Quote Originally Posted by Reiryuu View Post
You know, the more I think about it, the more this whole limitation thing makes absolutely no sense. Forced to make choices? Who are they kidding-- you can literally change it out at any time with no penalty-- they removed the cooldown a while ago. That's the complete opposite of enforcing a choice. In fact, because there is no penalty for switching, the case is even stronger for not having any limitations on how many you can put on your hotbar in the first place there IS no real choice to be made, so you might as well just let us use them all at will.
The cooldown isn't complete removed. I know that when I went into a solo dungeon to test the swapping whilst double-checking the 'current state of things' before posting, it triggered a 30s penalty on all of my abilities upon making modifications. In safe areas like cities, you can change on the fly, but not elsewhere.

It's possible they'll remove this penalty for 4.0, but either way, there are unanswered questions and odd behaviour. If the penalty remains, they've diminished what appears to be a goal of the system. If the penalty is removed, their decision to limit how many abilities can be selected is really going to open it up for players micro-managing each other.

Either way, I maintain that the central problem with the cross-class system is that certain abilities came to be viewed as 'essential' because of how powerful / useful they were. Blood for Blood, Raging Strikes, Swiftcast, Provoke, etc. They appear to have worsened this situation with the role-based system. I don't care what sort of shiny bow they've tied around it; if that fundamental problem still exists, or is worsened, then the system will still be the source of much unnecessary frustration. They needed to re-cast these elective abilities as optional, roughly-equivalent bonuses that allowed people to customize how their character played and felt. That is the only path I can see that would allow for customization without a huge amount of grief.