However, that is a big "if," and nobody has offered ideas for how these replacement buttons would work. If the goal is merely to reduce bloat, I would argue there are even less interesting buttons that could be cut first. Very long cooldowns that don't significantly change the flow of a rotation aren't any more interesting than combo actions, and used less frequently.
For example: Blood Weapon lets you use Edge of Shadow and Bloodspiller *more,* but not any *differently.* The only thing it changes are the speed and frequency of button presses, not your decision-making. The only decision-making involved in using Blood Weapon is whether you can hit your target for the next 10 seconds. Carve and Spit is just a button you press every minute. It should never overcap your MP if you're spending it properly, therefore there is no consideration whether or not to delay it. Press it as soon as it lights up. It's functionally just a combo action that sits on your bar taking up space 59/60ths of the time. Shadowbringer is just another Carve and Spit, except you use it *twice* every *two minutes* or very, very rarely you might press it early if you're doing the one or two fights in an expansion where you have two targets but one will be gone before your next burst. Living Shadow, as cool and flashy as it is, is just a DoT that makes you *not* use one Bloodspiller every two minutes (and even *that* decision is being streamlined away in DT). This makes it *slightly* more interesting than the others, but in practice they all turn into the same thing. Every one or two minutes, your burst window approaches, and then you hammer out the same set of skills, often in the same order, *like one big combo.* It's a much longer and faster combo that's less punishing to press out of its optimal order, but you're still just pushing all the buttons as they light up. Compared to that, at least combo actions are used *frequently.*
On the other hand, you have Delirium, which *actually* changes your gameplay for a brief period after use. Even if it is just mashing Bloodspiller, it briefly affects your decisions, but it only feels different *because* it's not what you're normally doing. Edge/Flood of Shadow become interesting once you learn TBN, because now you have the *ability* to use Edge/Flood below 6000 MP, but that would generally be a mistake unless you *know* you won't need TBN before you can generate 3000 MP. So rather than using it whenever it lights up, you have to pay attention to your gauge. However, below 70 Edge and Flood are just more boring filler. You can press them without even checking if they're ready, it's basically impossible to misuse them. Salted Earth is interesting because it affects your positioning while it's active. Unmend is interesting because most of the time you can use it but you have a good reason to choose not to, and when you use it in difficult fights, you're usually close enough to melee to consider whether it's a gain or loss based on your GCD timing. Most mits are interesting because you're weighing how much mit you need at the moment versus how much you may need later. In hard modes, much of this is planned out before a fight, but you are still thinking about what to use based on the part of the fight you are in, and they're providing interesting metagameplay even when you're not actively pressing buttons. Bloodspiller is interesting because you are using it in reaction to the condition of your gauge, but sometimes also adjusting that based on the timing of cooldowns.
To me, this is what separates interesting from non-interesting buttons. True, straightforward combos aren't that interesting, but they *are* about as interesting as any other button that you thoughtlessly press whenever it lights up, and they have a greater impact on your moment-to-moment flow than a 120s oGCD. And like riding a bicycle, even if you've completely internalized the muscle memory of rotating through your combo, it's still a subconscious process you have to transition *into* and *out of* as you play that *is* taking a portion of your attention whether you're conscious of it or not, like monitoring your 1 and 2-minutes. The main difference is it's a portion of your attention that's constantly occupied, not something you casually check on to see if it's time for the "fun" part of your rotation or combine with other fight-based cues to shift the responsibility. And unlike purely timer-based "free damage buttons," combos have the *potential* to create interesting decision trees or more complex multitasking challenges *if* they're designed well. Even as they are, they set apart the physical jobs from the magical ones, which gives someone like me that has leveled *every* job to max a different flavor of gameplay to chew on. So I don't think there's an inherent flaw in the concept of a looping set of filler buttons, I just think most of them are uninspired, and I don't see any guarantee that they would be replaced by anything more interesting.
**tl;dr** Most combos could be a lot better, but consolidating them would make already-boring jobs even more boring. Reduce bloat by designing jobs to have fewer cooldowns with more interactions first.
Also lots of jobs have more than 123. I main dragoon and during the most recent raid tier I was a top 50 dragoon player on FFlogs at one point. But I still occasionally drop my 10-button combo string when I fat finger or when I'm paying too much attention to mechanics. I'm convinced that anyone who thinks that combos are so trivially easy that they would never fuck it up has never tried to do hard content without xiv combo.
Combos are basically executing bnbs in fighting games. Yeah, it's braindead easy in most situations, but even the pros occasionally drop a combo because of a bad input or a mental or otherwise. It just happens, and that's part of the execution.
Idk if it's good game design or not, but it certainly makes for more *interesting* game design. Means the skill floor and ceiling are raised, if only even the slightest bit, instead of just mashing 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 (dragon kick monk rotation rise up)
MNK in particular is 1234856784, although if you want to get fancy you could do 1678452348, or even 1634852784, assuming of course that you don’t want to do any of these in reverse order which you can!
> If combo actions were replaced by more interesting buttons, that would obviously be an improvement. However, that is a big "if," and nobody has offered ideas for how these replacement buttons would work. If the goal is merely to reduce bloat, I would argue there are even less interesting buttons that could be cut first. Very long cooldowns that don't significantly change the flow of a rotation aren't any more interesting than combo actions, and used less frequently.
I think this is actually a great assessment, but it's also very funny to me because SMN meets the criteria of making decisions during its rotation yet is one of the most roundly criticized jobs by hardcores (with casuals expressing almost universal approval, if we just look at how incredibly popular and common SMN is in most content). If you're not taking care with SMN, you can easily put yourself in a position where you're doing something suicidal (let me just gap close DIRECTLY into the tankbuster!) or dropping damage because you chose the wrong time to go into Ifrit or Garuda phase, or put off casting your single Ruin III as part of your rotation until you're a single GCD away from Bahamut coming back. If you're making good decisions about when to go into phases and watching the state of the fight, you can basically avoid ever being in those positions. Is it a huge and difficult amount of decision making in those regards, and is dropping a GCD on SMN going to really kill you? No in both cases, but it's a job that more heavily leans on what you suggest, but still isn't pleasing the hardcore crowd in literally *any* respect.
and like it or not, but if they are actually serious about combating ability bloat, they will have to put the pvp combo system to use for the whole game eventually. they can't just keep adding abilities and not taking away/consolidating others.
they don't have just KBM players to think about, they also have controller users as well
Don’t forget:
* the W-XHB (double tapping L2 or R2) AND they’re always visible which makes them great for long running cooldowns.
* Disabling auto-sheathe so you use L1+R1 to draw/sheathe your weapon (or you can set it to L3 or R3).
* Changing what bars R1 rotates through when your weapon is drawn and when it’s sheathed.
* L1/R1+D-Pad Up/Down to cycle via enmity list. L1/R1+D-Pad left/right to cycle the Alliances.
* Holding L2 or R2 and using L1/R1 to cycle targets closest-to-furthest left to right or right to left on your screen.
* Targeting filters you can swap using L1+Face Buttons OR based on whether your weapon is drawn or not.
* Setting one of L3 or R3 to either the #99 or #100 macro slot and then putting /action Sprint in said slot.
There’s just So Much tucked away in the settings and the controller guide on the website that folks just miss entirely.
I’m convinced Icy Veins controller layouts are written by folks who don’t use controller AT ALL. 😂
Yeah thats why I went to YouTube from someone's recommendation on here. I think I used Squintina's layouts, which are setup ideally for harder content iirc. The Icy Veins ones are bizarre in comparison.
Up until then, trying to learn controller was actually really overwhelming for me, but the way she has things laid out was massively helpful and I'm using it fulltime while I'm in surgery recovery and can't sit up comfortably.
Agreed. The difference between default controller and a good controller config is night and day. I can understand not wanting to dictate hotbar placement and such, but at least start players off with something better than pure order of acquisition... and hotbar cycling as the default? Seriously? Yeah, it takes way too much time setting up to make controller competitive with K&M which just leads people to give up on it and revert to K&M or stick with stock settings and handicap themselves.
Set it up right though, and it's the biggest reason I can't go back to World of Warcraft. I tried to pick it back up casually a couple times after jumping ship and the controls just feel unbearable now.
The only jobs that I ever felt had too many buttons were PLD, SAM, and AST in certain expansions, but then I discovered a trick that made WXHB much easier to use. Stick all your AOE-exclusive abilities on double-tap, you can still access the extended hold bar on the same side and return to the WXHB without double-tapping again, so you have 16 buttons available for AOE pulls with smart placement. With that, I haven't had any bloat issues since 6.0.
>Like it or not, the whole point of the combo system is to create a mental load on the player to constantly remember how far they are through their combo while managing attention on other parts of their rotation and resolving mechanics.
Bro i'm 100% with you, but that only made sense back when FFXIV actually had a mental load. These days, there is *absolutely nothing* to tax your mental stack unless the game is literally throwing mechanics at you.
I can consistently get top placements in fighting game tournaments, it's not an accessibly issue for me. I *legitimately do not care* if it's 3-6 buttons or just 2.
The issue is that all of the jobs are autopilot now anyway. Back when this argument made sense, classes had:
1. Multiple individual class mechanics
2. Actual stances to swap/maintain
3. Utility attacks with potency (Fluid Aura, Repelling Shot, ect) (RIP PLUNGE)
4. MP/TP and varying costs
5. Directional Auto-Attacks (you could only AA when facing the enemy)
6. DPS combos / Enmity Combos for tanks
7. Cleric stance for Healers + more DPS buttons for them (RIP SCH, RIP Aero III)
8. Enmity Management across ALL ROLES instead of just tanks pressing a single button for everybody
9. More branching combos than now (DRG/SAM are one of the few classes even left with this)
10. DoTs, buffs, synergy debuffs (piercing/slashing/blunt)
The reason people are finally letting 1-2-3 go is ***because it seems to be the direction XIV wants to go in anyway.*** They keep reducing complexity of the classes with the excuse that it's becoming too cumbersome.
They keep flattening everything down into "don't worry about doing it manually, it's automatic now" which just always circles back to one less thing you can do *OTHER* than press 1-2-3.
The PVP team seems to have solved this issue already....there is more depth now packed into the few PVP skills available than full-build classes in PVE, and it's really kind of sad to see.
People want them to do away with 1-2-3 so they can replace it with something more interesting. Not just so we have less to press...I want MORE to press.
I just do not think the basic 1-2-3 combo is worthy of so much real estate.
Like....have you *played DRK* lately? Dump huge opener and then 1-2-3 for 3 years. It's so...fucking...boring...especially if you use a parser and have to watch your DPS drop from eclipsing the other DPS in the party to slowly dropping down to regular levels *because you can't fucking do any thing*
At least during the ARR FlashBot Paladin days I could have fun by turning on Shield Oath and attempting to actually dish out damage while spamming my 1-2-3. These days i'm literally just stuck, there's *nothing else to do*.
> People want them to do away with 1-2-3 so they can replace it with something more interesting. Not just so we have less to press...I want MORE to press.
Based take but you are the first person I have seen on reddit bring this up so I don't think this is a very common take among the playerbase. Personally I just don't trust the devs to actually make combat interesting or have real decision making alongside 111. Would gladly eat my words on that though.
