How many skills is too many?

[Nihility]

i really enjoyed the 10 button setup in wildstar.
you had way more skills than that but you could only "equip" 8 + class skill + trinket skill



It really did have a lot cleaner feel to play with limited actions, and was kind of neat having multiple saved setups that you could swap out for different occasions.
FFXIV could never pull it off of course, I think just the basic healing spell lineup for healers is like 6+ buttons already
but i really do feel like less is more in a big way for making MMOs more enjoyable for the majority

i mean the physical dps basic combos are kind of silly as they are now. You have like 6+ buttons for one combo all usable at any time but all completely useless when it's not their turn.
take a page from newer games and have the buttons just change function as you progress through a combo. Astro and Monk are proof that FFXIV already has the coding to support it.

dps don't really need like 5 different cooldown skills that all accomplish basically the same thing as well. A damage booster and a resource booster would get across the same point

same deal with tank cooldowns, they all have this big line of cooldowns that they just go down as tank buster skills roll out. Just figure out how often you want tanks to be able to reduce damage and give them like 2 to use with appropriate cooldowns

if they wanted to they could get every class down to like 20 buttons or so i would imagine. Cleaning up cooldowns, combos, and skills that are super similar would go a very long way

[Shurrikhan]

dps don't really need like 5 different cooldown skills that all accomplish basically the same thing as well. A damage booster and a resource booster would get across the same point

same deal with tank cooldowns, they all have this big line of cooldowns that they just go down as tank buster skills roll out. Just figure out how often you want tanks to be able to reduce damage and give them like 2 to use with appropriate cooldowns

if they wanted to they could get every class down to like 20 buttons or so i would imagine. Cleaning up cooldowns, combos, and skills that are super similar would go a very long way

The purpose of having varying cooldowns, durations, and potencies is that you might just have to think about when to use what. You might want to activate Rampart early, for instance, so that you can have it back up in time for the next tankbuster for which Rampart will make the difference between life and death, or at least a significant difference in healer contribution necessary. Admitedly, that novelty wears off fast as unvarying fights are gradually memorized, but even the memorized timings are fair bit more interesting than 'press/hold defensive button before incoming hit'.

Without a sufficient number of these, there's no real interplay between them, nor between those "boosters" and the other oGCDs. Remembering to hit a button once every 2 minutes is not fun. Calculating, based on incoming events, when would be optimal to hit it is where it starts to get interesting. Without that consideration, a boosting CD can be handled just as easily by trimming back burst DPS requirements and providing that benefit passively as not to advantage certain classes based on the intervals at which one enters the burst requirement windows, badly limiting or matching their sustain depending on the fight and gear levels, and rather than having a resource CD it would be better just to cut out resources like TP entirely.

Beware how you try to reduce bloat, or you may well just end up creating a yet more pitiful form of bloat in its place.

[Nihility]

The purpose of having varying cooldowns, durations, and potencies is that you might just have to think about when to use what. You might want to activate Rampart early, for instance, so that you can have it back up in time for the next tankbuster for which Rampart will make the difference between life and death, or at least a significant difference in healer contribution necessary. Admitedly, that novelty wears off fast as unvarying fights are gradually memorized, but even the memorized timings are fair bit more interesting than 'press/hold defensive button before incoming hit'.

Without a sufficient number of these, there's no real interplay between them, nor between those "boosters" and the other oGCDs. Remembering to hit a button once every 2 minutes is not fun. Calculating, based on incoming events, when would be optimal to hit it is where it starts to get interesting. Without that consideration, a boosting CD can be handled just as easily by trimming back burst DPS requirements and providing that benefit passively as not to advantage certain classes based on the intervals at which one enters the burst requirement windows, badly limiting or matching their sustain depending on the fight and gear levels, and rather than having a resource CD it would be better just to cut out resources like TP entirely.

