Button Bloat Reduction With Customized Combo

[LeoLupinos]

Since the Korean Live Letter, we now know that they aren't going to use the PVP combo system for PVE, and will end up deleting Job Actions in the next expansion, if the translations are right.

You can refer to this topic: Korean Live Letter Summary

I want to suggest a system to customize the combo, similar to what Aion/Tera Online has, so that everyone will need to create your own. I imagine this as the solution for the quote: "In PvE we feel that the effective use of branching combos is one sign of player skill".


Customized Combos

This new feature will be in the Actions & Traits window as "Customized Combos".

Players will be able to put up to 4 Actions (GCD or oGCD), then put the first Action of the combo into the hotbar.
Following the image below, you create your combo and put the first one in the hotbar (Image Example: Skill 1), and by pressing the action, then next action will appear, and so on, until the last one, then repeat. I would like 24 lines of combos.



For oGCD, if it is on cooldown or disabled, it will be skipped to the next one. But when it is off cooldown it will automatically get priority accordingly to the position.

I would like to enfatize that this whole system will only be useful if the Combo Actions enter in the GCD queue, similar to the PVP Action system. Macros are not efficient for me for this reason.


Basic Examples

AST: Draw > Undraw: You can use "Draw", then "Undraw" will appear. When "Draw" is off cooldown it will appear again.

DRK: Blood Price > Grit: At first it will appear with Grit, because BP is disabled out of grit. Using grit, then you can use BP. The same can be used for "Blood Weapon > Darkside".

DRG: Fang and Claw > True Thrust > Vorpal Thrust > Full Thrust: FaC will only appear when the conditions are met, while including the traditional 1, 2, 3 combo.

MNK: 3 Actions in each line, with only 3 buttons the MNK could shift between forms without button bloat.



So much more can be done beyond these basic examples. We can solve a lot of button bloat problems with this system, while avoiding more deletion of cool Job Actions. I really don't want them to delete any action. I also would love a system for Job Actions Glamour, would be a nice collectibles for end-game content.

[Bright-Flower]

I don't see them doing this. If they think that having each skill on a different hotbar slot = skill they're not going to let us set up custom combos like this.

I'm curious what actions they would delete. The only baseline job ability I have that I don't use often is tempered will, since it doesn't seem to actually affect knockbacks on a lot of bosses. I suppose divine veil requires a bit of group coordination as the shield doesn't activate until I get a heal but it still has its uses if I'm not mistaken.

I might like to see Intervention go mostly for selfish reasons to see it replaced by something that lets us dump extra oath guage into damage when we don't need it for shelltron. (I know you can shelltron an aoe when off tanking and then get in a shield swipe but I mean more directly.)

Cover I guess can be pretty situational but is also a classic and iconic FF ability so I don't see it going away.

I wonder if they're doing away with role skills next expansion. It's the only reason I can think of as to why they would just give us all 10 of them in this patch, as a prelude to that. Maybe they'll cut out the lesser used ones and just fold the important ones into base job abilities. I mean every healer has a version of raise, why not give every tank their own version of rampart, provke, shirk etc at this point? It's not even a strategic choice of what to take when leveling really because you get them all at 48.

[HyoMinPark]

Basic Examples

AST: Draw > Undraw: You can use "Draw", then "Undraw" will appear. When "Draw" is off cooldown it will appear again.

I’m fine with this; I don’t see an issue with it, really.

DRK: Blood Price > Grit: At first it will appear with Grit, because BP is disabled out of grit. Using grit, then you can use BP. The same can be used for "Blood Weapon > Darkside".

Honestly, Darkside should just be a passive trait at this point because you never don’t have it on. That removes one button. Blood Price should be reworked to actually be decent (as it was in HW), or removed. But how would your proposed combo work if you want to turn Grit off? Short of making a /statusoff macro for it/clicking it off?

[HyoMinPark]

The only baseline job ability I have that I don't use often is tempered will, since it doesn't seem to actually affect knockbacks on a lot of bosses.

Tempered Will does work on most bosses; there’s very few mechanics where you can’t negate knockbacks (or don’t want to with regards to Chaos’ mechanics in V9S). You have to pop it before the cast finishes though. Anything Surecast or Arm’s Length works on Tempered Will works on as well. The only issues I have with Tempered is that it’s a 3-minute cooldown while Surecast and Arm’s Length are 30 seconds and 60 seconds, respectfully.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I'm curious what actions they would delete.

