Next Expansion Please Give Us Traits Instead of Skills

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Originally Posted by Franchesca

Race traits was never brought up, we're talking about job traits.

For instance, I'd like for us to the choose to boost Spell Speed or increase potency on Stone III by 5% or make parry REALLY useful on tankers but not necessary if they are given other choices.

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My apologies. OP was a little vague, and I'm used to games when traits are mentioned immediately mean race.

Now what you suggest sounds great. I'm all for that kind of variety.

They're gonna have to straight up give console players dynamic macros (skill cycling ones that follow the combos and reset if you miss kind of thing) if there are many more abilities. Realistically you can run 32 active skills with the crosshotbar and extended crosshotbar and have skills like kiss of the viper or like a quick-cast/raise macro and stuff like limit break on a different crosshotbar without overly complicating things. If you have more than 32 actions/buffs in a rotation it is doable but would definitely be a pain. I guess we could all get used to swapping crosshotbars to apply cooldowns but they would need to add a way for console players to visually see when cooldowns on a different bar become available at least.

I would be happy if they consolidated most skills and expanded on the combo system. Having a single combo line that branches off for various things would be more interesting than just adding more skills.

I would love to be able to pick traits from a list of them as well.

I think it's safe to assume that traits or upgrades of our current skills (potency boosts, new animations,...) will be the way jobs will change in the future. Heavenward brought skills that were necessary for many classes (SMN needed to deal more direct damage, BLM needed something to make it less sleep-inducing, PLD desperatly needed more than just ONE combo,...), and now they feel "complete" compared to the way they were before. Adding more skills would either cause previous ones to go to waste (but we wouldn't be able to remove the old skills from our bars because of level-synch) or make the jobs overly complicated. Or it would simply make some jobs less desirable because one of its specialty was given to another job and made it OP in the process.

I find the jobs I play (SMN, BLM, WHM, PLD) have the perfect amount of abilities at the moment.

More skills and more traits, y not

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Originally Posted by TriksteR

More skills and more traits, y not

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Because there are only so many keys.

Please no more skills my SCH has 3.5 hotbars of skills, not including the pet hotbar .

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Originally Posted by DreadRabbit

My apologies. OP was a little vague, and I'm used to games when traits are mentioned immediately mean race.

Now what you suggest sounds great. I'm all for that kind of variety.

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I don't think the OP was vague at all. The screen where you find your abilities is called "Actions and Traits" and there is a section named Traits. Every job has traits, except after 50 we stop learning new ones.

As for the OP, I would also like to see some interesting new traits rather than making our list of actions even longer. I do think that being able to upgrade or augment our current abilities would be better.

I just don't think they'll be as extensive as last time. I think most jobs could still work in a couple more abilities.

I'd suggest something like:
62: trait
64: skill
66: trait
68: skill
70: trait

The tricky part is we all know that the next expansion will have a level cap increase and there obviously has to be some feeling of character progression from leveling, but bloat is getting to be a serious issue - for most jobs I think an additional 5 more skills would be way overkill. Ideally I'd like to see maybe 1-2 with more traits and/or a merit system.

Maybe slow down the level increases, cap it at 65 and give everyone 1 skill at cap + a merit system.