Beware how you try to reduce bloat, or you may well just end up creating a yet more pitiful form of bloat in its place.

i know you put think in italics and all but it's just not true. Been through the savage raids with a bunch of groups now and the dps cooldowns all just work off one another so the best time to use all of them is exactly the same as the best time it would be to use a single one. Crit+damage+stat boost+whatever all boost each other making using them all together far more effective than stringing them out individually. With the new shorter GCD not having to weave them all in as quickly as possible would be a welcome change i would think

It's basically the same deal with tanks. You have the cheat death on a very long cooldown, the big damage reduction on a long cooldown, and the smaller damage reduction on a shorter cooldown. Then they have a bunch of trivially small cooldowns(with the exception of dark mind, dark knights have a pretty big bonus on nice damage reduction cooldowns)

and even though it wasn't quoted having evolving skill buttons for combos would cut down needed keys pretty beautifully
I'll Use dark knight since it's a simple one
you have 1. Hard Slash 2. Spinning Slash 3. power slash 4. Syphon Strike 5. Souleater 6. Delirium
6 Buttons could be cut down to 1. Hard Slash -> Spinning Slash -> Power Slash 2. Syphon Strike -> Souleater 3. Delirium
almost every combo component is heavily used so that would free up prime keyboard space for other heavily used skills

[Shurrikhan]

i know you put think in italics and all but it's just not true. Been through the savage raids with a bunch of groups now and the dps cooldowns all just work off one another so the best time to use all of them is exactly the same as the best time it would be to use a single one. Crit+damage+stat boost+whatever all boost each other making using them all together far more effective than stringing them out individually. With the new shorter GCD not having to weave them all in as quickly as possible would be a welcome change i would think

It's basically the same deal with tanks. You have the cheat death on a very long cooldown, the big damage reduction on a long cooldown, and the smaller damage reduction on a shorter cooldown. Then they have a bunch of trivially small cooldowns(with the exception of dark mind, dark knights have a pretty big bonus on nice damage reduction cooldowns).

Just one nit-pick: the stat's multiplicity and sync into core periodic GCD skills (e.g. 18s DoTs on 20s CDs) is the main reasons there IS nuance in their usage. Sure, they all pop almost simultaneously and in a prearranged order at the start, but what of the 2nd or 3rd refresh on a Bard or Machinist, or BFB maximization with BotD on a Dragoon. Those considerations couldn't occur if you were to chop everything down into single ubiquitous function keys ("burst", "resource", etc.).

I'm not saying the system is paying off very well in terms of button efficiency. But I'd rather have more use and tacticality involved in those buttons than fewer buttons and tacticality alike. Having a single button do that removes any possible nuance *unless* there's some sort of dynamic and/or analog resource tied in with it that you can still manipulate meaningfully to adjust your strategy.

I didn't quote the evolving skill buttons portion simply because I've no disagreement with it; I and others have posted the same idea multiple times in this thread, and it's popped up frequently since ARR's release. My focus was just on the two ways to look at increasing button efficiency and how ours seemed to differ.

Edit: Admittedly, as with the above resource-tie-in suggestion, there are ways to still get a lot out of a single function key, but I just don't see why it's necessary to go to that little when we're already used to so much. By the time you stack redundancies (combos and stance mutual-exclusives like IB/FC, F&C/WT, ShO/SwO, and every trio of Monk skills outside of PB) and hopefully slightly readjust both stances and combos to make better use of that space, there isn't that much left. And if you consider the oGCDs that mostly fall into APM-boosts for some spare DPS, whatever utility they provide generally wasted as simple extra damage, in the same light as these boosting CDs, all the more so. You're down then to roughly 5 weaponskills, 2 CDs, 2 oGCDs, and a couple job utilities. Now, that may be more button-efficient—I'm not doubting that—but why favor reduction over embueing meaningful mechanics into everything you can. Take combos for instance? Do we really want 4 skills, 3 of which change animations and have prelude globals (the time it takes to reach the more substantial finishing effect, which is all we really care about), or do we want 10 weaponskills that we can combo meaningfully in almost sort of way, each with different strategic considerations? Do we want to axe Bulwark, Sentinel, Awareness, and/or Rampart due to bland repetition, or do we want to actually make something interesting and unique out of each? Once you axed, it's a lot harder to come back.