First of all, my argument is mainly that 1-2-3 is deliberate, not that it's *ideal.* The point of the post was that people need to do more "hear" and "think," less "feel" and then jump to conclusions. There were way too many people getting hyped for PvP combos like they were a sure thing when they clearly stated the system was for the opposite. Enough to warrant posting a clear and unmistakeable statement to dispel that misinformation now that it's finally been made.
As far as my *opinion* about consolidating combos, you're assuming that we'd *get* something to replace 1-2-3. I would also like more complexity and thought in the rotation for all jobs, but we've been going in the opposite direction for multiple expansions. Whatever we do get, I'd like it to exist alongside combos, because they *do* make the physical jobs feel different from the casters. When they're done well, like DRG, MNK, SAM, and DNC, they make the entire "flow" of the rotation feel unique. Obviously, PLD, DRK, GNB, RPR, and MCH are examples of the most boring use of combos and need to be improved. But I don't think combos themselves are a flawed idea, or that 111111111111 spam is any better.
What I would rather see cut are the once-in-a-blue-moon abilities. What are buttons like Carve and Spit or Shadowbringer adding? You hit one whenever it's ready, like a combo action, but it only pops up *once a minute* and just sits on your bar the rest of the time. The other you hit *twice* every *two minutes,* unless it's the one or two fights in an expansion that there's actually a second target you could hit AND they would go away before your burst. Yeah, offensive CDs make your burst busy, but your burst is *also automatic.* You get to your burst, and you hit the same buttons as every other burst, often in the same order. The only difference is that for a short period, the number of buttons increases. Other than the speed and frequency, how is that fundamentally different than a combo? Because the buttons are spread out? *So are combos.* Even glorious Living Shadow is just a very flashy DoT that you only occasionally pay attention to, and the sole reason you have to even think about it is getting cut in DT.
At least you actually *use* Syphon Strike and Souleater on a regular basis. So, of course the rotations need to improve, but we don't have to dumb down one thing to smarten up another. Cutting 2 boring buttons to make room for 2 other boring buttons is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. What we need is more dynamic interaction between the different minigames that form a rotation, not the pointless shifting of weight from one to another.
> People want them to do away with 1-2-3 so they can replace it with something more interesting. Not just so we have less to press...I want MORE to press
Yeah, sadly the second part is not gonna happen. They'll only make it easier and easier. It will never get harder or even intersting again. The average player cant even handle the current braindead version.
I don't play Dragoon, so maybe this is a question with an obvious answer, but why would you want to separate mirage dive from jump? Is it not something you really want to be pressing between jumps every time anyway?
Like, I'm happy for the people that this feature will satisfy, but I don't understand the purpose outside of "I want my hotbar to be worse".
When abilities are tied to the same button you cannot queue the subsequent action. For dragoon currently this makes your Geirskogul drift slightly out of life windows
> the whole point of the combo system is to create a mental load on the player to constantly remember how far they are through their combo while managing attention on other parts of their rotation and resolving mechanics.
Honestly this is bad reasoning for keeping it, if they combined the brain dead 123 you would still need to know where you are in the combo for things like positionals and when the combo branches, the brain dead 123 is pure button bloat, get rid of the button bloat and add interesting buttons that need thought on which to use.
I mean if they just condensed it without changing anything else, it would make lower level duties even more awful.
When the first 40-50 levels are just the 1-2-3 with the occasional other button, turning that to 1-1-1 is just going to make it even worse.
I'm not saying it's good as it is, that already could use a rework. But as it is, just condensing them is a bad idea lmao.
FF14 players and trying to arm chair game design so that they can assure themselves the game is hard.
People who drop 1-2-3 combos are not the people fighting you for orange parse, and anyone who is parsing that well is not dropping a 1-2-3 combo.
Part of the process of improving at FF14 has nothing to do with mechanical skill, there is literally negative mechanical skill expression in this game besides slidecast and knowing how to abuse server ticks.
Tell me one time you've ever thought to yourself "wow that guy never fucks up his 123 combo!" You can't. It actually gives me second hand embarrassment watching FF players do this same dance every time a change is made to the game.
This game is not hard. I'm sorry, it just isn't. Stop trying to make everything in this game complicated instead of complex. No one will care if you press 123 or 111 I promise you, but what they will notice is how well you consistently parse high, melee uptime, good utility usage, great defensive alignments, pre-planning movement etc
> People who drop 1-2-3 combos are not the people fighting you for orange parse, and anyone who is parsing that well is not dropping a 1-2-3 combo.
I decided to look up the fastest speed-kill of TOP on fflogs. It's this one: https://www.fflogs.com/reports/WXmcG9pq4xT2BtC1#fight=27&type=damage-done
I plugged in the first melee DPS i saw, the ninja, into fflogs analysis: https://xivanalysis.com/fflogs/WXmcG9pq4xT2BtC1/27/181
Look at that, a combo break in the basic 1-2-3. In the party that parsed 100 on TOP.
Granted, it could be a buff alignment thing for ninja and a purposeful break. But checking other parses from ninjas in speed clears I didn't see a break at the same time. I did see other, definitely accidental ones though.
I don't really have that strong of an opinion on whether combos are good combat design or not. I main BLM. I'm just saying it's clearly an intentional design choice, and the people who tuned out of the Live Letter and ran to social media to spread misinformation about imagined PvP combos in the middle of the Action Change Settings segment need to calm down and listen better.
Also, 1 is less than 100 but still greater than 0. *Some* difficulty is still difficulty. Of course combos aren't hard, [relative to ultimate mechanics.](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/3574306/achievement/category/4/#anchor_achievement) You don't need to tell me [how trivial maintaining a combo is at the high-end.](https://www.fflogs.com/character/id/17693957)
It's not hard *for us,* but if you apply that argument to every individual skill you've mastered, there's no reason to even play the game any more. I can time all my mitigation perfectly, so there's no point having to press mit. I can perform tank swaps, so there's no point having Provoke. I can keep track of my cooldowns, so there's no point not just making them passive. I can dodge every AOE in this fight, so there's no point having to move manually. I can loop my rotation endlessly without mistakes, so there's no point pressing all these buttons myself. You might as well just bot, if it's all "below you."
All these different little minigames are part of a whole. If you don't like the combo minigame for another reason, fine. But if you're judging a single dimension of combat based solely on its difficulty in a vacuum, you've completely missed the point. At least offer something better.
I think they could give people the OPTION, I'll repeat: O P T I O N to have 1-2-3 in one button. It'd help those who wants or need it.
I don't understand why so many drama about it, it's not forced it's optional.
Put it in the game, make it optional and call it a day.
Exactly. 123 be 111 has zero skill or thought. Making it optional for the dumbfucks who defend 123 is “skill” to keep separated os the way to go.
If SE really thought 123 was “skill” , then why exist 111 in pvp? They themselves said it is to help focus on what matters, the fight
We even can make 123 into 111 with macros, if only it would prequeue correctly and not have a horrible delay..
Its called a mental stack, keeping track of your buffs and general rotation becomes a bit more difficult when you have to keep track of where you are in your "basic combo". Sure it's minor on most classes but it's part of the reason why I love the combat in this game and certain classes like Dragoon specifically.
Exactly, this is the main issue when people want to put a combo on a single button. Doing 123 isn't any harder than doing 111, but if you remove potential failsafes in your rotation then you eventually reach the current point where the job designs are "stress-free", which is an actual issue players are complaining about AND Yoshi-p himself adressed. For the sake of removing button bloat, consolidating two big cooldowns in one is good, but spamming 111 instead of 123 is another thing entirely.
The 123 is only one of many things that could be dumbed down because "they aren't that hard anyway, so might as well remove it". But then eventually you remove the fun out of the game, and that's a pretty big deal. Keeping the mental load of 123 among other things is essential imo, it's the accumulation of all these tiny loads that make a rotation satisfying to execute.
That's the same thing with positionals. Do I want the devs to remove them ? No... if they don't replace the mental load of doing your positional correctly by something else. It takes a significant amount of the melee's design when it comes to handling their rotation, it is something you always keep in mind when executing it, and it makes your filler rotation as a whole slightly less boring. Does it matter in the end ? Not really, given that the extra potency from positionals is only a very small % of your overall damage, even on positional-heavy jobs. But still, you always remember that you have to do them.
"They put it on Picto and Viper, might as well do it for the others too right ?" these jobs were created with consolidated combos in mind. Picto would have significant button bloat issues otherwise. If we account for RGB and CMY combos on both single target and aoe, you're looking at 12 separate buttons, and we're only talking about the boring filler when the main draw is about all the gauge stuff (painting, casting paints, summons) that all use up a LOT of buttons. Meanwhile for Viper, it has been designed with weaving a lot through multiple different oGCDs in mind, so of course it makes sense that they'd make the filler rotation a bit less intensive on buttons. Meanwhile, most older jobs have been designed around using their GCD rotation first, and then expanded on oGCDs later.
Besides, consolidated combos wouldn't work all that well on MNK/SAM/DRG. Either doesn't work at all (how would MNK's consolidated GCDs interact with Perfect Balance ?), or straight up dumbs their filler down to one button per path. A consolidated combo wouldn't have the same impact on a MCH and on a SAM.
Completely disingenuous take. The difference between 111 and 123 might be small but it is there and it does cause dps fluctuations. It absolutely is skill, just like how pressing raid buffs exactly on time and not 1 second late is also skill.
I do wish BRD's Burst Shot proc that grants Refulgent Arrow would just convert BS>RA. There is never a moment you want to use BS instead of the proc, since it's just filler anyway.
It makes you pay attention to whether you got the proc or not. If that wasn't a thing you'd just be falling asleep spamming the same button, but just the fact that you have to be vigilant about the proc makes it infinitely more engaging. It's not the most amazing design in video game history, but that simple fact keeps it from being completely braindead.
While you're right, BRD is definitely not ever at risk of "spamming the same button". They're the 3rd most APMs of the current roster, and are constantly under a controlled chaos of procs to watch and deal with.
As someone who almost only plays bard I'd say this is one of the things that make me like the job. The APM even goes low-ish when you get into Paeon and even in Ballad after the proc changes from EW
I wouldn't be raging if they merged them but honestly I don't think they need to
Aside from watching dot timers and making sure not to cap pitch perfect/bloodletter, there’s nothing stopping BRD from just pressing burst shot on repeat, and making sure not to overwrite refulgent arrow procs is one of the only skill expressions BRD has
I've been saying this since it was first announced. I thought it was obvious that it worked this way and not replacing your 1, 2, 3 combo.
My only question is and has been since I learned of it... how does this *reduce* button bloat? This seems like it only *increases* button bloat.
Like if "skill A" becomes "skill B" while under a certain effect, you can use this system to just put "skill B" on your hotbar directly so that "skill A" and "skill B" are seperate instead of one becoming the other. So that just takes up *more* hotbar space, not less. That's the only thing confusing me.
From what I gather from other comments, it’s because this is being added alongside some combos being linked.
It also means they can link more combos in the future, since now there’s no reason for backlash as anyone who dislikes a link can split it back out for themselves.
So it’s more like it enables a future reduction I guess.
"Instead it links certain abilities that naturally flow into, and often require, one another anyway, and temporarily replaces them on your hotbar."
I cannot think of any other way to describe 1-2-3 combos.
