How many skills is too many?

[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

[CyrilLucifer]

Around 30 is perfect.

I have 4 full bars (48 slots) if I have my PvP abilities up on AST and that's too much, though admittedly some of them are for Feast callouts and focus targeting.

[Shougun]

Around our current number is good, I do have room for at least 5 more abilities, like 10 more depending on what happens to PvP. But I worry about controller players so shouldn't use PC space as a space goal lol.

I liked a suggestion made in another thread where we start to see traits more. I can imagine these empowering/transforming and adding layers to our current tools while leaving us with similar buttons. (Not just adds 10 seconds to buff but traits that add combos and such as well, like a morph to a spell).

However I would like to see some goof/lore for fun spells/options. Like mage in WoW or WHM in FFXI with their teleports. Eagle vision, Eye demon, and other spells. Perhaps can go over the regular line with these as you don't really need to hot bar them. Like just for fun I think dragoons should be able to jump extra high- maybe it can be a special mount unlock lol.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.