Some hotbar suggestions going into Heavensward

Hey all, I just felt I would share my thoughts on some possible improvements to the hotbar/cross hotbar. If any of these ideas have already been discussed forgive me, I couldn't locate them using a search.

First Suggestion: Make Skills able to be activated by holding the button.

The reasoning behind this is pretty simple: latency. As you all are undoubtedly familiar with having to smash on the key/button on your keyboard or controller to ensure a skill actually comes out when you press it, having the option to toggle a "hold" function so that the skill is constantly trying to be activated while you hold the key might be a good quality of life option. That way, when your next combo or cooldown is needed you can simply hold down the button until it goes off with no rapid mashing.

Second Suggestion: Make combos able to be used on a single button without Macros.

This suggestion would take a lot more doing, but as we're going into the expansion and getting more and more abilities as the game goes on, I feel it should be addressed since there are a lot of controller players out there on PC and console. Basically, the game would recognize when you hit the first hit of your basic combo (like True Thrust for example), and change the skill on that same hotbar slot to the next part of the combo for as long as the combo bonus is active (Vorpal Thrust in this case). Many MMOs have done this and I think that FFXIV should consider it too with all the branching combos and limited hotbar space for controller players. Macros can sort of do this, but they will automatically play out in a sequence which you don't necessarily want, and cannot be activated as instantly as when you manually activate a weaponskill.

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Originally Posted by InfiniDragon

First Suggestion: Make Skills able to be activated by holding the button.

The reasoning behind this is pretty simple: latency. As you all are undoubtedly familiar with having to smash on the key/button on your keyboard or controller to ensure a skill actually comes out when you press it, having the option to toggle a "hold" function so that the skill is constantly trying to be activated while you hold the key might be a good quality of life option. That way, when your next combo or cooldown is needed you can simply hold down the button until it goes off with no rapid mashing.

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This wouldn't be bad, but I'm not sure that it's really necessary. If you use skills directly, they already will queue up ahead of time and go off as soon as you're available for the next action. There's no need to either mash or hold the button, just press it a moment before your current action finishes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by InfiniDragon

Second Suggestion: Make combos able to be used on a single button without Macros.

This suggestion would take a lot more doing, but as we're going into the expansion and getting more and more abilities as the game goes on, I feel it should be addressed since there are a lot of controller players out there on PC and console. Basically, the game would recognize when you hit the first hit of your basic combo (like True Thrust for example), and change the skill on that same hotbar slot to the next part of the combo for as long as the combo bonus is active (Vorpal Thrust in this case). Many MMOs have done this and I think that FFXIV should consider it too with all the branching combos and limited hotbar space for controller players. Macros can sort of do this, but they will automatically play out in a sequence which you don't necessarily want, and cannot be activated as instantly as when you manually activate a weaponskill.

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Combo actions aren't linear enough for that to work well. Would a GLD/PLD's Fast Blade be followed by Savage Blade or Riot Blade? They both have a combo action from it, and both have situations where they're the most useful followup. And what about occasional procs? An ARC/BRD's Heavy Shot has a 20% chance to give crit damage to a follow-up Straight Shot, but also an 80% chance that it won't. You'll want the Straight Shot anyway for its crit rate boost any time your buf from it wears off, but whenever that guaranteed crit proc comes up you'll generally want it regardless of the time left on that buff. And so on. Most "rotations" aren't really fixed enough as a single thread of A is always followed by B which is always followed by C, which is really the only pattern where this sort of button swapping would help.

While the combo thing is good for jobs that have linear combo (drg,mnk,nin) things like PLD after HW would be difficult
Fast blade is going going to tier into either A) savage or B) riot
And if u go the A route it is then going to tier into A)halone B)new dot C)new dd combo

I wouldn't mind some charged abilities for holding like I have seen in other MMOs