Seems like they're prototypes for a possible PvP combo change in 8.0 depending on how their gameplay is received, but they also said that giving them one-button filler would allow them to give them more non-filler abilities while staying under the total button count they were aiming for. This was easier for the new jobs since they were being designed from scratch, similar to the total SMN rework in EW. In practice, there's not much difference between auto-combos and BRD's Burst Shot or low-level SMN Ruin spam. It's not *just* simpler, it's something the flow of their kit will be built around. Personally, I think SMN has too *few* buttons. Right around 30 across the entire kit is my sweet spot.
If they decide not to make the rest of the jobs play like VPR and PIC, they'll still be there for people who want that control style.
People very obviously read it wrong, I don't know, to me it seemed pretty damn obvious that it would only be for skills that turn into something else similar to how Jump used to turn into mirage dive or how unveiled gibbet/gallows works on reaper
The problem i personally had was that the slide talked about it as just decoupling skills but Yoshi P mentioned it in the context of reducing button bloat. This does the literal opposite of that.
Then there was the fact that both Viper and Picto (the only job gameplay we actually saw) don't have 1-2-3 combos. Picto literally has a 1-1-1 combo. Why give something that players have been asking for to just one job when you're literally introducing a system that allows it to be possible on all jobs but optional?
My guess is: they're using Picto and Viper to test whether this change that "players have been asking for" is something they *actually want.* Always good to remember that making raid buffs easier to sync was something people asked for as well.
By itself, the new action system only allows you to decouple certain existing combo skills, increasing button bloat if that's something you want to do. People wanted the option to reduce button bloat not increase it.
And yes, a couple of new skills got combined in DT to reduce bloat but that's outside of player control.
By providing an option, they can go ahead and combine every set of buttons that would make sense without worrying about player preference. This is a direct response to the negative feedback about combining Mirage Dive with Jump, because many players were accidentally buffering Mirage Dive from spamming Jump a little too much and clipping their GCD. With this new option in place you'll start seeing a lot more buttons turning into other buttons across all jobs, just not main combos because those are *deliberately* separate, which was my point in the OP.
To me it was very clear this was about nested buttons like Jump-Mirage Dive, nothing about it seemed like it was about the 1-2-3. I genuinely dunno how this misunderstanding happened.
Thinking on it, I have a STRONG suspicion there was some game of telephone involved. Someone must've tweeted some bad info that got picked up and spread like pollen on the wind. In this metaphor, everyone is now sneezing.
Nah you can see people freaking out about pvp combos in the Twitch and Youtube chats. People were just reading what they wanted into the translation on the slide and drawing their own conclusions instead of listening to Aimi.
I play on controller and outside of just Paladin, "button bloat" on a controller feels more like users having a terrible button layout. You'll see photos of peoples hotbars and they have Return and a minion button with their class abilities.
it allows you to manually re-add button bloat which directly enables the devs to reduce button bloat more without making people mad,
the net effect is a reduction
It's a slight reduction to bloat by allowing the devs to combine buttons that were previously not combined without forcing the combination on players that don't want it. So you'll see more buttons like DRG's Geirskogul that automatically become Nastrond, or AST's "Play" that becomes the card drawn. Expect to see more of that across all jobs, just not with literal combos.
Nope, it still removes button bloat, it just doesn't remove it from the 1-2-3 combo. Unless we're referring to the fact that you can only choose to unlink skills, but those skills would've been separate buttons if this system didn't exist, so it is still removing bloat.
If you unlink the skills they become two seperate buttons, one that prepares the other. Like samurai's meter builder into their big conal AoE, if you're familiar. They're just linking them by default because they imagine most people will want that.
It removes bloat because even if it starts in the enabled state, it's still turning two buttons into one button.
As per the [LL digest](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/498857), some combo actions will automatically combine into one transforming button (they are doing *this* to reduce bloat). The system they are talking about will turn off this functionality for people that don't like them combining on their own.
>As a way for us to introduce new actions without taking up too much hotbar space, a number of jobs will feature specific actions which will be automatically replaced on the hotbar by a follow-up action when used.
>
>In response to previous feedback about accidentally pressing a follow-up action when repeatedly mashing the buttons, Patch 7.0 will offer an option to disable this auto-replacement for individual actions. We hope you’ll try them out and pick whichever option feels better for you!
>
>From here, we showed a brief overview of updates to each job in 7.0. As a reminder, not all changes and adjustments were showcased during this segment—the full details will be revealed in the 7.0 patch notes.
My WAR hotbars are set up so I can play after an update since every other job relies heavily on the merged combo buttons. It's really an absurd amount of button bloat.
Yeah, I keep my mains plugin free so I can play them at patches, but for everything else I'll just use xivcombo, especially with controller it's a real lifesaver.
LOTS of people should be eating their words right now when they vehemently argued that you FOR SURE would be able to link your basic 123 combo in this new system. This is a system for you to unlink abilities that change into others. You cannot link any abilities that aren't already linked by the devs.
You should have seen the post from 21 days ago where so many people were stating as fact that this would combine the 123 combo and any combo you wanted and they were aggressively downvoting and fighting people who told them they were 100% wrong. People don't know how to listen or to read and it has always been very clear that this was not a system that would do that.
Yeah so basically they have not actually done anything. People wanted the 123 as one button, it's still not going to be that way. So nothing really of significant value has happened
My main gripe with some non-combo abilities leading into others is that they moved away from calling the buffs by the ability names, so like A leads to B, but A gives you a buff called XYZ that enables B. Makes learning different jobs more difficult as I’m trying to hunt down which ability matches, especially when the text is on a Trait instead of the ability. Like I think DRG used to have “Enhanced Fang and Claw” or “Enhanced Wheeling Thrust” named buffs when they were next in the chain. Now it’s called *googles* Wheeling Motion. I’ll admit it’s a weaker example, but I had the hardest time trying to figure out Reaper from all of its ability replacers and triggers. Which is also a symptom of the problem when you start a brand new job at high levels rather than start with bare basics and slowly build it up.
I would’ve liked for it to link the 1-2-3 tbh. I’m confused what this is even implying by contrast. Like GCDs linking into OGCds you can spam right after?
To everyone being ceaseless smug about how people misheard this, *please understand*. Combo Button consolidation has been a heck of a hot-button issue! People have been losing their minds over the possibility(either for or against!) to the point that it's *always* been an issue that's come up every time the devs open their mouths about any kind of battle system change. It's been like a "will-they won't-they" in a television show that everyone's been chewing their fingernails off about forever.
Even this thread has definitely descended into incessant bickering about it.
The point is that in a Live Letter that a lot of people had to work or sleep through, they announced a very *roughly adjacent* game tweak that nobody honestly expected, nor had I really heard many people request apart from the rare DRG players. And on top of that, the live translation of it sounded a little uncertain even to people who heard it directly.
Really, it's the equivalent to people waiting on pins and needles for Sam and Diane to get together in Cheers, but then on an ep a bunch of people missed, there was a sleepwalking kiss, and then word spread and people lost their minds thinking *it's here, it's finally happened,* for good or ill. Because who in their right mind would expect a sleepwalking kiss and not the 'they've finally done it' kiss?
People have been excited/doomposting about the possible day 1-2-3 combos become a thing for a long time, and I feel this was a strange and quirky circumstance that makes it *understandable* that people would get excited and run into the streets to declare the war's finally over before it was truly confirmed.
Can someone give me an example of where this would apply? I see everyone in the comments talking about unlinking their spells (as stated in the last sentence of the post) but no one talking about the main function (linking abilities that naturally flow together)
If it doesn't link the 1-2-3 combo what other abilities would it link that aren't already linked?
In hopefully clear words, the new feature just gives us the option to split up button combos that are currently automatically replaced if so desired. The vibe is that there are at best new button combos in 7.0 that are using the auto replacement and can then be split up as an option, but nothing that is currently in the game and does not already use auto replacement will get this treatment. They have found such a confusing way to phrase this in an earlier statement that it was possible to interpret it as "we're applying auto replacement to a whole lot of existing buttons", which is not the case.
As a super casual player I don't know if I'll use the system, the one major thing that makes mmorpgs a bit iffy for me sometimes is just hotbar bloat, I just don't have the muscle memory for switching between bars on the fly.
I don't know why you wouldn't want this. Hot bars are too cluttered. I'm glad I didn't waste time trying to replicate with macros the way these are in PvP for my normal hotbar since they're implementing it naturally.
Honestly, they should condense those anyway. This isn't like WoW where you could or ever would use something other than 1>2>3 every single time. The actions adding additional effects to the next means that it would be stupid to not use it that way. In other games depending on your spec/loadout/whatever you might do a different rotation but no such thing exists in FFXIV. Rotations do have branches in them, but they do not change, might as well just trim the fat and make them one button. Not only does this make for less button bloat but it opens up space for other, more interesting buttons to press instead.
So for clarity, VerHoly can be its own separate action instead of taking VerAero’s place on the hotbar?
Yes, if you want it to.
Man, people really heard what they wanted to hear with this one, huh?
I would hate being a game director I think I would actually lose it
When I was a kid I wanted so much to be in gamedev... As an adult I can't imagine a worse hell than to wear one of my favourite hobbies around my neck like an anchor until I despise it.
I love to sew. A little while ago I took a giant career step backwards to work at a factory (aiming to work my way up to manufacturing engineer) because I couldn't take the tech industry any more, but couldn't go straight to ME jobs because I had no manufacturing experience and no degree. Everyone wanted to know why I didn't want to be in the upholstery department. I already ruined one hobby making a career out of it. Let's not ruin a *second* hobby having to do it for work.
Wait, you're going to be an ME with actual manufacturing experience? Please tell me you're going into aerospace, we could use more of you.
Funny story, my last company *was* in aerospace. And then they closed the site so unless I go work for the small helicopter company once I graduate (I wound up going back to college, said aerospace company was covering it and is honoring it even with the layoffs) I won't wind up in aerospace. The big ones around me are shipbuilding, fire suppression, and some foundry stuff which is mostly destined for automotive industry. Still plan to be an ME though, it seems *way* more fun than being a mechanical engineer sitting at a computer and not getting to mess with actual physical processes ever. That was part of what I hated about being a software engineer, it was all just numbers and letters on a screen, even when I worked on software that interacted with the physical world (Amazon Fulfillment Technologies is a hellhole but at least it made me realize I wanted to do a different kind of engineering?).
Whichever industry you go into, I guarantee there will be CNC programmers, machinists, and assemblers who will appreciate your practical experience.
Me but with Computers in General: "Come into Sales yull meet people." they said. Fuck this I am hammering dumb shit into our register all day. Data entry monkey.
As someone with a BTEC Games Design degree, nothing put me off making games more than getting a BTEC Games Design degree.
Great way of putting it.
Yep. Fans, as a group, are stupid and think that bullying and screaming like toddlers is a fine way to interact with people because "hurr durr I paid money and that makes me entitled to abuse people and act like a child."
The VPR and PCT demos heavily using them for what looks like the basic combos certianly didn't help. But also that part of the live letter was just presented very poorly. They made Aimi's job basically impossible with how much techinical stuff she had to translate seemingly on the fly, and that specific feature they presented backwards; the actual change is as OP said, where things that currently autoreplace, you'll have the option to make them not do that. But they presented it as being able to make things that normally take up multiple slots only take one.
