Did Stormblood fix abilty bloat? What is your opinion?

[Hikuras]

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

You say this but can you explain the amount of people who can't play as good and do YOU clear raids in world first and can do everything perfectly without fail? If not then you can only and should only speak for yourself. I'm just saying cause a statement like yours doesn't reflect the playerbase at large. If it did that dungeon thread wouldn't be as long.

[Ruinfeild]

I just noticed that the PvP action bar has the exact thing that they should have done.

Instead of having heavy bloated action bars they could let us either customize our skills into a combo system or even have already generated combo buttons for us to use. Would help with the bloat quite a bit.

[BorisDaBlade]

As a pld, I have 32 spots on my expanded cross hotbar for 38 skills. I'm gonna have to say no. Bloat is worse now than 3.0.

[chromo]

Personaly i would say its so early for people opinions like i'd give it a raid tier AT LEAST!

[Berethos]

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

Let's not follow their example if we can help it. Last time I played I used all of 5 abilities 95% of the time, and most of the time it was based around 3 of those. Spam 1 ability 4 times, spam another 4 times to spend the resource, hit a third if it procs. Repeat ad nauseum until cooldowns are ready every 1-5 minutes. I know not every class over there is like that, but more than a few have reached that level of over simplification and it's a real shame.

I'm all for careful trimming, but WoW went overboard and we need to look at them for how not to do it as much as we need to consider why they did it.

To answer the OP's question - I ended up with basically the same amount of keybinds as Bard (sitting at 27 total, including modifiers like shift and alt), with the added bonus that some of them now do far more interesting things than "increases crit chance for 20 seconds" every minute or two.

[MrSmiley]

pruning is good, but lets not use the *current* wow as a good example...its not. I struggled to find a class that used more than 3 buttons regularly, or 5 at most. If you like it that simple, well, grats, WoW exists for you. Can we try not turn every mmo into the same thing?

[KisaiTenshi]

BUT WE STILL HAVE FLUID AURA?! AND IT DOES NO DAMAGE ?!

Because Fluid Aura was being misued in much the same way Repose/Sleep isn't being used.

In ARR, this is how you'd do a solo fight as WHM prior to level 45 (when you get Holy)

Switch to cleric stance
Aero a monster
it will inevitably attract 2 or 3, repose the other two mobs, and then use fluid aura to push the one you want to fight away.

If you time things correctly, you can finish off that mob before you have to try and repose the other two mobs. That's pretty much how I did things, only before I knew cleric stance did anything useful. So inevitably every solo fight took forever. This was way back at launch.

Fluid Aura was never about doing damage itself, it was about pushing away and binding a mob as a DoT ticks down.

Once you get Holy, you never have a reason to use Fluid Aura because Holy stuns everything. Likewise you have no reason to ever use Repose either because the only two dungeons that it was ever needed was for level 32 (Brayflox Longstop) and maybe stone vigil if you had incredibly weak DPS players.

There are just some things in the game that require the uses of these skills, and if you don't have them, it's easier to heal through it. That's why Aurum vale is despised, because it's one of the few dungeons that you simply can not heal through, and you can't zerg rush it.

Repose is essentially useless because it has a cast time. If it was possible to just cast a sleep field on a group of monsters, then a tank and DPS can focus on wearing down one mob. But PotD is teaching people to just zero rush through content.

If SE wants to do something for V5.0 drop this "role" former cross-class system and just give every job their equivalent skills back. Maybe instead create categories so that the player can setup their own "stacked command"'s like how the PvP changed.

eg "Combat Rotation 1: SKILL, SKILL, SKILL, ACTION", will execute each skill in succession when the button is pressed until a different button is pressed. That would allow players, particularly PLD, NIN, and SAM to condense their combos down since many of these combos don't really do anything but cause different levels of damage or lay out different DoT's.

For healers it might look more like:
eg "Heal priority combo 1: Regen, Cure 1, Cure 2, Tetra, Benediction", "Heal priority combo 2: Assize, Medica, Medica II" and the priority checks that the target needs healing and then at 5% uses Regen, 20% uses cure 1, 50% uses cure 2, 70% uses Tetra, and 90% uses Benediction. If tetra and benediction have already been used, then it will keep casting Cure 2.

Or SE could just improve the macro system to have a "wait for ready" and a "skip if busy" command for stacking commands, and a "on <counter num>th time pressed do ..." and a "reset counter num" to do the replace with next proc type of macro that the PvP combo uses.

But macros are hard for casual players to understand. Hence SE would need a way to simply create a 3 or 4 action combo by click+draging the skill to a combo creator.

[Minizomb]

I don't think it changed much for me at all, freed up exactly two slots. I lost disable all together and Malefic 1-2 and now 3 only takes up one spot. Other than that no changes to my key binding because even the "role" ones pretty much stayed the same because you still have to switch them so they don't leave their spot binding, all that really has happened for me is that it has become tedious to switch "role" to cycle protect out when needed. It has honestly been just annoying but then again I never complained keybinding amount, I have it the way I like it and I had no complaints prior to this update. As for the changes of PvP, sucks for me now so I probably won't do much of it anymore.

[Nixxe]

It fixed it in the sense that it got rid of essentially all partly or fully redundant abilities. However, the results in terms of raw number of keybinds are mixed. My paladin has more than HW and my WHM has significantly fewer. I don't really mind having a lot of abilities, but they didn't really seem to hit the mark on "about the same number of abilities as before." My paladin has four additional keybinds over what it had in HW while my WHM has about five fewer.

[Vurtney]

I think i have more keybinds on use than ever before. My finger acrobatics as a warrior have ascended to a whole new level. It keeps things interesting.