A lot of the issues I have with this game involve controller support simply not letting me map things the way I would want them and that my controller doesn't have enough buttons to do what I want it to do in the context of this game.
I always have brought up games like Warframe or Dragon's Dogma Online when it comes to how classes play in this game because I feel there is no doubt that the Successor classes (including the Luster who has one extra photon art that won't fit on to your main palette and cannot be put onto a subpalette) are designed very well to be played on a controller assuming all basic functionality. The only real exceptions to this are the Hero and the Phantom who both have access to techniques and therefore you might as well have your subpalette loaded up with them to use them on-demand.
I have never been able to play the game well on console without wishing I had more input options from when I played on the PlayStation Vita (on Phantasy Star Nova your subpalette was accessed by using the touchscreen whereas Phantasy Star Online 2 has absolutely none of that) and on the PlayStation 4 you were forced to stick to the default controls or what the Dualshock 4 had as buttons. On the Xbox One version you can at least use a keyboard and mouse and map your keyboard completely if you really wanted to though it was relatively impractical unless you had shortcuts around that. I have used DS4Windows to push extra inputs from my controller and have since used reWASD (and now Steam Input because it's more flexible even if it is not perfect) because I intentionally unmapped my L1 button so that it can be used to access my subpalette in the same way we access the Back Palette. Similarly I have also added functionality for other button inputs (L1/R1 + L3 activates my Photon Blast, L1/R1 + R3 activates whatever I have mapped for either a Complex Photon Art/Compound Technique/Special Class Finisher ability) and have extended the use of the Dualshock 4's touchpad to allow me to use things like Chat Shortcuts for easy access to subpalette swapping, weapon swapping, and even fashion swapping.
There is a lot of customization you can do with the controls but the main issue I have is that it is not "flexible" enough for what I want to do so that as a spellcaster (Techer, Force, Bouncer, Summoner, Hero, or Phantom) I can access both my normal attacks and subpalettes without messing with the D-Pad to scroll left/right or up/down to find what I'm looking for. Ever since Sega had updated subpalettes to include Photon Arts as well this has extended my gameplay as melee/ranged classes as this meant I can now use multiple attacks as a Twin Daggers fighter without having to scroll weapons (which has an inherent delay that you must jump-cancel out of to update due to the weapons not appearing or changing until you wait about a second or two from my experiences with eight-step dashing) and it allowed me to be more versatile as a Gunner who can fight using more options than just Another S-Roll Arts with everything else in my main palette being used exclusively for Chain Trigger breaking.
When it comes into context for classes like the Bouncer (and the Braver by extension) I never enjoyed that their "big damage boost" skills were always on a cooldown and that when the cooldown was over you were doing less than "normal" damage because the game assumes you will either swap to the other weapon and utilize that or that you are worse than you normally are until you can get the cooldown back. This is mitigated by playing as the Luster with a subclass because you can make cooldowns non-existent if you are capable of keeping up your voltage but this does not change the notion to me that you have to "normally" scroll through your subpalette, activate the skill you want, and then resume gameplay. The Successor classes like the Hero and Phantom still struggle with this if you are intending on having sets of subpalettes with different techniques and skills laid out and the only real solution I want is the ability to have a mappable menu (think like Warframe's Gear Wheel or Ability Menu) so you can access features like Stance Toggles, "Super Abilities" for classes, or things like Photon Blasts/Dark Blasts without having to dance left/right around a menu. Dragon's Dogma Online solves this entirely by removing L2/R2 as usable buttons for the gameplay unless you are in a special context (if you enter an aiming mode of any sort then L2/R2 can be used as the "shoot" button) as L2 opens up a hotkey menu that highlights four of the twelve options you have which you can easily scroll through using L1/R2 which makes the F1-F12 hotkeys on a normal MMO easily accessible. Similarly holding R2 opens up another menu that allows you to use the face buttons or the D-Pad to input one of eight shortcut commands and you have multiple pages (about ten pages) worth of these you can set up for things like chat shortcuts, pawn commands, and emotes. Pressing L2 and then R2 expands the map for viewing purposes as well which is highly convenient when needed. The amount of customization in that game's hotkeys allows players to have extremely quick and easy access to the menus they are most invested in (for me in this case my equipment/items/friend/fast travel menus were all together and then I had my items loaded up together with niche items also grouped together).