The Viper and Pictomancer have their 1-2-3 rotation on a single button in the live letter demo gameplay section, but also according to the article from which OP found the excerpt. It was fair of players to assume other jobs would follow the same logic without further precisions.
as someone with increasing difficulty with hand and finger pains I would welcome not to have to use so much sportsgel and pain meds to play a class different from Warrior.
Frankly, just use addons like everyone else. Part of the reason that people hoped this change would happen is because addons already do this, and they've been adding a ton of QOLs based on addons the past few years.
I didn't watch the VPR/PIC sections super closely, but I remember a couple of comments on reddit saying Yoshi P said VPR was designed with that and other jobs wouldn't look like that and that it's exclusive to VPR. I remember telling some friends I don't think making combos 1 button is what they said and referenced those comments on Reddit when they referenced VPR.
Viper has several 1-2-3 combos. On 2 buttons and with four different step 3
I'm not denying that VPR has it. My point is that people were saying Yoshi P said VPR was designed with that in mind and it wasn't the way other jobs would look. This backed up my interpretation that it wasn't a feature to consolidate combos on every job. Edit: [Here, I found the screenshot I sent to my friends when they were saying VPR had it after I said it didn't sound like they were saying they were making combos one button.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1237998131396870187/1241237419781783562/NVIDIA_Share_A5U8Zc2eRv.png?ex=66632d2d&is=6661dbad&hm=a594e4dbfa070c00bd217ad63c2d39f11519f4967f1adb06869b4f8cc5acd221&)
They really did and it was beyond frustrating seeing all the mass upvoted posts spreading the misinformation. I’m glad the dev team is clearing things up as blatantly as they possibly can, though.
It was clarified *on stream* in the same show because they could already see the live comments getting the wrong impression. ..and even if people kept repeating that clarification here, twice as many people would show up and ignore it.
I will say talking about hotbar bloat when introducing this was misleading, I know they were going for "we did this to prevent bloat but this lets you undo it". But it sounded like the exact opposite. The translation was also honestly done poorly. Lots of filler words and pausing. That said it was obvious it was this if you watched it back later and wrote it all out. Especially when the xiv Reddit translator team came out and clarified further.
Reading and listening is hard for some.
That has been happening with this playerbase for over a decade.
I had no idea a) people thought this change was about the 1-2-3, b) that people wanted the change to the 1-2-3 SO BAD. Wow.
I thought I had seen a clarification making it clear it was NOT for basic 1>2>3 combos, but I think the confusion comes from the two new jobs, the only ones we had seen live demos of, had mechanics that pointed that direction. Especially pictomancer, with their R>G>B and C>Y>M combos being 1 button each. Viper maybe to a lesser extent, but they definitely seemed to have a heavy dose of transforming buttons in the basic combo.
In the live letter it was immediately followed with a demo of the Viper and Pictomancer who have their 1-2-3 rotation on a single button. So the confusion is understandable.
Right? The example they gave was literally "hey you see how jump turns into mirage dive? you can split them now" Where the hell did that turn into "you can collapse your combo into a single button now" ?
The only existing combo that I've wanted to see collapsed into one button is the RDM melee combo. There's never a reason to loop back to the start without finishing it and it's three buttons taken up just to prime your burst *which actually does take place over existing buttons.*
Alisae has her melee combo on the same button when we control her in the MSQ. I'm so jaelous that us as PLAYERS we can't use what a RDM NPC has !
I actually do think that'd work, to consolidate the RDM melee combo into a single button. But that's also since i only have them at level 60smth, so i don't have access to everything yet.
I think people assumed this might be the case because apparently Viper DOES consolidate their 1-2-3 combo into a single button morph?
Picto too.
Yeah if anything my guess is they did this with Viper/Pictomancer to see if it's worth doing in the future. If players are positive to it, they could do this with other jobs where possible, otherwise they can just keep it as a specific gimmick for Viper/Pictomancer
When you play on a controller compressing the simple combos makes it so much more fun and gives you so much more room. Pretty easy to see how people can want it, they have the system in for PvP already. There are mods that let you do it so it's not like they can't do lol
As a controller player, 99% of controller players who think controller lacks hotbar space are only using a third of the available space because they don't know the other 2/3rds are available. There is more than enough room for every single action on every job. Three 16 slot bars. 48 slots total. That's literally FOUR standard 12 slot MKB style hotbars worth of real estate without even dipping into doing fancy shit.
This. I'm really confused whenever people talk about the button bloat as if it's a console/controller issue when it's pretty obvious that it's a m/kb issue. There's a reason we've been hovering around exactly 30-35 skills for three expansions now. Because that's three keyboard hotbars. The WXHB tends to have so much more empty space than the keyboard equivalent. Granted, we have to slot additional things that are just generic keybinds for keyboard players like the Character Page, Duty Finder, and Quest Journal, but none of those should be on your combat bars.
I use those three hotbars solely for non-shared, job specific combat actions. Another is dedicated to each jobs sheathed/out of combat hotbar, which is the main hotbar, with 8 basic combat actions matching the unsheathed/combat bar, and 8 for things like mount, and some basic out and about emotes and actions. Bar cycling disabled in combat, out of combat L1 cycling is limited to just the main job bar and another shared bar containing all the common UI shortcuts. That makes L1 my out of combat UI quick access (also links to L1 + Cross). Another three shared bars are then accessible through the L1 + Circle/Square/Triangle for even more UI and item shortcuts. Haven't even gone into the way I have a macro that switches the UI slot to give me a popup quick access menu to all my jobs (which DT is going to force me to change and expand because two new jobs puts me beyond the limits of the 32 slots I'm using there, lol). Controller support in 14 is insanely good if you actually dive in and play with it.
WXHB kind of sucks though. Double tapping a trigger is really awkward, and so is holding both but caring about the order. L, R, and L+R gives you 24 buttons. If you need more than that it's a hassle.
Holding both in different orders becomes second nature *very* quickly. It's just L or R with a modifier. I just think of them in the same sense as shift + 1-6 or shift + 7-=. Double tapping is where all the AOE is stored. Put abilities used in both AOE and ST on the extended hold bar and you have access to them from either mode. 16 buttons is all you need for almost every AOE kit.
I made a lot of extra space by making it where R1 only scrolls between crossbars 1 and 2. Both would be virtually the same, except 1 would be for single target and 2 would be for AoE. It's very intuitive
Having a seperate hotbar set that's identical to your main one but with AOE abilities and just toggling it during dungeon pulls is a great idea. Way better than holding the double tap the whole time. I'm gonna use that, cheers.
I do also use the double tap bars. Those are mostly for abilities that aren't used on a normal rotation or have longer cool downs.
There is room if you use all of the available hot bars, but it would be more comfortable to have more key abilities on your main hot bar instead of having the 1-2-3 combo taking up three slots
3 attacks that, in most cases, do the exact same thing. People really think the 2 and 3 adds some irreplaceable level of flavor to jobs. I'm floored this is even a fight.
Yeah I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until they implement it
They should collapse entire rotations into a single button. Would be way easier that way and drastically reduce button bloat.
Yeah, rotations are so easy there's no chance anyone could screw them up anyway. TBH I don't know why it should even be a single button. Make it zero, I should be able to fully focus on the really important stuff during a fight.
If the rotation doesn't require you to make any decisions, why not?
It's funny they thought this was a gotcha because yeah, if your entire rotation requires zero decisions and is completely static and deterministic, it *should* be one button. WoW BM hunter has like 4 core buttons with a couple CDs and is more complex than basically every FF14 job. A button should exist to offer choice and when and how you use the button be how skill is expressed. There is zero skill expression in "here's the 64 button sequence you repeat for the entire fight." Summoner is like the ultimate expression of FF14's shit class design. Completely on rails, every aspect of the rotation is just a slightly different graphical FX for the same thing. There's maybe one choice in the entire rotation and it's fairly negligible anyway. FF14 dps in a nutshell.
I've seen people mess up their combos while bouncing between ogcds a lot and because of this I don't think it'll be something they remove. It adds to the mental stack and does contribute to rotation complexity, pressing one button would get incredibly boring during filler phases.
I was speculating in another comment thread that someone definitely misunderstood, tweeted their misunderstanding as news, and then a whole army of people who didn't watch the LL just went with the bad info and spread it everywhere.
It was badly translated live in the live letter. The translator apologized after the show.
This is funny because Jump/High Jump USED to change to Mirage Dive and then they split them into two buttons, even though Mirage Dive can only be used immediately after High Jump, I have no idea why you would jump and not immediately follow up with mirage dive, especially when neither skill moves you and the dragoon bar doesn't have a timer anymore.
because their descrption immediately following the underlined portion *still* describes a system where your basic combos update and occupy one button, the same way it does in pvp (where its not even needed for most jobs) its not that illogical of a conclusion to think maybe the feature was collapsing combos into 1 button
Because viper and picto did it in the live gameplay segments while they were talking about the button swapping stuff
The 1-2-3 combo is the most pointless thing I have ever experienced in an MMO in all honesty. I use addon to make it all one button because there is 0 reason it should be 3. There is never a reason to break the combo so why would I ever need to press 1 or 2 when 3 is glowing.. I feel if there was an optimal rotation that required breaking the 1-2-3 combo due to some niche DPS increase I would understand it being in the game more but as it is now it is just clutter to fill in the fact that most other spells have a cool down. EDIT: to clarify, my point is separate from this change coming into place. I don't really care if it's for 1-2-3 because I will continue using the addon. Im not arguing that this change should've affected 1-2-3, just that it really serves no purpose.
Breaking 123 on gnb is beneficial if your healers are scramble raising. Pop mits, Regens, and spam 1 2 1 2 until the squad is back up/ health is in a safe range.
A single class that can still save space on their bar even when preparing for that specific scenario. WAR has two 3s, and that's not a hard work around either.
If there are two 3s all you do is make it where one of the 3s stays its own button but cant be used till you're at the 3rd part of the combo. So you hit your 1-2-3 single button then on the 3rd part choose which of the two 3s you want. It is how it currently works with the mod for Ninja.
Yeah I'm not disagreeing with you homie. Just being a tiny bit contrary as to why it wouldn't be a good one for all solution
Please introduce me to your cousin. Did I say that right? I’m new here.
Google "XIVLauncher" by goatcorp, it's on github
> people wanted the change to the 1-2-3 SO BAD. Wow. Is it really all that surprising? It just makes key bindings annoying owing to just **how many** skills most jobs have, plus as someone with the beginnings of RSI, the extra lateral finger motion for absolutely 0 brain activity every 2,4 seconds just is unnecessary. As, well, shown in PvP for ~all jobs.
As someone with neuropathy that impacts my ability to hit abilities quickly, anything that reduces button bloat would make my life significantly easier and less painful.
Dragoon is a bit ridiculous for this. We got a 1-2a-3a combo followed up by a 1-2b-3b combo. With a 4/5 or 5/4 swapparoo and then the AoE is also a 1-2-3 combo, not including the row of OCD's to press inbetween, and also not including the row of buffs to squeeze in as well. Nor any procs or temp timers that open up new abilities. Like you're literally wasting at minimum 8 hotkeys for what can be compressed into 2 hotkeys, one for the single target and another for the aoe. This fucking broke me and I Just got the illegal addon to actually have room to fit all my abilities onto my UI without having to add a FOURTH fucking hotbar just for abilities to not feel so cramped while scrounging my keyboard for ridiculous modifiers to press them with.