For tanks, it's fairly easy. Remove all the aggro combos, which we barely use to begin with, and change it so if you have tank stance active, you gain the same effect. An example being give the effect of Power Slash to Souleater but only if Grit is active. This frees up two skills on all three tanks, plus you can merge Shield/Sword, Defiance/Deliverance and Blood Weapon/Blood Price to free up another slot. Move Darkside to Traits since you'll never turn it off and drop Shield Bash as it's useless. That more or less solves the tanks without taking much away at all.

[LeoLupinos]

But how would your proposed combo work if you want to turn Grit off? Short of making a /statusoff macro for it/clicking it off?

Grit will always appear if BP is on cooldown. I tend to keep BP always on cooldown during battle, that's why I see no problem in this setup. I could just rework the combo line and put "Blood Weapon > Blood Price > Darkside". So I can turn Darkside on and if Grit is on I can use Blood Price, and if it's off I can use Blood Weapon. This would make difficut to turn darkside off, but we really don't want to turn it off anyway.

Anyway, these are just examples, please do not take it as a mandatory suggestion, everyone will be able to do their own combo, or not.

[HyoMinPark]

Grit will always appear if BP is on cooldown. I tend to keep BP always on cooldown during battle, that's why I see no problem in this setup. I could just rework the combo line and put "Blood Weapon > Blood Price > Darkside". So I can turn Darkside on and if Grit is on I can use Blood Price, and if it's off I can use Blood Weapon. This would make difficut to turn darkside off, but we really don't want to turn it off anyway.

I’m just thinking about the DRKs that optimize; most do not sit in Grit for very long, so the proposed combo would have to have a way to turn Grit off independent of cycling through the buttons within the combo. Of course, another solution would be to just toggle Blood Price/Blood Weapon a la WAR skills—Blood Price is the main button when Grit is on; when Grit is not on, Blood Weapon is the main button. The changes to Inner Beast/Fell Cleave and Steel Cyclone/Decimate toggling with Defiance/Deliverance seemed to work nicely for WAR. Though I still stand by my suggestion that Darkside should just be a trait at this point—it’s one of those buttons you press once and then rarely look at again afterwards.

The sad thing about a system like this, is that I feel like it’s unlikely SE would make it an optional thing. In the event that such a system would be mandatory, there would need to be work arounds for using skills in a combo tree without having to cycle through the entire tree to get to them first, in my opinion.

[Bright-Flower]

For tanks, it's fairly easy. Remove all the aggro combos, which we barely use to begin with, and change it so if you have tank stance active, you gain the same effect. An example being give the effect of Power Slash to Souleater but only if Grit is active. This frees up two skills on all three tanks, plus you can merge Shield/Sword, Defiance/Deliverance and Blood Weapon/Blood Price to free up another slot. Move Darkside to Traits since you'll never turn it off and drop Shield Bash as it's useless. That more or less solves the tanks without taking much away at all.

I suppose at this point they could just remove the enmity combos. I'd rather they put something back into Ragoe of Halone like the debuff it used to have instead so it was worth using at least enough to keep that up on a boss to make the rotation more interesting, but they really could just remove savage blade and rage of halone. Heck without RoH's debuff it does the same thing as savage blade now function wise. I'd rather have something tied to ROH to make that combo useful, but if they're not going to do that they could just scrap those two skills.

They could also potentially remove sword oath and bake its extra auto attack damage into a trait, or remove it and buff our potency elsewhere. I can't speak for warrior or dark knight but for paladin the only real gameplay change between stances is how we fill our gauge, and they could just have our gauge fill from auto attacks when shield oath is inactive adn blocks/holy spirit when active and shave off a button for sword oath. Really when you have two mutually exclusive buffs and there's never a reason to have NEITHER active, you might as well just have the one button.

[Sylvina]

If the number of skills goes up significantly from the stupid number we already have myself and no doubt countless others will be playing something else in an expansion or two. keybinding everything on all classes is already almost impossible. (if you want easy to reach keybinds like you always do)

I just hope another game comes out that I like before this happens.