In the context of Phantasy Star Online 2, however, I feel the Bouncer definitely has it better than other classes. I would have loved for something along the lines of a "gear wheel" selection for the Ranger so they can select the ammo they want to use or the traps they want to use because the Dark Blast menu already handles this and I see no reason why at all the Ranger could not use something similar for their traps instead of having to load up each one and its ammo into their subpalette. This would also assume that any trap and bullet would be viable as in my experience I have only ever used the Gravity Bomb and Weak Bullet/Blight Rounds because everything costs skill points when I really feel that they should not at least compared to other classes.
I have had ideas for a Bouncer redesign that I would absolutely love to see but it would end up radicalizing a lot of the gameplay Bouncers are used to. Specifically I would love to utilize more of the "Variant Arts" concept and expand on them by turning Jet Boots photon arts into potential two-or-three input combos or to utilize Hero/Luster mechanics so that a player can use Strike Gust, drop kick it into the ground, and then soar right back into the air (by holding the weapon action or by pressing it again, I'm not fully committed to what I would prefer more) with the Soaring Blades by it being linked to Immortal Dove. Similarly for the Soaring Blades in this case due to the lack of a Variant Art the ability to hold photon arts would switch back to the Jet Boots with a related attack (though I am not much of Soaring Blades player so I am not fully familiar with their rotations beyond the Tech-Cancel Flying Trick). The main obstacle with this particular mechanic I see is that the Hero "already" does this with their Link Arts and the Luster utilizes this for their Enhance Arts but I see no problem with backporting these when both the Phantom and Etoile utilize some aspect of these Variant Arts (Phantom's Shifta Arts and the Wand-Etoile's Focus Arts). The other obstacle which is more of a technical one is that like the Hero, the weapon switching is heavily latency-dependent where if you are a player with a poor connection you have the same delays you would with manually switching weapons where you must jump-cancel to force your weapons to change quickly. The easiest solution around this is a hacky solution where you completely avoid the transition altogether and simply just swap weapons using the Numpad (or in my case the button combinations I created for myself) and either attack right away or jump.
If we are talking about things like damage numbers and the gearing the Bouncers do, I really feel like the Jet Boots side of the Bouncer can use some touch-ups to push Serpen Plenzer (Serpent Prenzer in global) levels of power and utility into being more of a "natural" thing for the Bouncer. The Bow-Braver was infamously hit with this years ago when one of their bows (Divine Raikou) had its potential changed because it became the "only" bow to use due to its reduction to Rapid Shoot's cooldown and as a result the Braver was changed to have that cooldown naturally and so players can use other bows. The Bouncer, at least to me, has not yet really seen this outside of their very big gameplay changes for Episode 5 (being given infinite jumps when every class could double jump and being given much more mobility) because you still have weapons like Jupiter Tullus and Serpen Plenzer effectively dominating your choices. Due to Jupiter Tullus being power-creeped by future weapons, you still definitely do want its potential (in the form of an S5) on future weapons and Serpen Plenzer brings in such a huge change to the Jet Boots gameplay (specifically for Bouncer/Phantom) that I really do wish that instead of it being locked to a weapon despite how much I like it the gampelay for the Bouncer would have kept up to play like the Successor classes do in terms of ease-of-play. I would personally have loved if the stances were simply passive and not needed to be active instead (so no need to juggle Elemental Stance or Break Stance) and to make the Field Skills activate upon "grazing" attacks using the weapon action or the brief invulnerability period during attacks. The Hunter gets to activate their Guard Stance damage buffs by doing something very similar and it baffles me why the Bouncer cannot for something very similar.