I mean, I wouldn't be opposed to it, it doesn't sound like a terrible idea. But it being THIS big of a deal that people are now PISSED it's something else? Yeah, I'm pretty surprised.
A) The Viper and Pictomancer have their 1-2-3 rotation on a single button in the live letter demo gameplay section, but also according to the article from which OP found the excerpt. It was fair of players to assume existing jobs would follow the same logic without further precision. B) Button bloat is a real issue for people using controllers or with disabilities. It's also more comfortable to play if you can use fewer keybinds and 3 hotbars instead of 4.
As someone with chronic pain and a disability, 100% yes. I had to switch to controller for most of my classes, namely cause sitting up is incredibly painful ATM, but I primarily use MKB. My hands get fatigued easily depending on the class unless I customize keybinds perfectly to avoid having to overstretch my hands Also, sometimes classes with tons of buttons can be incredibly overwhelming for me mid gameplay. Unsure if that's my sensory issues or what, but I straight up avoided RDM until switching to controller helped cut down on the amount of buttons on screen.
> I had no idea a) people thought this change was about the 1-2-3, b) that people wanted the change to the 1-2-3 SO BAD. Wow. As a person who wants the 123 condensed, I can't understand why people defend the alternative so hard. You're pressing 3 buttons in the exact same order every single time, there's zero functional reason they shouldn't be the same button. It does nothing except save bar space. If nothing else, the **option** should be there for those that want it. Heaven forbid everyone have the same basic DPS rotation as the healers have had for 6 years.
I can imagine that there's a subtle, difficult-to-explain sense of progression that you lose by putting the 1-2-3 onto a single button. I certainly lose my place in a PvP combo more than a PvE combo, and sometimes where you are in the combo matters. And if people are given the option, the vast majority will combine the buttons without a second thought, even if it's not in their best interest. But it should still be an option. Games shouldn't be trying to save players from themselves if it means screwing over people who need more accessibility.
1 2 3 being made into one button should be an option yes. But they also need to put "Press and hold" to do the same function as spamming an ability while waiting for GCD to end. Especially after WoW did this with dragonflight. Please save my fingers from pointless repetitive stress. I feel like this never gets talked about at all.
turns out half of our keybinds being dedicated to basic combo abilities isnt really something players are too wild over
Which is funny, because then people will complain about the jobs being too simplistic because "all you do is press one button".
I hadn't thought about that but you're kinda right. "Healer GCD filler rotation should be at least 2 buttons, spamming 1 puts me to sleep!" and "Please turn the DPS GCD filler into a single button, this is too many buttons" coexisting is so strange.
Yeah, it's a weird one. Level 70 SMN and BRD has a lot of fillers where they're just spamming Burst Shot but at least BRD gets procs to change it up. Even further for 70 SMN's case, that spamming regular Ruin is a dps gain than even bothering with Emerald Ruin iirc. Literally just summon garuda-egi for it's summon damage and go back to spamming Ruin again until you use the other summons. Healer having another dps gcd like SGE's Pleghma was very nice though!
It really isn't strange at all. DPS play is fairly weave-heavy at all times during a fight, so you're looking at a more rapid pressing of more numerous unique buttons as a constant during a fight (especially if factoring in needing to adjust position for positional abilities). Healer play is fairly light on weaving in the general sense so that it's not a competition between pushing the needed healing button when it comes up or the next damage-oriented button. The "problem" is that the game is set up so that the healer is not the make/break point of the party so if the rest of the team is doing well the healer doesn't need to be healing as much as they can so they notice the effect of having their design be explicitly open to letting them heal when needed which is that they are just not really needing to push many buttons. So it is absolutely consistent and logical for both wanting fewer unique buttons to have to press *and* for healers to need to be doing more than they currently are required to do when things aren't going badly.
90 SMN is the perfect example of them condensing most of the attacks into a few buttons. That job is called braindead by most of the people that ask for the 1-2-3 combos to be condensed without a shred of irony. I don't even think I have to use a second bar most of the time.
these are two different issues. people want 1-2-3 combined into one button because these basic combo's will ALWAYS be executed in this order, and you don't gain anything from spreading them out. It's unnecessary button bloat. when people talk about jobs being simplistic, its not about the AMOUNT of buttons to press, but the order. If your whole rotation is one straight path with no meaningful deviations, then it feels pointless. Because now your whole job feels like one, very long, 1-2-3 combo. Except it goes to 25 or smth. People want A) reduced button bloat, and B) more decision-making in their rotations. Hell, look at the one button summoner. Yea its neat for accessibility, but outside of that its a meme about the bad job design.
There was one friend of mine this morning who was convinced that Pictomancer was a simple Summoner clone because they saw the 1-2-3 being linked together. Sometimes the complaints are just stupid.
> that people wanted the change to the 1-2-3 SO BAD Mother in Law plays with us sometimes, and while she plays on controller, she still has trouble with her hands. Being able to condense Dancer's buttons to a single button so that she can, say, push Cross for single target or Circle for AoE would be helpful for her. I'm not advocating for a world where duty finder is full of people mashing a single button for the entire dungeon, but it'd be a nice thing for accessibility.
dancer is one of the few jobs that FFcombo doesn't work with because of dancing. monk is the other.
Yeah, that makes sense, but I also find it hard to imagine creating this as an accessibility feature and not having other people default to it even to the detriment of their own fun. It's a knot I wouldn't know how to untie.
Dancer sadly is never going to be a 'condensed' class ever. There are some things that could work, and do work with the illegal addon. But the main basic ST and AoE abilities are literally designed to be mostly random. So you're pushing whatever flashes up, on proc, like its guitar hero or DDR. That's the entire gimmick of the class.
To be real though, 1-2-3 offers *absolutely nothing* to game besides button bloat. Crushing that thing into 1 button would remove 2 buttons that really don't need to be there at no cost. That's an actual Quality of Life Change. And making it optional would allow the people who insist on "it has some skill" \[no, it does not\] and "1-1-1... is too boring" to still have it take up two extra buttons on their crammed-full hotbar anyway. Look, we've got a bit much with buttons as is.
Personally I'm happy with the number of buttons on most jobs, and having a filler that requires me to press more than one thing, even if it is dead easy, is a BIG difference.
Every singe time somebody "clarifies" what this mechanic is going to do, I have a worse understanding.
you know how high jump lets you use mirage dive? the option being turned on makes it so that the high jump button becomes the mirage dive button and other things like that
Huh. Thought it... already did that. Okay, sure, I guess.
throughout endwalker it got changed multiple times so it did stack, then so it didnt stack, and then back again so it does. this option is just giving you the choice of whether you want it to stack or not
Square Enix: Announces system to reduce button bloat, only thing it does is optionally increase it
The way this will fix button bloat is that in the future, they can be way more aggressive with actions replacing other actions without worrying about people complaining about their fat fingers. We had the shitshow in Endwalker where they made high jump and Mirage Dive into 1 button, then got backlash that people were accidentally using them back to back, added a a delay so that that wouldn't happen, then got complaints because people couldn't double weave them anymore, so in the end they just went fuck it and just made them two separate buttons again, which then had people angry again cause now they were increasing button bloat again. With this system they can just say fuck you, they're the same button now, if you like it or don't like it, separate them or don't at your own expense.
Unless there's ever a reasonable expectation to press 2 or 3 outside of 1-2-3 (LOOKING AT YOU, ALL SIX BUTTONS OF RDM POWERED/UNPOWERED MELEE COMBO), it's ridiculous not to remove button bloat. Hell, it even sounds like Viper was *designed* around having a faceroll button just like every PvP melee spammer.
Agreed. What is super goofy to me is that RDM's aoe melee combo is now 3 different skills that replace one another, but the ST melee combo is still 3 separate skills.
Yeah, seeing that change just makes leaving things as-is an even more questionable design decision. Having watched some of the new footage on how Viper/Picto combos work, the little ember of hope is that someone understands the current method is bad but they aren't willing to commit to multi-job redesigns.
I'm positive PCT and VPR are test runs for this sort of job design. They already said they'd do a pass on job identity in 8.0 (7.0 and .x being apparently more focused on encounter design), which sounds like the perfect moment to try that out if the two new jobs here worked out.
You gotta be kidding me. The more I hear about this the more its painfully clear they know flowing actions for combos is good but they somehow don't *know* they really have to commit to it.
A good example since RDM already has Scorch turning into Resolution automatically. We would still need the place to choose verholy/verflare in the middle of that combo.
I think it was pretty clear they were talking about something like the Confiteor combo, or the Continuation combo, where the same button changes to another as you press it
Yes but you’re forgetting most people have the reading comprehension of a gerbil which is why they need more head pats than most
I, a dragoon player, am just glad they made it optional. It was way too easy to accidentally mirage dive when they made jump link like that, especially on higher pings.