[Ririta]

same deal with tank cooldowns, they all have this big line of cooldowns that they just go down as tank buster skills roll out. Just figure out how often you want tanks to be able to reduce damage and give them like 2 to use with appropriate cooldowns

if they wanted to they could get every class down to like 20 buttons or so i would imagine. Cleaning up cooldowns, combos, and skills that are super similar would go a very long way

Tanks would be more fun if they had to manage weaponskills or spells to mitigate, similar to Inner Beast, instead of just pressing a button. For example:

Paladin's Clemency could guarantee that attacks are blocked while it's casted, and add a barrier to its healing (like Adloquium).

Dark knight could have a weaponskill that sacrifices 10% of their max HP to add a barrier that blocks 200% of the HP sacrificed.

Warrior's Inner Beast could have its cost reduced to 1 Wrath, heal them for 4x the damage dealt and adding a barrier.

Just throwing some ideas. I'm not really a fan of how many generic "reduces damage" cooldowns we have, it's not only bloated, but it's boring as well.

[Zumi]

I hope that Stormblood does away with the multi dps cooldowns and puts them in 1 cooldown. Should just hit 1 dps cooldown not try to weave in 3 of them while trying to do burst damage.

[Lubu_Mykono]

Paladin has 38 at the moment with the new cross class going to 10
Summoner has too many to remember

This needs to be fixed by the UI team first, then gameplay and balance in the right order.

[shao32]

As a Gamepad player anything more that 2 hotbars (32 buttons) its to much for a confortable Gameplay in combat, more than that is mix all the shorcuts and can be clunky and messy.

[boopadoop]

i'd like to play with a controller but when i tried to set up my monk's hotbars i was...very confused and frustrated...
i do not agree with more is better
if i can comfortably play with a controller that would be nice because i'm extremely tired of mouse and keyboard and even then what we have now feels like too much for me
it's worse when i want to play something new and i feel like i can't bc i don't have a heckin clue how to, esp with so many buttons that affect your min/maxing or some bs, so i'm stuck with one thing that i've grown very, very, very bored with
even when i think abt trying to tank my first concern is holding aggro but after that ppl expect you to maximize your dps too and that??????????? i'm?? sorry? i don'T even knOw if i can aCtuAlLy taNk wEll
so i'm..stuck to mnk and...maybe a healer bc..at least when you do dps it's pretty straight-forward; here's a dot for you, maybe two, and here's like two other spells you can use
and monk has felt the same literally since the beginning of ARR and having played that long i'm super ugh'd
i wouldnt mind a huge overhaul .-. also not a big fan of positionals bc for some fricking reason it's fun to have bosses spin around constantly in addition to having to run around the arena to stay out of aoes bleh bleh blehbleh blehhhp
not a fan of the combat system period, tbh
played wow before ffxiv was a think, then played ffxiv, then wow bc 1.0 was a heck, then ffxiv again for arr, and that's fine at all but btwn those two games it's like...exactly the same combat, almost
which gets
super boring.
but i love ffxiv. so i want to play it. i want to make friends with other nerds.
but i'M SO BORED OF THE COMABADFSTASD
too many buttons for smol hands and also the same style my entire gaming life has experienced
b to the o to the o-o-o

there's also the fact that i would like to SEE what's happening in the game, fight, w/e, instead of having to look at my 23240304 skills covering most of the screen
like
ffxiv can be super pretty, even prettier if you use shaders, but you don't really get to appreciate that a lot bc have to look at all dese buttons and watch for aoe and increasingly needing to watch the boss for signs of something you need to stay out of the way of which i like, that's fine, but not when i have to pay attn to 3-24-23-2t903094 buttons also. it's mostly a problem when you try to play something you haven't been maining. bc one job gets old after a while. but then you realize, at the end-level, you have to read like 3 essays on how to play optimally and that's a lot of info that makes it super hard to retain when you're a newb to the class dglllserdserg

[Roda]

3 hotbars is my absolute max. I would prefer <= 2 hot bars, though.
I really hope they implement flip combos in pve like they have in pvp.