Idea to simplify combo action skills

[Morbid]

Make sure to click that little lock below the hotbar after setting up your skills. To see skills on cooldown I just activated one of the vertical hotbars shrunk it a bit and put those abilities on there so you can see when they refresh. Clean up the UI by also selecting the option to not show inactive slots.

[Genaxx]

I also use an additional hotbar like Morbid but a horizontal one to display all the long CD skills that are on my second bar. Make sure its not set to shared so you can use it for multiple jobs.

There's also the very annoying "quirk" where when you first pick something from the 2nd bar, it will swap back to the first.

Could you explain this more? I've never know this to happen. Are you saying that if you use R1 to go to the 2nd bar and then use a skill, it will change back to the first?

Macros won't queue, though, so it would mess up the flow of chaining your combo abilities. I feel like the result would be less efficient.

They wouldn't need to queue if you could macro macro's to the hotbar. It would work like this;

/mlock
/micon "Spinning Edge"
/ac "Spinning Edge" <t>
/crosshotbar set "Gust Slash" 1 RAR

which then changes the same button to this;

/mlock
/micon "Shadow Fang"
/ac "Shadow Fang" <t>
/crosshotbar set "MACRO NAME" 1 RAR

But since we cannot set macros to the hotbar like this, I will try another way.

The other way is to do it like this;

Hotbar 1
/mlock
/micon "Spinning Edge"
/ac "Spinning Edge" <t>
/crosshotbar change 2

Hotbar 2
/mlock
/micon "Shadow Fang"
/ac "Shadow Fang" <t>
/crosshotbar change 1

/mlock
/micon "Gust Slash"
/ac "Gust Slash" <t>
/crosshotbar change 3

Hotbar 3
/mlock
/micon "Armor Crush"
/ac "Armor Crush" <t>
/crosshotbar change 1

/mlock
/micon "Dancing Edge"
/ac "Dancing Edge" <t>
/crosshotbar change 1

/mlock
/micon "Aeolian Edge"
/ac "Aeolian Edge" <t>
/crosshotbar change 1

Technically it works, but its not very practical, since if you press the next action before the timer is up, it hotbar will change and you will lose your combo. Sadly I dont think its possible to do this right now, however I think its possible with 1 > 2 combo's like below, giving you however many seconds to combo the second action before it switches back to the original.

/mlock
/micon "Spinning Edge"
/ac "Spinning Edge" <t>
/crosshotbar change 4 <wait.3>
/crosshotbar change 3

[Bluffnix]

its been discussed before and it was referred back to why we have macro's, and etc. The argument was then, macro moves dont queue/subjected to delay.

Dev's are like "But it works!"

[Matthew0320]

I fully support this idea and would love to see it taken into consideration.

Many melee jobs suffer this problem causing 'button overload' and would make the UI a lot more simpler and would make movement easy while keeping tabs on one button/click.

I like it.

[RiceisNice]

You also have monks which have a different comboing mechanic. They use stance buffs which enables the use of skills and aren't sequentially locked like the other melees.

Though one way they can tone down on button bloating is get rid of skills that add no depth to the job. Things like stone 2/3, gauss round and dwad. Or at least redo them so it's not a waste of a slot for most of he time, like ninja poison, turrets and most of mch skills that share cooldowns for the same purpose in different areas.

[Callback]

Why wouldn't it work? I can't see any situation where you would still want to use "disembowel" when the next combo action is "chaos thrust", etc.

It differs a lot between classes tho, in terms of how they branch. For many you need to keep the option of resetting to the first skill in the chain if you need to quickly set up for a different finisher than you are currently going for.

[Houston009]

yes, I'm using it. swapping is just inefficient, even though I just have the 2 to page as I turned off the rest. There's also the very annoying "quirk" where when you first pick something from the 2nd bar, it will swap back to the first. You also can't see the state of cooldowns on the other bar. If there's a better way, I'd love to know what it is.

This wouldn't be so bad if you could just stick to what's required for lvl60, but the bulk of dailies is still lvl50 roulettes, and there's only 4 dungeons where full lvl60 is used.

You are most likey experiencing this quirk because you have the setting for which when you Draw your weapon it allows access to certain bars. Even though you set your bars to only switch between 2 sets, having unsheath/sheathed checked will send you back to your first set when you engage.

[Garvey]

You also have monks which have a different comboing mechanic. They use stance buffs which enables the use of skills and aren't sequentially locked like the other melees.

Though one way they can tone down on button bloating is get rid of skills that add no depth to the job. Things like stone 2/3, gauss round and dwad. Or at least redo them so it's not a waste of a slot for most of he time, like ninja poison, turrets and most of mch skills that share cooldowns for the same purpose in different areas.

With monk you could still do the same thing, you could have a set of buttons allocated for using form-required spells, and a set of buttons allocated for form-changing spells. Both sets of buttons will morph based on whatever is currently available.

[Garvey]

It differs a lot between classes tho, in terms of how they branch. For many you need to keep the option of resetting to the first skill in the chain if you need to quickly set up for a different finisher than you are currently going for.

Ok, I've only really played lancer, so I haven't encountered a scenario where I'd want to reset a chain, but it may still be simpler to still use this new approach, along with a reset button for those situations.

At the very least, it would be nice to just have both styles as a preference option XD

[Reynhart]

I really feel they'll change combo to be exactly that if they want to give us more skills.
Yes, we have plenty of room in our hotbars, but it would be easier to access a lot of them very quickly.

After all, it works for Ninjutsu