How many skills is too many?

[Martin_Arcainess]

So the more skills we have the better more options for us to choose from and makes the battle style more fun to do. But to what point is considered too many skills? 20? 30? 40?? 50?!?

Me? I think around 25ish mark is a enough skills for any player to have.

[Skyrior]

I don't see how Tataru is an Imperial spy. Where is your justification for that?

[Felis]

3 crosshotbars are still comfortable to navigate during battle with controller
16 slots * 3 = 48 skills. Maybe 42 skills to save some slots for pots and macros

[NovaLevossida]

I've seen much less complicated games use far fewer buttons for a much more challenging experience. I don't think there's a need to have 40 buttons or even more than 20 you hit regularly. There's a lot of redundant stuff in there, and most jobs have a ton of OGCDs just to give you something to activate between GCDs that aren't meaningfully used (really, they're just hit the moment they come off cooldown unless it's a rare one with movement that you'd save momentarily to jump back on a boss or add like with Plunge).

It's really just a complexity created by the hotkey-based design of the game, and you can see other things similarly created just for the sake of creating complexity where there was none before (having to use cleric stance to get the same damage you would otherwise get in other games, having to have enochian up just to cast your highest tier spells, etc).

[Pintsized]

I've seen much less complicated games use far fewer buttons for a much more challenging experience. ...

@NovaLevossida, totally agree with everythning you said.

People who think 30/40/50 buttons are needed are simply confusing convolution with challenge. There's a lot of fluff in XIV's existing skill sets which seem to be there simply for padding out the numbers.

[Nixxe]

@NovaLevossida, totally agree with everythning you said.

People who think 30/40/50 buttons are needed are simply confusing convolution with challenge. There's a lot of fluff in XIV's existing skill sets which seem to be there simply for padding out the numbers.

People repeated that over and over with WoW and lo and behold, removing abilities actually generally reduced the gap between skill floor and skill ceiling.

[Dzian]

I've seen much less complicated games use far fewer buttons for a much more challenging experience. I don't think there's a need to have 40 buttons or even more than 20 you hit regularly. There's a lot of redundant stuff in there, and most jobs have a ton of OGCDs just to give you something to activate between GCDs that aren't meaningfully used (really, they're just hit the moment they come off cooldown unless it's a rare one with movement that you'd save momentarily to jump back on a boss or add like with Plunge).

It's really just a complexity created by the hotkey-based design of the game, and you can see other things similarly created just for the sake of creating complexity where there was none before (having to use cleric stance to get the same damage you would otherwise get in other games, having to have enochian up just to cast your highest tier spells, etc).

This is generally really true.. most of those ogcds are just spammed mindlessly for a small % increase to dps.. no one ever uses a shield swipe with the deliberate intent to pacify an enemy. 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. not to mention all the similar ones I didn't mention... you could remove all of those skills and it wouldn't have any real impact.. take both a ninjas ogcd away and they lose something like 4 potency per second.. you honestly wouldn't notice it.

moving away from ogcds you have things like lethargy shadowbind, (actually that might be ogcd) sure cast, feint, fists of earth fists of wind, dissipation, freeze, sleep, repose all of which have virtually no use ever and as such are completely unnecessary all they do is bloat hot bars (if people even bother to set them at all)

then you have skills that are so similar in whatthey do they could easily be condensed. thunder 1 2 3 for example. stones aeros, etc etc..

you can have as many skills are there is practical use for them..
the problem the game has now is so many of the skills we have serve no real purpose or function... the only function that exists is dps..

sleep is a useless skill because nothing ever needs to be slept just round it all up and aoes it down... makes the presence of sleep speels obsolete..

if content actually required more than just dps, required tactical use of heavys stuns silences sleeps pacifies etc etc etc, suddenly all those skills would be worthwhile... but as it stands they're only ever used for a small dps boost and if they don't offer a dps boost at all they're probably not ever set to hotbars.....

I wouldn't mind 50 buttons if they all did 50 different things and not 50 varieties of the same thing... and all of those different things were actually properly functional, not just used on cooldown for a loldpsincrease

[Ririta]

moving away from ogcds you have things like lethargy shadowbind, (actually that might be ogcd) sure cast, feint, fists of earth fists of wind, dissipation, freeze, sleep, repose all of which have virtually no use ever and as such are completely unnecessary all they do is bloat hot bars (if people even bother to set them at all)

Those are great for PvP though.

But I agree on your first point, I think those OGCDs should have their damage removed and have more enemies require interrupting.

[kattzkitti]

There's a lot of redundant stuff in there

Easily this game's biggest problem. There's so many buttons that exist just for the sake of existing, contributing nothing meaningful to the job as a whole. For example, why does Hot Shot exist? It's literally just a button you are forced to hit every 30 seconds so you maintain the 5% damage increase. This isn't fun or engaging gameplay, it's just dull and tedious maintenance busywork.

GW2 has the best system for this kind of combat. One auto attack spell and the rest are cooldowns. Change stance/weapon and you get different spells. My Elementalist has like 25 spells on 10 buttons.

Pretty much sums up my opinion on the matter. While I would never expect FFXIV to reduce to only a few buttons, the GW2 button system is what FFXIV should aspire to.

Back to FFXIV, I don't understand why we need to bind all those skills. For example, Chaos Thrust and True Thrust combos could've been 2 buttons instead of 6. Cleric Stance could change our hotbar to be a DPS one, since we won't be healing when it's active, and won't be DPSing when it's not..

Pretty much hits the nail on the head for how things should work in FFXIV, if FFXIV were to adopt the GW2 button system. For those who are unaware of GW2's buttons, the reason Chaos Thrust and Full Thrust combos would be two buttons instead of six is because in the GW2 system, hitting one of the initiators (Impulse Drive and True Thrust respectively) would just replace the initiator's button with the second combo button (Disembowel and Vorpal Thrust respectively). Hitting the second combo button would replace it with the third combo button in turn.

[Nixxe]

35-40 is generally a good number, provided the abilities are good ones. Anything more than that and I start having to really work to find keybinds for them, many of which are just uncomfortable to use and do not really get more comfortable with time. I wouldn't try to really pick any number as some sort of target and I think designing that way, as opposed to making sure the kit feels complete and well-rounded (at least to the extent it's supposed to be), would be a very poor choice. I do generally like having more skills rather than fewer though, as it usually opens up more ways to approach a given situation in the game and a lot of those abilities can be somewhat niche abilities that really enhance the flavor of a class. However, it was more important to me in WoW than in this game, which has a lot to do with what abilities exist and how they work.