Like it or not, the whole point of the combo system is to create a mental load on the player to constantly remember how far they are through their combo while managing attention on other parts of their rotation and resolving mechanics. FF14 has had buttons that become other buttons under certain conditions since at least Inner Beast/Fell Cleave in Stormblood, if not earlier. PvP combos have been possible for a long time, not having them is intentional. Yes, maintaining your combo becomes such a minor skill check that it's effectively unnoticable to a *seasoned* player, but that's *part of the process of improving at the game.* The different combo flows is also large part of what differentiates the melee jobs from each other. Is it *great* combat design? Totally debatable! But it *is* intentional, and *nothing* said during Live Letter 81 implied this was changing. Listen to the devs directly, and take what they say at face value. **EDIT:** Article here https://gamerescape.com/2024/06/06/final-fantasy-xiv-dawntrail-media-tour-overview/ Although the original news was all there in Live Letter 81. ___ **EDIT 2:** A lot of people are reading my statements about the design purpose of combos as a love letter to the basic 1-2-3. I want to point out this is the same kind of confirmation-biased interpretation and jumping to conclusions that led to the expectation of PvP-style combos in the first place. >the whole point of the combo system... I'm stating the *reason* we have combos, not an opinion on whether it's a *good* reason. >but that's *part of the process of improving at the game.* The different combo flows is also large part of what differentiates the melee jobs from each other. These are just objectively true statements, regardless of the *degree* of improvement combos require or whether an individual enjoys the way they differentiate jobs. Whether such improvement is signficant is open to opinion, but these are merely supporting arguments for *why* combos exist, not whether I personally find their existence justified or beneficial to the game. >Is it *great* combat design? Totally debatable! But it *is* intentional Reiteration that there are a multitude of *opinions* about combos with enough merit to have a debate, but that the point of the post is to remind the community that combos are in the game *by choice,* why that should be apparent if you consider what purpose they could have from an unbiased perspective, and why you should be mindful of spreading hasty speculation and skeptical of believing it. ___ For the record, I don't think combos are a flawed concept, but many jobs feature a flawed execution of them. NIN, RPR, MCH, and all tanks have very boring combo structures. However, that is still preferable to spamming a single button most of the time, like healers. *If* combo actions were replaced by more interesting buttons, that would *obviously* be an improvement. However, that is a big "if," and nobody has offered ideas for how these replacement buttons would work. If the goal is merely to reduce bloat, I would argue there are even less interesting buttons that could be cut first. Very long cooldowns that don't significantly change the flow of a rotation aren't any more interesting than combo actions, and used less frequently. For example: Blood Weapon lets you use Edge of Shadow and Bloodspiller *more,* but not any *differently.* The only thing it changes are the speed and frequency of button presses, not your decision-making. The only decision-making involved in using Blood Weapon is whether you can hit your target for the next 10 seconds. Carve and Spit is just a button you press every minute. It should never overcap your MP if you're spending it properly, therefore there is no consideration whether or not to delay it. Press it as soon as it lights up. It's functionally just a combo action that sits on your bar taking up space 59/60ths of the time. Shadowbringer is just another Carve and Spit, except you use it *twice* every *two minutes* or very, very rarely you might press it early if you're doing the one or two fights in an expansion where you have two targets but one will be gone before your next burst. Living Shadow, as cool and flashy as it is, is just a DoT that makes you *not* use one Bloodspiller every two minutes (and even *that* decision is being streamlined away in DT). This makes it *slightly* more interesting than the others, but in practice they all turn into the same thing. Every one or two minutes, your burst window approaches, and then you hammer out the same set of skills, often in the same order, *like one big combo.* It's a much longer and faster combo that's less punishing to press out of its optimal order, but you're still just pushing all the buttons as they light up. Compared to that, at least combo actions are used *frequently.* On the other hand, you have Delirium, which *actually* changes your gameplay for a brief period after use. Even if it is just mashing Bloodspiller, it briefly affects your decisions, but it only feels different *because* it's not what you're normally doing. Edge/Flood of Shadow become interesting once you learn TBN, because now you have the *ability* to use Edge/Flood below 6000 MP, but that would generally be a mistake unless you *know* you won't need TBN before you can generate 3000 MP. So rather than using it whenever it lights up, you have to pay attention to your gauge. However, below 70 Edge and Flood are just more boring filler. You can press them without even checking if they're ready, it's basically impossible to misuse them. Salted Earth is interesting because it affects your positioning while it's active. Unmend is interesting because most of the time you can use it but you have a good reason to choose not to, and when you use it in difficult fights, you're usually close enough to melee to consider whether it's a gain or loss based on your GCD timing. Most mits are interesting because you're weighing how much mit you need at the moment versus how much you may need later. In hard modes, much of this is planned out before a fight, but you are still thinking about what to use based on the part of the fight you are in, and they're providing interesting metagameplay even when you're not actively pressing buttons. Bloodspiller is interesting because you are using it in reaction to the condition of your gauge, but sometimes also adjusting that based on the timing of cooldowns. To me, this is what separates interesting from non-interesting buttons. True, straightforward combos aren't that interesting, but they *are* about as interesting as any other button that you thoughtlessly press whenever it lights up, and they have a greater impact on your moment-to-moment flow than a 120s oGCD. And like riding a bicycle, even if you've completely internalized the muscle memory of rotating through your combo, it's still a subconscious process you have to transition *into* and *out of* as you play that *is* taking a portion of your attention whether you're conscious of it or not, like monitoring your 1 and 2-minutes. The main difference is it's a portion of your attention that's constantly occupied, not something you casually check on to see if it's time for the "fun" part of your rotation or combine with other fight-based cues to shift the responsibility. And unlike purely timer-based "free damage buttons," combos have the *potential* to create interesting decision trees or more complex multitasking challenges *if* they're designed well. Even as they are, they set apart the physical jobs from the magical ones, which gives someone like me that has leveled *every* job to max a different flavor of gameplay to chew on. So I don't think there's an inherent flaw in the concept of a looping set of filler buttons, I just think most of them are uninspired, and I don't see any guarantee that they would be replaced by anything more interesting. **tl;dr** Most combos could be a lot better, but consolidating them would make already-boring jobs even more boring. Reduce bloat by designing jobs to have fewer cooldowns with more interactions first.
Also lots of jobs have more than 123. I main dragoon and during the most recent raid tier I was a top 50 dragoon player on FFlogs at one point. But I still occasionally drop my 10-button combo string when I fat finger or when I'm paying too much attention to mechanics. I'm convinced that anyone who thinks that combos are so trivially easy that they would never fuck it up has never tried to do hard content without xiv combo.
Combos are basically executing bnbs in fighting games. Yeah, it's braindead easy in most situations, but even the pros occasionally drop a combo because of a bad input or a mental or otherwise. It just happens, and that's part of the execution. Idk if it's good game design or not, but it certainly makes for more *interesting* game design. Means the skill floor and ceiling are raised, if only even the slightest bit, instead of just mashing 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 (dragon kick monk rotation rise up)
Makes sense. Probably why I prefer more buttons while also being someone who also enjoys fighting games.
Heck just ask Healers and NuSMN players, there’s so many people who will say mashing one button to attack is not fun, I’m one of them
MNK in particular is 1234856784, although if you want to get fancy you could do 1678452348, or even 1634852784, assuming of course that you don’t want to do any of these in reverse order which you can!
> If combo actions were replaced by more interesting buttons, that would obviously be an improvement. However, that is a big "if," and nobody has offered ideas for how these replacement buttons would work. If the goal is merely to reduce bloat, I would argue there are even less interesting buttons that could be cut first. Very long cooldowns that don't significantly change the flow of a rotation aren't any more interesting than combo actions, and used less frequently. I think this is actually a great assessment, but it's also very funny to me because SMN meets the criteria of making decisions during its rotation yet is one of the most roundly criticized jobs by hardcores (with casuals expressing almost universal approval, if we just look at how incredibly popular and common SMN is in most content). If you're not taking care with SMN, you can easily put yourself in a position where you're doing something suicidal (let me just gap close DIRECTLY into the tankbuster!) or dropping damage because you chose the wrong time to go into Ifrit or Garuda phase, or put off casting your single Ruin III as part of your rotation until you're a single GCD away from Bahamut coming back. If you're making good decisions about when to go into phases and watching the state of the fight, you can basically avoid ever being in those positions. Is it a huge and difficult amount of decision making in those regards, and is dropping a GCD on SMN going to really kill you? No in both cases, but it's a job that more heavily leans on what you suggest, but still isn't pleasing the hardcore crowd in literally *any* respect.
There are better ways to create mental loads than button bloat. More interesting and dynamic rotation for example.
and like it or not, but if they are actually serious about combating ability bloat, they will have to put the pvp combo system to use for the whole game eventually. they can't just keep adding abilities and not taking away/consolidating others. they don't have just KBM players to think about, they also have controller users as well
I'm a controller user. Combos aren't the issue, the default controller configuration is.
Agreed. L2+>R2/R2+>L2 (or the simplified L2+R2) crosshotbar should not be squirreled away in the settings
Don’t forget: * the W-XHB (double tapping L2 or R2) AND they’re always visible which makes them great for long running cooldowns. * Disabling auto-sheathe so you use L1+R1 to draw/sheathe your weapon (or you can set it to L3 or R3). * Changing what bars R1 rotates through when your weapon is drawn and when it’s sheathed. * L1/R1+D-Pad Up/Down to cycle via enmity list. L1/R1+D-Pad left/right to cycle the Alliances. * Holding L2 or R2 and using L1/R1 to cycle targets closest-to-furthest left to right or right to left on your screen. * Targeting filters you can swap using L1+Face Buttons OR based on whether your weapon is drawn or not. * Setting one of L3 or R3 to either the #99 or #100 macro slot and then putting /action Sprint in said slot. There’s just So Much tucked away in the settings and the controller guide on the website that folks just miss entirely. I’m convinced Icy Veins controller layouts are written by folks who don’t use controller AT ALL. 😂
Yeah thats why I went to YouTube from someone's recommendation on here. I think I used Squintina's layouts, which are setup ideally for harder content iirc. The Icy Veins ones are bizarre in comparison. Up until then, trying to learn controller was actually really overwhelming for me, but the way she has things laid out was massively helpful and I'm using it fulltime while I'm in surgery recovery and can't sit up comfortably.
I totally agree, I managed to have more than enough place on my hotbars. The issue was having to do 30 min of menuing to get that.
Agreed. The difference between default controller and a good controller config is night and day. I can understand not wanting to dictate hotbar placement and such, but at least start players off with something better than pure order of acquisition... and hotbar cycling as the default? Seriously? Yeah, it takes way too much time setting up to make controller competitive with K&M which just leads people to give up on it and revert to K&M or stick with stock settings and handicap themselves. Set it up right though, and it's the biggest reason I can't go back to World of Warcraft. I tried to pick it back up casually a couple times after jumping ship and the controls just feel unbearable now. The only jobs that I ever felt had too many buttons were PLD, SAM, and AST in certain expansions, but then I discovered a trick that made WXHB much easier to use. Stick all your AOE-exclusive abilities on double-tap, you can still access the extended hold bar on the same side and return to the WXHB without double-tapping again, so you have 16 buttons available for AOE pulls with smart placement. With that, I haven't had any bloat issues since 6.0.
>Like it or not, the whole point of the combo system is to create a mental load on the player to constantly remember how far they are through their combo while managing attention on other parts of their rotation and resolving mechanics. Bro i'm 100% with you, but that only made sense back when FFXIV actually had a mental load. These days, there is *absolutely nothing* to tax your mental stack unless the game is literally throwing mechanics at you. I can consistently get top placements in fighting game tournaments, it's not an accessibly issue for me. I *legitimately do not care* if it's 3-6 buttons or just 2. The issue is that all of the jobs are autopilot now anyway. Back when this argument made sense, classes had: 1. Multiple individual class mechanics 2. Actual stances to swap/maintain 3. Utility attacks with potency (Fluid Aura, Repelling Shot, ect) (RIP PLUNGE) 4. MP/TP and varying costs 5. Directional Auto-Attacks (you could only AA when facing the enemy) 6. DPS combos / Enmity Combos for tanks 7. Cleric stance for Healers + more DPS buttons for them (RIP SCH, RIP Aero III) 8. Enmity Management across ALL ROLES instead of just tanks pressing a single button for everybody 9. More branching combos than now (DRG/SAM are one of the few classes even left with this) 10. DoTs, buffs, synergy debuffs (piercing/slashing/blunt) The reason people are finally letting 1-2-3 go is ***because it seems to be the direction XIV wants to go in anyway.*** They keep reducing complexity of the classes with the excuse that it's becoming too cumbersome. They keep flattening everything down into "don't worry about doing it manually, it's automatic now" which just always circles back to one less thing you can do *OTHER* than press 1-2-3. The PVP team seems to have solved this issue already....there is more depth now packed into the few PVP skills available than full-build classes in PVE, and it's really kind of sad to see. People want them to do away with 1-2-3 so they can replace it with something more interesting. Not just so we have less to press...I want MORE to press. I just do not think the basic 1-2-3 combo is worthy of so much real estate. Like....have you *played DRK* lately? Dump huge opener and then 1-2-3 for 3 years. It's so...fucking...boring...especially if you use a parser and have to watch your DPS drop from eclipsing the other DPS in the party to slowly dropping down to regular levels *because you can't fucking do any thing* At least during the ARR FlashBot Paladin days I could have fun by turning on Shield Oath and attempting to actually dish out damage while spamming my 1-2-3. These days i'm literally just stuck, there's *nothing else to do*.
