Thinking Ahead: Is the Game Doomed to have more Ability Bloat Updates?

[Hestzhyen]

I don't mind them trimming excesses, but I'm worried that if they don't add new skills in later expansions that we'll see even worse leveling than we do now. Jobs used to feel complete at 50, and 60 made them even better. Now they feel kind of half-baked at 50 and some don't even come together until 70. And then you have the terrible experiences like MCH where you get your new gauge/resource thing at 50 and have no meaningful interactions with it until 62- that's a heck of a long time. I almost wished I hadn't bothered to level the job once I found out that I'd be stuck dropping Gauss Barrel like a dweeb or taking the huge punishment from Overheating. So I hope SE takes the slow skill learning rate into account when the time comes, as well as placing skills in a logical order.

I think players can handle a few more buttons personally. By all means have traits to upgrade existing abilities but maybe one or two more additions wouldn't hurt either.

[Dzian]

They just plain out don't want to remove crowd control abilities, maybe they plan to use them again in normal gameplay, maybe they think newbies could get an use of them, but all the skills people consider useless have some sort of crowd control effect.

Either way the fact that you don't need crowd control in normal gameplay means you can just remove those abilities from your hotbar if you want to.

Crowd control will never be used because it detracts from the every job is viable in every single instance thing they're so obsessed with..

Add a mechanic that requires several group's of mobs to be slept. Well say goodbye to the 2 of the 3 caster jobs straight away... no spot for you in this content as you can't sleep stuff...

This is why crowd contols even stuns and silences were only ever used as a small dps increases. And now not even worthy of a role skill slot because they're just never used. Same with heavies binds sleeps pacify.

[Cluebilly]

Crowd control will never be used because it detracts from the every job is viable in every single instance thing they're so obsessed with..
heavies, binds, sleeps, pacify.

This actually reminded me that back before a certain patch, Bind would actually keep a target bound even after they were attacked. I'll understand why they changed that.

[Kaonis]

Unless they do some bigger changes, they will be pruning every expansion to fit new abilities in.

A few things they could do to fix this in the longer run,

-More traits, they started to do this with SB, but hopefully they do this more moving forward.
-More pruning. Some abilities serve little purpose but still warrant a spot on the bar. Some examples are Heavy Thrust on DRG (you only hit it every 30 second to keep up a buff) or even more so their combo set-up WS (Impulse Drive, True Thrust, Vorpal Thrust) whose sole purpose is to be used so you can use better WS for higher damage (Full Thrust) or debuffs (Disembowel, Chaos Thrust). Though pruning them would mean more of a removal of the combo system which I doubt they will do, so alternatively for these abilities they could gie them the PVP treatment.
-Do what they did for PVP. This is where a big change would occur. For many abilities/spells you only use them in combo or with certain procs. So they spend a good chunk of time cluttering up the hot bars. RDM I think is one job that would highly benefit from this, as most of their abilities could be condensed down to 4 buttons (Jolt/impact, black mana spells, white mana spells, melee combo). The usual argument against this is "But hitting 1-1-1 is boring/too easy", though I'd counter argue that 1-2-3 isn't much different, and all that added bloat just adds a false sense of complexity. In the case of RDM they could condense them down to those 4 buttons for their main rotation, which that opens up 7 new slots for new abilities that can give more depth to the job without having to remove/rework everything they already have.

Of these I think going the PVP route for buttons is one of the better things they can do. They can condense redundant skills into a single button without removing them from the game or doing big reworks to how the class plays, and open up more slots that can add to the job as it already is without all the time consuming reworks it would take to remove/rework most of a jobs kit.

[Canadane]

Instead of five new skills in an expansion that changes your rotation, how about one super awesome skill that compliments the current rotation?

[Mysticdraggon]

Instead of five new skills in an expansion that changes your rotation, how about one super awesome skill that compliments the current rotation?

i would not mind that. again, even if adding more traits may be the best option, that does not mean that we shouldn't get at least one ability per expansion.

[RLofOBFL]

I think it will be fine for most classes if they just condensed each combo GCDs into one button. Not entirely sure what to do about healers though...

[Lambdafish]

Traits, role action skills, and upgrades to existing skills are all options the devs could go down. We may even get new combat systems that we don't know about yet, did anyone take the gauges into account when thinking of future expansion combat back in 3.0?

[ArcanoJones]

To solve ability bloat they should just upgrade existing abilites that replace abilities that already exist.

[Lithe]

I want more skills. SE simplified the jobs and just made them boring. I think it's time for SE to stop holding player's hands and dumbing down everything for them. There's no pride beating something that's faceroll.