Did Stormblood fix abilty bloat? What is your opinion?

[KisaiTenshi]

It is comments like this that make me worry for the fate of this game. There are many in my FC that are beside themselves over the loss of tools that they used constantly. Eye for an Eye is a complete joke, and, even if you didn't use Raging Strikes to do the optimal amount of damage as a black mage, I did. If you wish to not use your class to its greatest potential and use all the tools given to you, that's fine, and I will not judge you. So long as we pass DPS checks, your healing keeps everyone alive, and your tanking holds the adds' attention, we're dandy. However, your call for class pruning would not allow me the same courtesy and detracts from my ability to enjoy the game. I came here BECAUSE it was complicated. Should you not find it to your liking, there is always Blizzard's legion expansion. I would suggest you play that instead.

This game is designed to be played with the controller, thus the maximum number of "button mashing" has to be limited to 4 buttons. You can toggle those 4 buttons 8 ways with the shoulder buttons so you have a maximum of 36 buttons combinations that are reasonably useable (L1, L2, R1, R2, L1+L2, L1+R1, L2+R2, R1+R2) but for some people it's better to have less combinations and just map those shoulder buttons to commands instead.

[Warlyx]

as bard far from it ....now i even have more buttons based on rotation and procs ,and i have way less personal CDs and 2 songs that only benefit my party and not me and they still call me selfish ¬¬

[Sylvina]

I came here BECAUSE it was complicated. Should you not find it to your liking, there is always Blizzard's legion expansion. I would suggest you play that instead.

Comments like this do indeed make me worry about the fate of the game. Too many buttons is too many buttons, classes need not require an engineering degree to play to their fullest, nor a gaming mouse/keyboard.

WoW had a good reason to prune their abilities like they did and SE would do well to learn from it.

[Priya]

It is comments like this that make me worry for the fate of this game. There are many in my FC that are beside themselves over the loss of tools that they used constantly. Eye for an Eye is a complete joke, and, even if you didn't use Raging Strikes to do the optimal amount of damage as a black mage, I did. If you wish to not use your class to its greatest potential and use all the tools given to you, that's fine, and I will not judge you. So long as we pass DPS checks, your healing keeps everyone alive, and your tanking holds the adds' attention, we're dandy. However, your call for class pruning would not allow me the same courtesy and detracts from my ability to enjoy the game. I came here BECAUSE it was complicated. Should you not find it to your liking, there is always Blizzard's legion expansion. I would suggest you play that instead.

BLM is not a class that suffers from key bloat, nor did it. Healers, with the exception of SCH, also have not historically suffered from bloat. Please keep in mind that not all classes have the same number of skills, and the amount varies greatly depending on what you play.

Also, legion pruning did not harm gameplay, and actually improved it for many because the focus became "easy to pick up, but hard to master" for most classes. Even so, talents add more keys to class kits, so even in Wow, some classes have many necessary keys. Even in legion, gameplay in Wow is not as black and white as you are trying to make it appear.

[loreleidiangelo]

I love the number of actions in WoW, tbh. It's like two hotbars at most for some classes. XIV still has too many, IMO, and on healers especially a ton of the abilities are either overpowered or redundant. I think it's plenty possible to have involved kits that DON'T translate to a ridiculous number of job actions cluttering my hotbars.

[Airget]

I"d say yes, the job feels different, there was a bloat in the sense of every job doing the same thing, they all had theri DoTs to apply, buffs to apply before certain burst damage and keeping up combos.

Now it's been reduced, not all jobs have a buff, when you look at NIN their "Buffs" are a Double Attack, a Critical Jutsu and you could say Ten-Chi-Jin. Rather than actual buffs NIN reacts with using it's gauge to perform 1/3 actions, while upkeeping combo, using jutsu as it's avaiable. So in terms of rotation bloat it has been reduced because you're no longer juggling Mutilate, Shadow Fang Combo, Main Damage combo, Huton reapply combo and Dancing Edge combo on top of using jutsu and timing your self buffs to deal more dmg.

[Vhailor]

So do you think, from a keybind point of view, that:
- there are still to much abilitys.
or
- we are fine for Stormblood but need another prune in the next expansion.
or
- we are fine regardless.

I don't think they accomplished much, and I think a lot of their efforts were poorly-planned and clumsy.

Take WHM, for example; I have four instant-cast Heal abilities. Single-targets are Tetragrammaton and Benediction; AoE are Assize and (sort of) Plenary Indulgence, though this last one is more like a single-target in a lot of ways. That's a TON. If I'd been focused on ability prune, I'd have eliminated at least one, and possibly two, of these abilities. My instinctive approach would have been to keep Tetra and Bene, and merge Plenary Indulgence into Assize (remove the Confessions stack timers and give Assize a bonus potency to anyone with stacks). That's one ability lost.

Medica and Medica II are also entirely unnecessary to duplicate. Raise the potency of Medica II a bit, lower the potency of Medica I, and give a tier-up similar to Stone. There's the AoE heal. Keep in mind, I don't necessarily MIND that there are two skills, it's just that the idea of "low-potency plus regen" vs. "high-potency AoE" is only functional if the initial potency isn't such a small gap. These are essentially two abilities that aren't needed, especially if Cure III had finally been modified to have a worthwhile radius.

So that's two skills from the WHM toolbox I could knock out right away, without even trying all that much. Could probably knock out a third by combining Presence of Mind and Thin Air (the latter would be an added effect to PoM). All of a sudden, WHM has a rather condensed (but identically as potent) toolset. And this is a job that started with a tiny number of abilities to begin with - it's fully possible for others to be pruned even more, I'm sure.

That said, I don't know that there are "too many" abilities. As the OP said, it depends on the fight, and we have plenty of keys for them. This is more a 'style of play' type of consideration. The more involved the fights, the more movement-centered they are, the more battlefield awareness is required, the fewer abilities SE can reasonably give us. A top-notch raider can handle all these abilities while watching the fight; someone lower-down like me begins to struggle when it gets much above 15-20 (and it also takes me quite awhile to "settle" on a hotkey layout so that it's comfortable). I'm sure a huge portion of the playerbase struggles to even go above a half-dozen or so abilities while watching the battlefield. They manage in most fights to do fine, but they only pull it off by staring at icons and ability bars with half an eye paid to AoE on the ground.

So, at best, I'd say SE is treading water right now. And that's unfortunate, because they really f*cked up the balance in a lot of ways while they went about their "pruning" activities for the release of 4.0. I sincerely hope that, in the future, when this is needed again, they'll remember to limit the godsdamned focus to just reducing ability bloat. They'd likely get much better results.

[Khalithar]

From the classes I've played so far:

Drk- About the same.

Pld- More complexity added, same amount of buttons but they're more interesting in my opinion.

Nin- Significantly less bloat and much more manageable. Having to manage as many buffs/debuffs as it did wasn't fun it was irritating, I got good at doing it and it certainly did crazy damage when you DID do it, but I like it better now.

[Mindiori]

Lol @ people wanting the game to be even more simple.

It already takes no skill at all. But I suppose you'll all keep crying until every class is one button candy crush experience. /Facepalm

[Rivxkobe]

I have empty space on my cross-hotbars now.