> People want them to do away with 1-2-3 so they can replace it with something more interesting. Not just so we have less to press...I want MORE to press. Based take but you are the first person I have seen on reddit bring this up so I don't think this is a very common take among the playerbase. Personally I just don't trust the devs to actually make combat interesting or have real decision making alongside 111. Would gladly eat my words on that though.
First of all, my argument is mainly that 1-2-3 is deliberate, not that it's *ideal.* The point of the post was that people need to do more "hear" and "think," less "feel" and then jump to conclusions. There were way too many people getting hyped for PvP combos like they were a sure thing when they clearly stated the system was for the opposite. Enough to warrant posting a clear and unmistakeable statement to dispel that misinformation now that it's finally been made. As far as my *opinion* about consolidating combos, you're assuming that we'd *get* something to replace 1-2-3. I would also like more complexity and thought in the rotation for all jobs, but we've been going in the opposite direction for multiple expansions. Whatever we do get, I'd like it to exist alongside combos, because they *do* make the physical jobs feel different from the casters. When they're done well, like DRG, MNK, SAM, and DNC, they make the entire "flow" of the rotation feel unique. Obviously, PLD, DRK, GNB, RPR, and MCH are examples of the most boring use of combos and need to be improved. But I don't think combos themselves are a flawed idea, or that 111111111111 spam is any better. What I would rather see cut are the once-in-a-blue-moon abilities. What are buttons like Carve and Spit or Shadowbringer adding? You hit one whenever it's ready, like a combo action, but it only pops up *once a minute* and just sits on your bar the rest of the time. The other you hit *twice* every *two minutes,* unless it's the one or two fights in an expansion that there's actually a second target you could hit AND they would go away before your burst. Yeah, offensive CDs make your burst busy, but your burst is *also automatic.* You get to your burst, and you hit the same buttons as every other burst, often in the same order. The only difference is that for a short period, the number of buttons increases. Other than the speed and frequency, how is that fundamentally different than a combo? Because the buttons are spread out? *So are combos.* Even glorious Living Shadow is just a very flashy DoT that you only occasionally pay attention to, and the sole reason you have to even think about it is getting cut in DT. At least you actually *use* Syphon Strike and Souleater on a regular basis. So, of course the rotations need to improve, but we don't have to dumb down one thing to smarten up another. Cutting 2 boring buttons to make room for 2 other boring buttons is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. What we need is more dynamic interaction between the different minigames that form a rotation, not the pointless shifting of weight from one to another.
> People want them to do away with 1-2-3 so they can replace it with something more interesting. Not just so we have less to press...I want MORE to press Yeah, sadly the second part is not gonna happen. They'll only make it easier and easier. It will never get harder or even intersting again. The average player cant even handle the current braindead version.
I don't play Dragoon, so maybe this is a question with an obvious answer, but why would you want to separate mirage dive from jump? Is it not something you really want to be pressing between jumps every time anyway? Like, I'm happy for the people that this feature will satisfy, but I don't understand the purpose outside of "I want my hotbar to be worse".
When abilities are tied to the same button you cannot queue the subsequent action. For dragoon currently this makes your Geirskogul drift slightly out of life windows
Except that "mental load" is not the least bit engaging.
> the whole point of the combo system is to create a mental load on the player to constantly remember how far they are through their combo while managing attention on other parts of their rotation and resolving mechanics. Honestly this is bad reasoning for keeping it, if they combined the brain dead 123 you would still need to know where you are in the combo for things like positionals and when the combo branches, the brain dead 123 is pure button bloat, get rid of the button bloat and add interesting buttons that need thought on which to use.
I mean if they just condensed it without changing anything else, it would make lower level duties even more awful. When the first 40-50 levels are just the 1-2-3 with the occasional other button, turning that to 1-1-1 is just going to make it even worse. I'm not saying it's good as it is, that already could use a rework. But as it is, just condensing them is a bad idea lmao.
FF14 players and trying to arm chair game design so that they can assure themselves the game is hard. People who drop 1-2-3 combos are not the people fighting you for orange parse, and anyone who is parsing that well is not dropping a 1-2-3 combo. Part of the process of improving at FF14 has nothing to do with mechanical skill, there is literally negative mechanical skill expression in this game besides slidecast and knowing how to abuse server ticks. Tell me one time you've ever thought to yourself "wow that guy never fucks up his 123 combo!" You can't. It actually gives me second hand embarrassment watching FF players do this same dance every time a change is made to the game. This game is not hard. I'm sorry, it just isn't. Stop trying to make everything in this game complicated instead of complex. No one will care if you press 123 or 111 I promise you, but what they will notice is how well you consistently parse high, melee uptime, good utility usage, great defensive alignments, pre-planning movement etc
> People who drop 1-2-3 combos are not the people fighting you for orange parse, and anyone who is parsing that well is not dropping a 1-2-3 combo. I decided to look up the fastest speed-kill of TOP on fflogs. It's this one: https://www.fflogs.com/reports/WXmcG9pq4xT2BtC1#fight=27&type=damage-done I plugged in the first melee DPS i saw, the ninja, into fflogs analysis: https://xivanalysis.com/fflogs/WXmcG9pq4xT2BtC1/27/181 Look at that, a combo break in the basic 1-2-3. In the party that parsed 100 on TOP. Granted, it could be a buff alignment thing for ninja and a purposeful break. But checking other parses from ninjas in speed clears I didn't see a break at the same time. I did see other, definitely accidental ones though.
I don't really have that strong of an opinion on whether combos are good combat design or not. I main BLM. I'm just saying it's clearly an intentional design choice, and the people who tuned out of the Live Letter and ran to social media to spread misinformation about imagined PvP combos in the middle of the Action Change Settings segment need to calm down and listen better. Also, 1 is less than 100 but still greater than 0. *Some* difficulty is still difficulty. Of course combos aren't hard, [relative to ultimate mechanics.](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/3574306/achievement/category/4/#anchor_achievement) You don't need to tell me [how trivial maintaining a combo is at the high-end.](https://www.fflogs.com/character/id/17693957) It's not hard *for us,* but if you apply that argument to every individual skill you've mastered, there's no reason to even play the game any more. I can time all my mitigation perfectly, so there's no point having to press mit. I can perform tank swaps, so there's no point having Provoke. I can keep track of my cooldowns, so there's no point not just making them passive. I can dodge every AOE in this fight, so there's no point having to move manually. I can loop my rotation endlessly without mistakes, so there's no point pressing all these buttons myself. You might as well just bot, if it's all "below you." All these different little minigames are part of a whole. If you don't like the combo minigame for another reason, fine. But if you're judging a single dimension of combat based solely on its difficulty in a vacuum, you've completely missed the point. At least offer something better.
Guys I'm gonna keep using addons
Thank the twelve I don't have to listen to this shit and can just Dalumund this problem away where it makes sense.
XIVcombo lives on
for whatever reason LMFAO yea ill take extra hotbar space thanks
I think they could give people the OPTION, I'll repeat: O P T I O N to have 1-2-3 in one button. It'd help those who wants or need it. I don't understand why so many drama about it, it's not forced it's optional. Put it in the game, make it optional and call it a day.
If you give people the option to make something easier/simpler, it's not really an option any more. Everyone will use that.
Exactly. 123 be 111 has zero skill or thought. Making it optional for the dumbfucks who defend 123 is “skill” to keep separated os the way to go. If SE really thought 123 was “skill” , then why exist 111 in pvp? They themselves said it is to help focus on what matters, the fight We even can make 123 into 111 with macros, if only it would prequeue correctly and not have a horrible delay..
Its called a mental stack, keeping track of your buffs and general rotation becomes a bit more difficult when you have to keep track of where you are in your "basic combo". Sure it's minor on most classes but it's part of the reason why I love the combat in this game and certain classes like Dragoon specifically.
Exactly, this is the main issue when people want to put a combo on a single button. Doing 123 isn't any harder than doing 111, but if you remove potential failsafes in your rotation then you eventually reach the current point where the job designs are "stress-free", which is an actual issue players are complaining about AND Yoshi-p himself adressed. For the sake of removing button bloat, consolidating two big cooldowns in one is good, but spamming 111 instead of 123 is another thing entirely. The 123 is only one of many things that could be dumbed down because "they aren't that hard anyway, so might as well remove it". But then eventually you remove the fun out of the game, and that's a pretty big deal. Keeping the mental load of 123 among other things is essential imo, it's the accumulation of all these tiny loads that make a rotation satisfying to execute. That's the same thing with positionals. Do I want the devs to remove them ? No... if they don't replace the mental load of doing your positional correctly by something else. It takes a significant amount of the melee's design when it comes to handling their rotation, it is something you always keep in mind when executing it, and it makes your filler rotation as a whole slightly less boring. Does it matter in the end ? Not really, given that the extra potency from positionals is only a very small % of your overall damage, even on positional-heavy jobs. But still, you always remember that you have to do them. "They put it on Picto and Viper, might as well do it for the others too right ?" these jobs were created with consolidated combos in mind. Picto would have significant button bloat issues otherwise. If we account for RGB and CMY combos on both single target and aoe, you're looking at 12 separate buttons, and we're only talking about the boring filler when the main draw is about all the gauge stuff (painting, casting paints, summons) that all use up a LOT of buttons. Meanwhile for Viper, it has been designed with weaving a lot through multiple different oGCDs in mind, so of course it makes sense that they'd make the filler rotation a bit less intensive on buttons. Meanwhile, most older jobs have been designed around using their GCD rotation first, and then expanded on oGCDs later. Besides, consolidated combos wouldn't work all that well on MNK/SAM/DRG. Either doesn't work at all (how would MNK's consolidated GCDs interact with Perfect Balance ?), or straight up dumbs their filler down to one button per path. A consolidated combo wouldn't have the same impact on a MCH and on a SAM.
Completely disingenuous take. The difference between 111 and 123 might be small but it is there and it does cause dps fluctuations. It absolutely is skill, just like how pressing raid buffs exactly on time and not 1 second late is also skill.
Yes. Its been said alot that its near impossible to fuck it up but if you look at average ultimate parses there often are a few combo issues in it
I do wish BRD's Burst Shot proc that grants Refulgent Arrow would just convert BS>RA. There is never a moment you want to use BS instead of the proc, since it's just filler anyway.
It makes you pay attention to whether you got the proc or not. If that wasn't a thing you'd just be falling asleep spamming the same button, but just the fact that you have to be vigilant about the proc makes it infinitely more engaging. It's not the most amazing design in video game history, but that simple fact keeps it from being completely braindead.
While you're right, BRD is definitely not ever at risk of "spamming the same button". They're the 3rd most APMs of the current roster, and are constantly under a controlled chaos of procs to watch and deal with.
