How many skills is too many?

So the more skills we have the better :D more options for us to choose from and makes the battle style more fun to do. But to what point is considered too many skills? 20? 30? 40?? 50?!?

Me? I think around 25ish mark is a enough skills for any player to have.

I don't see how Tataru is an Imperial spy. Where is your justification for that?

3 crosshotbars are still comfortable to navigate during battle with controller
16 slots * 3 = 48 skills. Maybe 42 skills to save some slots for pots and macros

I've seen much less complicated games use far fewer buttons for a much more challenging experience. I don't think there's a need to have 40 buttons or even more than 20 you hit regularly. There's a lot of redundant stuff in there, and most jobs have a ton of OGCDs just to give you something to activate between GCDs that aren't meaningfully used (really, they're just hit the moment they come off cooldown unless it's a rare one with movement that you'd save momentarily to jump back on a boss or add like with Plunge).

It's really just a complexity created by the hotkey-based design of the game, and you can see other things similarly created just for the sake of creating complexity where there was none before (having to use cleric stance to get the same damage you would otherwise get in other games, having to have enochian up just to cast your highest tier spells, etc).

35-40 is generally a good number, provided the abilities are good ones. Anything more than that and I start having to really work to find keybinds for them, many of which are just uncomfortable to use and do not really get more comfortable with time. I wouldn't try to really pick any number as some sort of target and I think designing that way, as opposed to making sure the kit feels complete and well-rounded (at least to the extent it's supposed to be), would be a very poor choice. I do generally like having more skills rather than fewer though, as it usually opens up more ways to approach a given situation in the game and a lot of those abilities can be somewhat niche abilities that really enhance the flavor of a class. However, it was more important to me in WoW than in this game, which has a lot to do with what abilities exist and how they work.

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Originally Posted by Martin_Arcainess

more options for us to choose from

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It's never a choice.

Anyway, more than 10 is too much.

GW2 has the best system for this kind of combat. One auto attack spell and the rest are cooldowns. Change stance/weapon and you get different spells.

My Elementalist has like 25 spells on 10 buttons.

Back to FFXIV, I don't understand why we need to bind all those skills. For example, Chaos Thrust and True Thrust combos could've been 2 buttons instead of 6. Cleric Stance could change our hotbar to be a DPS one, since we won't be healing when it's active, and won't be DPSing when it's not.

Playing on controller helps but it's still has a rather high learning curve.

30 like DRG right now... That's not including PVP skills by the way. Needs to be a lot less.

5-6 active skills.
1-3 cooldowns.
2-4 situationals.

That's just what goes on the hotbar. What I'd like to see with combos is make them actual combos where the abilities change based on what you used prior. Sort of like Ninja mudras. You can easily double or triple the number of skills that way without using up 2-3 hotbars.

When 3 hotbars consisting of 12 buttons each (36 total) no longer are enough.

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Originally Posted by NovaLevossida

I've seen much less complicated games use far fewer buttons for a much more challenging experience. ...

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@NovaLevossida, totally agree with everythning you said.

People who think 30/40/50 buttons are needed are simply confusing convolution with challenge. There's a lot of fluff in XIV's existing skill sets which seem to be there simply for padding out the numbers.