Future Ability Bloat

[Osias_Qol]

Sounds boring if you gonna reduce DRG down to the basic 2 combos

Let us not act like the current rotation is anything special...
We are gaining more skills with the level cap. DRG is already basically 2 combos with 2 stand alone skills and a bunch of off GCD stuff. It is just cleaning house you are not losing anything assuming the new skills are worth using.

The point seems to be being missed that every class is gaining a bunch of new skills and in some cases new combos..

I realy don't want to make this about my thoughts on DRG. I just wanted to see peoples ideas on skills that maybe don't get much if any use or could be put together to help stream line things for the new skills.

[DoctorPepper]

Personally don't agree with the suggestion to combine multiple abilities into a single ability.

I enjoy the difficulty associated with having lots of abilities and think it would be overpowered to do something like the OP suggested for the drg abilities. Additional effects and dots add some variance to the button pressing so you can't just spam 1-4 and succeed.

I'm sure not everybody agrees with me but that's my opinion on the matter, I find all of the jobs simple enough as is and do not want to see them simplified further.

[Imoye]

There was never any ability bloat in WoW. It was simply an excuse to dumb down the game and appeal to casuals.

The arguement was that a lot of abilities and needed keybinds confused new players. Obviously that "reasoning" backfired and now people are tired of every class being the same because all the unique abilities got pruned or made passive. There was never any actual bloat. What they called bloat was abilities that were only useful in certain situations. The problem is that these abilities upped the skillcap and allowed for more varied play.

Complexity wise, WoW is completely dead. FFXIV doesn't even have close to the amount of abilities WoTLK had so I don't see it ever becoming a problem. Ability bloat is an artifical excuse to dumb down their game that Blizzard created for this specific purpose.

[Ceodore]

Reducing ability bloat is easy and it's been done in other MMOs.

The simple method is this.
Example: Currently we live in a system where if you have 6 attack abilities they work like
A B C D E F

If the combos are

A-B-C
A-B-D
A-B-E
A-F

That means 6 hotbar slots are being used for those 4 combos

So you could have a setup like

Hotbar 2=F-D-E
Hotbar 1=A-B-C

However instead of that what they could do is this

You have 4 combos

When I hit A, A now turns into B, when I press B it turns into C and then the combo is done it reverts back to A(or if combo timer runs out)

So now you have this

Hotbar 1=A(B)(C)-A(B)(D)-A(B)(E)-A(F)

So intead of having the hotbar use 6 spaces for 4 combos it now only uses 4.

Space could further be saved if say instead of setting each hotbar for x combo it instead does this

Hotbar 1=A.

Hit A and the following happens

Hotbar 1=B-F

Then if you hit F it goes back to A but if you hit B then this happens

Hotbar 1=C-D-E

So now in combat you would have this

ABC=1 1 1
AF=1 2
ABD=1 1 2
ABE=1 1 3

In that scenario now only 3 spaces are taken up for combos.

So overall there are manners in which abilities could be changed to make it easier to add but for now it is wait and see, we'll most likely know by next Thursday during the live letter, since they do plan on talking about battle system changes, though my bets are on they will do one of the two options listed above so that they can add more abilities without making the hotbar to cluttered.

I have Base 12 keys, then 12 keys more using Control, 12 more using Alt, and 12 more using Shift. I have a total of 48 keys at just the tips of two fingers. I also use peripherals that make using these controls easier. (Razor Naga and Razor Nostromo) So there is no way my hotbars are going to run out of room anytime soon. What you're purposing is much like the system Guild Wars 2 uses for some of their skills. Where pressing one button or holding it down will spam a combo. For the sake of energy preservation to not have to lift my finger off a key, I can see the benefit of this, but the necessity is drastically lacking when compared to much more important fixes that need to take place.

[KaijinRhada]

Ability bloat in this game? Even in WoW bloat wasn't as bad as people say (really it was UI clutter), and some specs feel gutted in the aftermath in the removal of said bloat. This game isn't facing the same problems yet (Wow is on its fifth expansion and forty levels above original cap) and if it does, the nature of it will probably be different from WoW. WoW cut out or rolled together skills that were situational, and limited certain spells to certain specs; classes in this game only have one role with no varieties of specs aside from cross class abilities, which don't make anything more complex.