Thoughts on the removal of skills

[Lethros]

Level 19 Templar (healer) in EverQuest II and I have 33 actions on my hotbars. 7 do damage, 4 single target heals, 2 group heals, several buff and target debuff/interrupt actions, some skills that help in the environment/exploring, a few teleport spells, a food/drink spell, revive, one that I think is basically esuna, and a couple more I'm not sure what they do yet. Currently the furthest I've gone, but the amount of spells are already pretty comparable to a maximum level healer in FFXIV. It's like there's this whole discipline to learn and master, which also relates to the world with actual learning and lore you discover, and a FFXIV job is a toy you might play with once in a while. There's so much more to learn and remember, but that depth and binding into the world are part of it actually being meaningful, as with the rest of EQ2. And I suppose also the other EverQuests, but I don't have experience in them

[RadicalPesto]

DRK is another job I play a lot, and while I do not know what I missed with HW DRK, I do know that current DRK doesn't feel like a DRK at all, and the resources their skills are tied to are totally arse backwards. Why are Edge/Flood OGCD but still consume MP? Why the hell are skills like Unleash and Unmend on the GCD but MP free? WTF is Abysmal Drain no longer a spell and on a ridiculous CD? I don't need to play HW DRK to know they really screwed this job up.

Uh, Edge and Flood are off-gcd with a MP cost to reward proper MP management, as well as allow you to pool MP for party cooldowns and use it spamming Edges during buff windows without using all your GCDs. DRK gameplay would be even slower and clunkier without Edge off the GCD, and would involve zero MP management if they didn't cost MP. Unleash and Unmend are MP free because the basic AoE rotation and pulling move for all tanks is meant to be free, so as to not force tanks to go dry in the middle of a pull. The only complaint that makes any sense here is the Abyssal Drain one, and that skill probably got nerfed so DRK wouldn't have infinite HP in big pulls anymore.

[linay]

Yeah, that's because you don't combine Venomous Bite/Windbite, and you have one extra role actions I have no need for. You also have Limit Break, Teleport, Return, a minion, and something else on your main hotbar, whereas I have those types of items on a sidehotbar (I only had two unrelated bard items on my hotbar). So, that accounts for all the empty spaces, which is why yours looks fuller than mine. I really have no desire to fill mine up with crap I don't need on it. XD

I don't need to use a side hotbar (or even the other cross hotbars not shown) as what is in the screenshot is everything I may need to use for Bard without a need to combine abilities with a macro. I think that's a good limit to have, especially as a controller user. Anything more just makes it cumbersome for me to use.

[Moonlite]

What is one of the biggest complaints of level sync? Losing all the skills. It might be too much work. It seems like everything is too much work. But moving a lot of skills down to lvl 1-10 and have the new skills evolve from those. They already have the animations partly done. They can balance the skills to that level. People who are synced still feel a similar game play. You start learning larger rotation earlier. They don't have to worry about skill bloat or balancing old skills since you won't be able to have them at the new level.

[linay]

What is one of the biggest complaints of level sync? Losing all the skills.

I actually think it keeps the old skills in the game. On Bard, for example, you have Venemous Bite, Windbite, Caustic Bite, and Stormbite. Another example would be Warrior's Berserk and Inner Release.

Without level sync, we'd have even less skills in the game and just one rotation.

[hynaku]

The only skills I miss that they removed is piece by piece from crafting and how that changed the cards to the ast.

[VenKitsune]

Moving from ARR to HW...All they did was ADD skills, they didnt remove a single one.

What was the solution to this? Simple. I just re-made my hotbars. I was actually kinda fun remaking them, made it feel fresh, and allowed me to experiment.

In SB...They got rid of a lot of rather useless skills, that was...Fair enough! To be honest! Makes sense!

In Shadowbringers? They removed half of the most useful skills in the game because of mythical "Button bloat" and yet many jobs, especially MCH and WAR...actually came in to 5.0 with LESS buttons to push than in SB! So stupid!

Skills should only ever be removed if they dont serve a purpose anymore, imo, not becuase of "Button bloat" - PC players have a whole keyboards worth of buttons, and several modifier options.
Controllers? Well, it might surprise some of you, but there is actually an extended hotbar options for controllers that is off by default...I forget what its called.

Case in point, we're not running out of buttons to push, SE is wrong to assume there are too many already...There isnt. Not by a long while. 5 More buttons per job, or even 10-15 more, really wont be an issue for 99% of players to simply...reorganize their hotbars.

[Sloprano]

What is one of the biggest complaints of level sync? Losing all the skills. It might be too much work. It seems like everything is too much work. But moving a lot of skills down to lvl 1-10 and have the new skills evolve from those. They already have the animations partly done. They can balance the skills to that level. People who are synced still feel a similar game play. You start learning larger rotation earlier. They don't have to worry about skill bloat or balancing old skills since you won't be able to have them at the new level.

Losing all the skills and after Stormblood started showing signs that (at least my favorite jobs) skill distribution is heavily, if not completely biased toward the unreasonably strict "a new skill/trait every second level" in the expanions, 50-60, 60-70 and 70-80. It seems they find it still so imporatnt they need to have fifteen skills locked away here that some jobs don't feel complete nor engaging until you get the "killerapp" skill because they keep taking skills away from the orginal 1-50 segment where, if cut into expansion parts, is still the largest collection of duties. Was it a expansion feature that you get five new skills? Are they under some law facing community work if broken? What about the base leveling experience that is completely butchered? And it's where it's the most painfully boring to play in that they keep throwing xp and tomestones reward at them so new people wont be stuck in queue forever.

How about they instead made sure jobs are fun even there? Give every job their core functionality at very early stage and then save gameplay-altering cornerstones for the desi-levels. You know, like how classes used to the be fundaments jobs were built on. And then to no surprise, when they knocked away Arcanist from under Scholar it had to no core left. Just a bunch of oGCDs, Broil and a fairy I can do less with. And with core I mean a gameplay playstyle or loop you have accessible anytime and anywhere, others might be situtional, like healing skills are, but if you're fighting anything you have your core ready. Going from having fifteen "core skills" to two mentioned in previous post is just too big.

This is where I keep bringing up Arcanist in ARR that by the time it reached Sastasha already had two dots, Aetherflow+1 ED, Virus, heal and two fully-fledgde different summons (although both could upset the tank with provoke and knockback so had to keep an eye out). Point being this set the stage for the stuff rest to come: even more dots and way to manipulate them and more stuff to spend Energy Drain on as you gained Scholar. It had it's core: dots, Aetherflow, pet hotbar and management by the time of the first dungeon. If I do Sastasha today I have two skills: Ruin and Bio, and bugger all.

[Nihility]

It really isn't skill removal that's the problem at all. It's the way they do it
Like no one was asking for scholar to lose like 80% of their dps/utility skills and gain it all back and then some more in ogc healing skills.

Or summoner has this weird thing now where they basically have aoe duplicates of their entire kit.
Probably would have been a lot more elegant to just have the skills change function based on which summon you have out

Or some classes have like 8 buttons of 1>2>3 combo that could have been compressed to 3 buttons but for some reason they get a bunch of their more interesting mechanics pruned out for no apparent reason instead

I've played several games that have a loadout restricted to 10 buttons or less and they are plenty in depth

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Amusingly, the only thing they changed that I don't like or agree with...is the Removal of AERO III