Combo Consolidation: How long before we see it in PVE?

[alimdia]

I really don't see how pressing 1-2-3 makes the game challenging. Or how a lack thereof would make it "dumbed down" If people find that challenging in the fights..I think we have a totally different problem.

So we're back in a full circle.

Seeing how many DF DPS have such massive difficulty hitting buttons, I say yes it is very different.

Whether you accept it or not, the skill gap comes from people who know how to do these extremely easy rotations and those who don't, and the skill gap is so big that someone who does know can deal twice as much damage as someone who doesn't.

Contrary to what Zigabar said, it doesn't raise the bottom, you're asking to remove the upper half of the skill bar and dumb everything to the lowest common denominator, press 1 over and over to win.

[Ferth]

Contrary to what Zigabar said, it doesn't raise the bottom, you're asking to remove the upper half of the skill bar and dumb everything to the lowest common denominator, press 1 over and over to win.

That's a gross oversimplification. You will still be weaving oGCD cooldowns inbetween weapon skill combos and moving for mechanics and positionals. The people who don't do this for whatever reason aren't going to suddenly be amazing. There will still be skill and nuance, it just won't require so many buttons.

[alimdia]

That's a gross oversimplification. You will still be weaving oGCD cooldowns inbetween weapon skill combos and moving for mechanics and positionals. The people who don't do this for whatever reason aren't going to suddenly be amazing. There will still be skill and nuance, it just won't require so many buttons.

No, your argument for consolidation could be perfectly used to buffs, why not consolidate all buffs to one button that keeps changing between damage up and resistance down? What's the point of having more than 1 weaponskill and 1 buff? There's no skill in hitting different buttons after all, so let's turn everything into spam 1 to win, anything more than 1 or 2 buttons is too convoluted and overcomplicated.

[Ferth]

No, your argument for consolidation could be perfectly used to buffs, why not consolidate all buffs to one button that keeps changing between damage up and resistance down? What's the point of having more than 1 weaponskill and 1 buff? There's no skill in hitting different buttons after all, so let's turn everything into spam 1 to win, anything more than 1 or 2 buttons is too convoluted and overcomplicated.

Yeah, it sure is a slippery slope, alright... if they add combo consolidation to pve pretty soon they're gonna come after our guns.

[alimdia]

Yeah, it sure is a slippery slope, alright... if they add combo consolidation to pve pretty soon they're gonna come after our guns.

Don't try to ridicule my post, you know your reasoning can be extended beyond combos, so why stop there? Many games only use one single hotbar for actions, should we consider that the baseline to what is considered "not convoluted" and purge everything else?

[OcieKo]

Lets not kid ourselves people, its not the core action rotation that separates the casuals from the hardcores its buff management and encounter knowledge. Rotating combo buttons arent going to change that. In the end youll still have a GCD from one to the next and will habe to know not to blow you long CD buffs right before an invuln phase. Only thing it actually does is reduce the physical capacity required, which as a person who plays with a few female gamers, hand size itself can be a huge factor. Time to accept not everyone can hit 1 with their thumb and 0 with their pinky like for example I can. Also this concept isn't even remotely new, tho it did start more in PVP oriented games where you decision making required more speed. AOC, GW2, and B&S come to mind, hell in WoW we used to macro that functionality into our sets back in the Vanilla > WotLK eras (and if you ask me quality macro programming is a skill in and of itself).

And if a change like this makes room for more interesting mechanics, I'm all in. Personally I'd rather get more unique opponents than a harder time doing my thing.

If you really want some vast aresnal of skills to be feasible, start finding a way into neurology research fieldscand build an SAO style VR device, then the last remaining barrier can go poof for you.

Edit: I was a fan of the EQ style of ability creation, more long term choices and buffs and less constant maintenance on everything. You had variety here and there, but you also had those constant support functions available to you. Also I miss selling SoW to buy KEI...

Edit: and if you want to be super picky a person could manually lay out a 30 sec rotation or so with just assigning the same skill to multiple buttons, i.e. that uber skill rotation could actually be made into 1234567890poiuytrewqasdfghjklmnbvcxz and thats just pressing the next button in line going up and down the keyboard. And then all that skill would not change, they had to learn the rotations order over a duration of time/clicks and the do everything else with the joysticks/mouse.

[Atmora]

Lets not kid ourselves people, its not the core action rotation that separates the casuals from the hardcores its buff management and encounter knowledge.

That's more what separates an 80-94th percentile player from someone actually capable of performing a fight semi optimally. If you actually ask bad players what they should be doing they'll oftentimes give you a very misguided and poor version of an actual rotation and if you dig deeper yet you'll find that they aren't even executing that misguided rotation correctly, they're hitting the wrong OGCDs, using the the wrong abilities, starting the wrong combos, among other things. I've looked through their action casts in order and seen a bard cast wind bite, venom bite into straight shot into venom bite with no OGCDs in between in Zurvan with no bonus. Players really do have a hard time hitting these buttons in the correct order and contrary to popular belief in this thread hitting buttons in the right order IS a skill in video games.