It's Time To Wake up

[Assirra]

Most MMOs nowadays avoid ability bloat. Most games that has released now have had a small arsenal of skills because having too many starts to get tedious. WoW even cut down on some of their skills compared to how it was before because people didn't like the fact that there was so many skills. As the post before me has said all those games cut down on skills because lets be honest a majority of people don't like having that many skills.

Honestly what other people find bloat i tend to find mostly situational cd's or just fun things to mess around with.
You don't want to use all those skills? Fine don't then. However you have no right to take them away from me.

[Aegrus]

Honestly what other people find bloat i tend to find mostly situational cd's or just fun things to mess around with.
You don't want to use all those skills? Fine don't then. However you have no right to take them away from me.

This sums up the community well. You are afraid of change, and I understand this, esp with the ffxi to ffxiv 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0. However, this has to be dealt with.

You can still have choices in skills, AND, not have bloat. 10 is too few, 30 is pushing the limit of alot, but somewhere between 20 and 25 is a nice balance.

Just because you have alot of skills doesn't mean they are all situational. Some just have to be pressed on cd, but are boring damage skills. 2.0 had a good balance, and pushed the edge of bloat. Adding in5+ skills (revamps of old skills) i believe pushed it past the tipping point. Some classes got it easy, wars could just macro out a skill swap for fellcleave/decimate with innerbeast/steelcyclone, paladins just didn't have 3 weapon chains, ninjas had mudras (4 buttons for 7 skills), but others, such as bard or summoner had abilities made relevant or added to their list on top of the new 3.0 skills.

Lets use a Dark Knight as a great example.

Unleash/Abyssal Drain can literally be the same skill and no one would cry. This is a NEW class that was just released and they managed to give it a redundant skill out of the gate. Carve and Spit is an one of the better skills that I still lump into HEY HIT THIS EVERY-MINUTE FOR MEDIOCRE DAMAGE, at least you can choose to buff the damage or get mp back, however, this is still lackluster. Why is this a level 60 skill? Its not fun, its not game changing, its literally just an extra ability just to fill in a space for no real reason.