How many skills is too many?

[Jetstream_Fox]

Nor does anyone ever use blunt arrow or jugulate with the actual intent of silencing an enemy. same again with steel peak or jugulate (under wasp) or brutal swing.. never actually saved or used for an actual stun just spammed on cooldown... ultimately makes all those skills worthless and not needed.

Uhhh in Weeping City Beguiling Mist needs to be handled with a silence, if not you wipe, and way back in T5 if you didn't have a stun or bind then Dreadknights were much harder to deal with. The reason those skills seem worthless is because of SEs design philosophy of wanting all classes to be accepted and functional in fights. That's why most content is nothing more than mechanic dance with very very little skill set requirements.

Aside from that when it comes to skill quantity, I'd be so bold to say that we should only really need one bar for melee/tank/ranged physical/caster and two for healers. No idea in the slightest how that would be accomplished but I feel it would make skill bloat irrelevant. With having skills from 2.0-4.0 and not exactly knowing how they're working this new system, I'd be pressed to believe that SE is also thinking less is better.

[Dyvid]

Anything past 2 hot bar rows is too much.

[Moonlite]

It is ok to have a few Jobs that have like 100 buttons for the people that like buttons. But realistically do we need more then 24. We are only at level 60. some jobs for burst need you to hit 4 or 5 buttons. That doesn't even include the actual attack. I don't find that fun.

Next since this was probably brought up because of the skill gap. Lets say two Players X and Y have the exact same set up. The job has 24 buttons. Player X pays attention but really can only handle a rotation of 12 buttons. Player Y maxes out all 24 buttons. What should the dps difference be between the X and Y?

[Shurrikhan]

I've seen as many abilities, to a more complex and challenging effect, used with only a third of our button count, so I certainly wouldn't mind cutting down on the button count while creating greater conditionals, dynamics, and synergies between the skills. But at the same time, we may as well hit some exact number (including sprint and maybe a pot) as per controller cross-bars, such as either just the one at 16 keys or 1 and then a half-bar at 22. Even as a keyboard player, that seems like it'd be a more comfortable amount of keys, allowing me to place additional tabbing methods, mic controls, focus target, assist, etc., back on less modified keys.

Simply removing the bloat of combos and stance-exclusives (FC/IB; WT/F&C) and tying the majority of new skills into stacked slots (like Meditation and TFC) would probably allow for that easily enough.

[Kacho_Nacho]

Good topic!

Two hot bars are enough. Anything more than 1 through =, Shift + 1 through Shift + = is excessive. So, to answer the OP's question, twenty five abilities or more are too many skills.

Yes, by using Ctrl and Alt, you can double the amount of skills available but can an average player actually keep track of that many different skills? Humans aren't that good at multi-tasking or remembering more than seven digits in a row.

This is good instance where less is more. Too many skills results in many skills being forgotten in the heat of battle. It's much better to have a smaller set of skills which will be constantly used in combat which is why two hot bars full of abilities are a good amount of skills. Twenty four are enough slots to have your combos, utilities, and situational abilities without overwhelming the player with choice.

[OcieKo]

Well id say about the 20 range for active use skills is right (at least usable every minute or so think more debuff rotation skills that ogcd buffs). But going over that with long term maintenace or out of combat buffs/skills or highly conditionals isnt bad. Such things would include tank stances, protect, stoneskin 2, rez, LB, summons (SMN/MCH), rotation improved maintenance skills like nins huton (could use more like this). So total skill count could pretty manageably hit 40ish, by all means if you include all the mudra combos ninjas have the most job skills in the game, but due to being combo patterns the button count is lowered.

Rotating combo buttons would help a ton i used to make em with macros in my WOW days, tho i did like it being built in when i played GW2, tho for FFXIV theyd have to be based on the end of the combo to accomodate shared start ups. Like for example ninja has 4 combo finishers but just 1 starter and one middle, question is how to make the tooltip reflect this with out adding too many bloat skills, but even them for my nins 9 box of primary use skills itd still make 2 more spaces even with unique start ups.

Other options for less painful skill bloat is add more options to long term ignored buffs/debuffs like Foe's Requiem on bard, maybe let bards choose one of 2 or 3 songs (exclusive use, kind of like can't have both Mage's Ballad and Army's Paeon running concurrently on 1 bard) with similarly potent effects but for different purposes, like increases healing recieved or boosts physical damage or improves defense, but to the point where you could say, this group needs this one or this fight prefers that one, so maybe youd use 2 in a raid size boss fight. Skills with more tactical decision making rather than hit everything, more like tank LB mechanics but less do or die.

[Zojha]

Judging by the DF story thread, it would seem any more than 5 is too much >.>

[Ama_Hamada]

9001, one too many.
Though realistically maybe 1-3 buffs, 1-5 ogcd, 6 ocd (enough for 2 different combos) 1 -3 aoe things

[Esp]

Your normal skills + PVP skills + those god awful chat icons. (If anyone uses the damn things)

^ That...that's too many.

[Zephyrin]

More than one skill is already too many according to many players in Dun Scaith. More salt please.