Originally Posted by
Airget
Reducing ability bloat is easy and it's been done in other MMOs.
The simple method is this.
Example: Currently we live in a system where if you have 6 attack abilities they work like
A B C D E F
If the combos are
A-B-C
A-B-D
A-B-E
A-F
That means 6 hotbar slots are being used for those 4 combos
So you could have a setup like
Hotbar 2=F-D-E
Hotbar 1=A-B-C
However instead of that what they could do is this
You have 4 combos
When I hit A, A now turns into B, when I press B it turns into C and then the combo is done it reverts back to A(or if combo timer runs out)
So now you have this
Hotbar 1=A(B)(C)-A(B)(D)-A(B)(E)-A(F)
So intead of having the hotbar use 6 spaces for 4 combos it now only uses 4.
Space could further be saved if say instead of setting each hotbar for x combo it instead does this
Hotbar 1=A.
Hit A and the following happens
Hotbar 1=B-F
Then if you hit F it goes back to A but if you hit B then this happens
Hotbar 1=C-D-E
So now in combat you would have this
ABC=1 1 1
AF=1 2
ABD=1 1 2
ABE=1 1 3
In that scenario now only 3 spaces are taken up for combos.
So overall there are manners in which abilities could be changed to make it easier to add but for now it is wait and see, we'll most likely know by next Thursday during the live letter, since they do plan on talking about battle system changes, though my bets are on they will do one of the two options listed above so that they can add more abilities without making the hotbar to cluttered.