How many skills is too many?

[Kosmos992k]

For me, it's 32 skills.

2 cross hotbars worth of skills. Any more than that and it becomes more difficult and time consuming to juggle bars to get to the commands you want. I believe that all jobs should be streamlined to hit a nice total of about 28 job/class skills with another 4 cross role skills.

Pet classes make it more difficult since you really need closer to 48 total skill slots to properly manage Pet Skills in addition to your own, and that's too much controller manipulation for me personally. Maybe one day I will figure out this 3rd cross hotbar arrangement, but for now I am comfortable with 32 commands on 2 cross hotbars.

[Jonnycbad]

Counting spells, FFXI mages had over 120 skills. Blue Mage had 160 I think. Most were tiers though, e.g. Cure 1-5, Cura 1-5, Curaga 1-5, Protect 1-5, Protectga, 1-5, Fire 1-6, Firaga 1-5, Flare, Flare II, etc...

[Berethos]

threads like this cause games to be really dumbed down. Look at WoW, "hey I got 4 attack buttons to press, yay!" Just saying be careful what you ask for.

When certain Devs (read: developers who really like how a pendulum swings and like to emulate that with their development style) are the helm, I agree.

This team is almost cautious to a fault, so I wouldn't expect such sweeping changes to occur here.

[Jandor]

I think we've hit as many as I'm comfortable with at what we've got.

Maybe a few less would be ideal, but I struggle to think of what to get rid of while still allowing StormBlood to add some new ones.

[Zumi]

I think the game should be made with 16 skills in mind. That is how many skills fit in 1 standard cross hot bar. Having to switch between more then one feels somewhat clunky. Would like it very much if there were 16 main skills that are used frequently.

[Zumi]

threads like this cause games to be really dumbed down. Look at WoW, "hey I got 4 attack buttons to press, yay!" Just saying be careful what you ask for.

Games can work much better with a simpler set up. I think FFXIV can be much better with less abilities because often there are too many to press with a controller. If I look at the wow paladin they have 5 attack buttons however the order in which you use skills matters it can make the difference between doing 50k dps to 1 million dps.

I do think FFXIV needs less buttons due to the fact that the controller is used as one of the main ways to play the game and shuffling between cross hot bars isn't fun or intuitive if you need to hit more then 16 buttons.

[Orbiaus]

I'm on controller and i'm fine with what i've got now. It'll be uncomfortable with more.

[Dzian]

I do think FFXIV needs less buttons due to the fact that the controller is used as one of the main ways to play the game and shuffling between cross hot bars isn't fun or intuitive if you need to hit more then 16 buttons.

At present you don't really need to shuffle that much on any of the jobs. It's all down to how players lay things out.

My ninja for example pretty much only ever has to press r1 and swap sets once every 90 seconds for duality and dream within a dream. And it's also laid out in such a way that I can take 10 or 15 seconds to swap back depending on my mudras.

It's wierd as hell seeing some peoplesort layouts where there literally swapping sets every 3 seconds. Way to many button presses.

Often feel this is where a lot of the bloat comes from just bad layouts that add unnecessary button presses.

[SuperZay]

16 so I don't have to switch crossbars every second.
No, there's no need to make Dismantle and Rend Mind as two different skills for more bloat.
No, there's no need to make Hawk's Eye, Blood for Blood and Raging Strikes as 3 skills when they all do the same function.
No, there's no need to make useless skills like Haymaker and Stella.

[LalaRu]

I'm now in the process to try myself playing with only a 12-skill bar. I've already noticed, in the big numbers of a full duty from start to end, not using some skills will affects something like... exaggerating ... 10% loss on dps ?

Maybe giving that 10% back to the really used skills, will halven our skill bars and keep the status quo on dps and changes nothing on the 'identity' of a job, and still room for emergency/conditional skills around.

I lol'd to PLD's Shield Swipe, literally useless and I don't miss it in any content whatsoever. Hell, it activates only after a block, as if it does something OP but didn't...

Edit: a note about pacification. It stops weaponskills. Pacificate a mob in a pull of 200 is totally useless, as long in that pulls your first priority is generate aggro to let the blm do his job. Hitting a mob with a little more potency than the aggro combo is not your priority there. So let talk about doing it to a boss. Good luck to pacificate a boss. You need it. If the boss is a caster, maybe it dies because was laughing so hard at you to choke himself to death, as long as casters don't even notice they got a pacification. If not a caster, ho well, a skill that does a little more dps, but I can use only after I got enough luck to block an attack, isn't really that useful, I'm still thinking I have better buttons to press to use that 1,3s of time.