How many skills is too many?

[Ririta]

If the game ever turned into that crap that is the WoW skill system (3-4 skills, 2 situationals, 2 buffs) I'd quit on the spot and be very sad.

Now imagine all the people who left because they can't pull good DPS while paying attention to over 30 buttons + mechanics + cooldowns.

[Nixxe]

Now imagine all the people who left because they can't pull good DPS while paying attention to over 30 buttons + mechanics + cooldowns.

You don't need to pay attention to 30 buttons. WoW's rotations started out very simple for the most part, often literally one or two buttons, when the number of buttons were at their peak (I think I had 45-50 on a warrior in Wrath including some PVP macros). Blizzard began introducing greater complexity alongside skill pruning due to the playerbase becoming increasingly skilled overall as average tenure increased. On top of that, a lot of abilities in WoW are either extremely niche and can be ignored most of the time, are not ever used in combat ever, or are otherwise very limited in use such that it's not a big deal if lesser skilled players want to ignore them entirely, and the bulk of what Blizzard has pruned were those types of abilities. In terms of rotations, most of them use 10 abilities or so and that's about as many as they've ever used. The exact number depends on the class and there are defensive cooldowns on top of that, but it's not exactly hard to manage it, and the relative complexity of WoW's combat isn't terribly different from FFXIV's until you start getting into talents or perhaps encounter design (I'm not very experienced with raiding in this game, let alone savage, so I can't say for sure).