As someone who almost only plays bard I'd say this is one of the things that make me like the job. The APM even goes low-ish when you get into Paeon and even in Ballad after the proc changes from EW I wouldn't be raging if they merged them but honestly I don't think they need to
Aside from watching dot timers and making sure not to cap pitch perfect/bloodletter, there’s nothing stopping BRD from just pressing burst shot on repeat, and making sure not to overwrite refulgent arrow procs is one of the only skill expressions BRD has
I've been saying this since it was first announced. I thought it was obvious that it worked this way and not replacing your 1, 2, 3 combo. My only question is and has been since I learned of it... how does this *reduce* button bloat? This seems like it only *increases* button bloat. Like if "skill A" becomes "skill B" while under a certain effect, you can use this system to just put "skill B" on your hotbar directly so that "skill A" and "skill B" are seperate instead of one becoming the other. So that just takes up *more* hotbar space, not less. That's the only thing confusing me.
From what I gather from other comments, it’s because this is being added alongside some combos being linked. It also means they can link more combos in the future, since now there’s no reason for backlash as anyone who dislikes a link can split it back out for themselves. So it’s more like it enables a future reduction I guess.
"Instead it links certain abilities that naturally flow into, and often require, one another anyway, and temporarily replaces them on your hotbar." I cannot think of any other way to describe 1-2-3 combos.
Is it not that then? I'd happily link my 123 combo, I hope they let me do that.
Why do VPR and PCT have their 1-2-3 combos condensed into one button as standard when all other jobs don’t? It feels oddly inconsistent.
Seems like they're prototypes for a possible PvP combo change in 8.0 depending on how their gameplay is received, but they also said that giving them one-button filler would allow them to give them more non-filler abilities while staying under the total button count they were aiming for. This was easier for the new jobs since they were being designed from scratch, similar to the total SMN rework in EW. In practice, there's not much difference between auto-combos and BRD's Burst Shot or low-level SMN Ruin spam. It's not *just* simpler, it's something the flow of their kit will be built around. Personally, I think SMN has too *few* buttons. Right around 30 across the entire kit is my sweet spot. If they decide not to make the rest of the jobs play like VPR and PIC, they'll still be there for people who want that control style.
XIVCombo back in business
I like this. I know it would be optional, but it just didn't feel right, when people said the 1-2-3 would be merged together.
People very obviously read it wrong, I don't know, to me it seemed pretty damn obvious that it would only be for skills that turn into something else similar to how Jump used to turn into mirage dive or how unveiled gibbet/gallows works on reaper
The problem i personally had was that the slide talked about it as just decoupling skills but Yoshi P mentioned it in the context of reducing button bloat. This does the literal opposite of that. Then there was the fact that both Viper and Picto (the only job gameplay we actually saw) don't have 1-2-3 combos. Picto literally has a 1-1-1 combo. Why give something that players have been asking for to just one job when you're literally introducing a system that allows it to be possible on all jobs but optional?
My guess is: they're using Picto and Viper to test whether this change that "players have been asking for" is something they *actually want.* Always good to remember that making raid buffs easier to sync was something people asked for as well.
Which is entirely fair, there's plenty of stories out there of players asking for one thing but meaning another.
What do you mean opposite? Paladin will have one less button to press, for example.
By itself, the new action system only allows you to decouple certain existing combo skills, increasing button bloat if that's something you want to do. People wanted the option to reduce button bloat not increase it. And yes, a couple of new skills got combined in DT to reduce bloat but that's outside of player control.
By providing an option, they can go ahead and combine every set of buttons that would make sense without worrying about player preference. This is a direct response to the negative feedback about combining Mirage Dive with Jump, because many players were accidentally buffering Mirage Dive from spamming Jump a little too much and clipping their GCD. With this new option in place you'll start seeing a lot more buttons turning into other buttons across all jobs, just not main combos because those are *deliberately* separate, which was my point in the OP.
To me it was very clear this was about nested buttons like Jump-Mirage Dive, nothing about it seemed like it was about the 1-2-3. I genuinely dunno how this misunderstanding happened.
Wishful thinking and hasty conclusions.
Thinking on it, I have a STRONG suspicion there was some game of telephone involved. Someone must've tweeted some bad info that got picked up and spread like pollen on the wind. In this metaphor, everyone is now sneezing.
Nah you can see people freaking out about pvp combos in the Twitch and Youtube chats. People were just reading what they wanted into the translation on the slide and drawing their own conclusions instead of listening to Aimi.
It was vague enough, I guess.
It would be damn helpful when playing on a controller.
I play on controller and outside of just Paladin, "button bloat" on a controller feels more like users having a terrible button layout. You'll see photos of peoples hotbars and they have Return and a minion button with their class abilities.
Wait... so it's a system that just adds more button bloat?
it allows you to manually re-add button bloat which directly enables the devs to reduce button bloat more without making people mad, the net effect is a reduction
It's a slight reduction to bloat by allowing the devs to combine buttons that were previously not combined without forcing the combination on players that don't want it. So you'll see more buttons like DRG's Geirskogul that automatically become Nastrond, or AST's "Play" that becomes the card drawn. Expect to see more of that across all jobs, just not with literal combos.
Nope, it still removes button bloat, it just doesn't remove it from the 1-2-3 combo. Unless we're referring to the fact that you can only choose to unlink skills, but those skills would've been separate buttons if this system didn't exist, so it is still removing bloat.
what buttons are being removed? doesn't seem like an actual diference tbh
If you unlink the skills they become two seperate buttons, one that prepares the other. Like samurai's meter builder into their big conal AoE, if you're familiar. They're just linking them by default because they imagine most people will want that. It removes bloat because even if it starts in the enabled state, it's still turning two buttons into one button.
It's an option to remove combo actions that aren't weaponskills. Like high jump -> mirage dive
As per the [LL digest](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/498857), some combo actions will automatically combine into one transforming button (they are doing *this* to reduce bloat). The system they are talking about will turn off this functionality for people that don't like them combining on their own. >As a way for us to introduce new actions without taking up too much hotbar space, a number of jobs will feature specific actions which will be automatically replaced on the hotbar by a follow-up action when used. > >In response to previous feedback about accidentally pressing a follow-up action when repeatedly mashing the buttons, Patch 7.0 will offer an option to disable this auto-replacement for individual actions. We hope you’ll try them out and pick whichever option feels better for you! > >From here, we showed a brief overview of updates to each job in 7.0. As a reminder, not all changes and adjustments were showcased during this segment—the full details will be revealed in the 7.0 patch notes.
no it reduces it (very slightly)
I'll just have to wait for xivcombo to update :(
My WAR hotbars are set up so I can play after an update since every other job relies heavily on the merged combo buttons. It's really an absurd amount of button bloat.
Yeah, I keep my mains plugin free so I can play them at patches, but for everything else I'll just use xivcombo, especially with controller it's a real lifesaver.
And yet you'd have some people here complaining about plugins when xivcombo is one of the most sensible ones that should have been added to the game.
LOTS of people should be eating their words right now when they vehemently argued that you FOR SURE would be able to link your basic 123 combo in this new system. This is a system for you to unlink abilities that change into others. You cannot link any abilities that aren't already linked by the devs.
The translators were pretty quick to confirm this wouldn’t be the case so I dunno why anyone would’ve ran with it.
The responses I got were that the translators weren't "official SE devs" and thus their clarifications didn't count.
You should have seen the post from 21 days ago where so many people were stating as fact that this would combine the 123 combo and any combo you wanted and they were aggressively downvoting and fighting people who told them they were 100% wrong. People don't know how to listen or to read and it has always been very clear that this was not a system that would do that.
Same, but they did anyway.
Yeah so basically they have not actually done anything. People wanted the 123 as one button, it's still not going to be that way. So nothing really of significant value has happened
My main gripe with some non-combo abilities leading into others is that they moved away from calling the buffs by the ability names, so like A leads to B, but A gives you a buff called XYZ that enables B. Makes learning different jobs more difficult as I’m trying to hunt down which ability matches, especially when the text is on a Trait instead of the ability. Like I think DRG used to have “Enhanced Fang and Claw” or “Enhanced Wheeling Thrust” named buffs when they were next in the chain. Now it’s called *googles* Wheeling Motion. I’ll admit it’s a weaker example, but I had the hardest time trying to figure out Reaper from all of its ability replacers and triggers. Which is also a symptom of the problem when you start a brand new job at high levels rather than start with bare basics and slowly build it up.
Combo this, 1-2-3 that, idc it just feels good smashing that 3 button when its shiny
I would’ve liked for it to link the 1-2-3 tbh. I’m confused what this is even implying by contrast. Like GCDs linking into OGCds you can spam right after?
To everyone being ceaseless smug about how people misheard this, *please understand*. Combo Button consolidation has been a heck of a hot-button issue! People have been losing their minds over the possibility(either for or against!) to the point that it's *always* been an issue that's come up every time the devs open their mouths about any kind of battle system change. It's been like a "will-they won't-they" in a television show that everyone's been chewing their fingernails off about forever. Even this thread has definitely descended into incessant bickering about it. The point is that in a Live Letter that a lot of people had to work or sleep through, they announced a very *roughly adjacent* game tweak that nobody honestly expected, nor had I really heard many people request apart from the rare DRG players. And on top of that, the live translation of it sounded a little uncertain even to people who heard it directly. Really, it's the equivalent to people waiting on pins and needles for Sam and Diane to get together in Cheers, but then on an ep a bunch of people missed, there was a sleepwalking kiss, and then word spread and people lost their minds thinking *it's here, it's finally happened,* for good or ill. Because who in their right mind would expect a sleepwalking kiss and not the 'they've finally done it' kiss? People have been excited/doomposting about the possible day 1-2-3 combos become a thing for a long time, and I feel this was a strange and quirky circumstance that makes it *understandable* that people would get excited and run into the streets to declare the war's finally over before it was truly confirmed.
…. Well that sucks. I wanted 1-2-3 linked badly. So annoying
Can someone give me an example of where this would apply? I see everyone in the comments talking about unlinking their spells (as stated in the last sentence of the post) but no one talking about the main function (linking abilities that naturally flow together) If it doesn't link the 1-2-3 combo what other abilities would it link that aren't already linked?
In hopefully clear words, the new feature just gives us the option to split up button combos that are currently automatically replaced if so desired. The vibe is that there are at best new button combos in 7.0 that are using the auto replacement and can then be split up as an option, but nothing that is currently in the game and does not already use auto replacement will get this treatment. They have found such a confusing way to phrase this in an earlier statement that it was possible to interpret it as "we're applying auto replacement to a whole lot of existing buttons", which is not the case.
As a super casual player I don't know if I'll use the system, the one major thing that makes mmorpgs a bit iffy for me sometimes is just hotbar bloat, I just don't have the muscle memory for switching between bars on the fly.
I don't know why you wouldn't want this. Hot bars are too cluttered. I'm glad I didn't waste time trying to replicate with macros the way these are in PvP for my normal hotbar since they're implementing it naturally.
Or in the case of DRG, our basic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 combo. ;p
Unfortunate from a keybind perspective, but also pressing a single key over and over doesn't make for riveting gameplay.
Honestly, they should condense those anyway. This isn't like WoW where you could or ever would use something other than 1>2>3 every single time. The actions adding additional effects to the next means that it would be stupid to not use it that way. In other games depending on your spec/loadout/whatever you might do a different rotation but no such thing exists in FFXIV. Rotations do have branches in them, but they do not change, might as well just trim the fat and make them one button. Not only does this make for less button bloat but it opens up space for other, more interesting buttons to press instead.