The Buttons & You

[Kandraxx]

Hey, after a longer hiatus I got back into the game recently and just wanted to ask where the general consensus & dev opinion is standing nowadays regarding the button bloat and 1-2-3 combos specifically.

I tried the new Pictomancer and Viper and there was obviously a drastic change in design choice with auto-combos, but then there are still things that don't make sense because you have to bind both color palette's spells where you're never able to use both and you're also never able to use both Holy in White and Comet in Black simultaneously but somehow they just have to be different buttons. Also the hammer essentially taking up 3 buttons to get it 'online'.

So to me it seems like that the devs are still dead set on requiring the player to have a certain number of skills bound & on their bars, no matter how redundant or senseless it might be.

I heard there is a kinda class revamp coming down the road with Dawntrail so I hope we might see getting the 1-2-3s addressed and consolidated onto a single button, this would help classes like PLD out immensely, because you don't have to waste 3 of your best bindings just to emulate what is an auto attack in like Guild Wars 2.

I've gone through both sides of the argument, where the yes-side stands on ''button bloat and accessibility" ground and the no-side arguing that it would cut down room for mistakes, to which I have to personally say: if the game's design revolves around fishing for player input error then there's something wrong to begin with.

Thanks for reading and I hope you will share your opinions.

[Khryseis_Astra]

I’m in the “give the option to condense anything that makes sense to do so” camp… as a controller player with all classes at 100, some classes are way too bloated already. I’d rather the challenging part of the game come from learning and clearing mechanics than fancy finger work and trigger tapping. So for me, if you’re always going to hit a basic combo in the same order, give the option to condense. If I have to put a skill on the one hot bar that requires both triggers to go down in a certain order, it’s probably not getting used much, if ever. lol (PLD is a good example! I think I’ve got 3-4 skills now on the “hidden” bar!)

Right now, the option exists to spread out the buttons they decided to default condense, but they should’ve added the option to have it the other way around. Most of the basic job combos are condensed in pvp, which makes some classes more fun to play there than pve.

I know what you mean about the Picto hammer setup… the only thing I can figure is that maybe they’re planning to add more “paint weapons” in the future that will use those same buttons when active.

[Ardeth]

I'm definitely on the less buttons side of things as a Guild Wars 1 vet. I'd rather have 1 defensive than 6 different ones that cover different things. It just seems really bad. But at the same time, hardcore people love to have awnsers to every situation, and I can see that from a swiss army knife standpoint. You may not use it all the time, but you might need it. But in saying that I'm definitely on team less is more, but that's me.

[Alice_Rivers]

I'm kinda surprised to see people here asking for fewer buttons while the healerstirke and tank threads are full of complaints about healers having only two buttons.

[Moqi]

I'm kinda surprised to see people here asking for fewer buttons while the healerstirke and tank threads are full of complaints about healers having only two buttons.

You shouldn't be because they have nothing to do with each other. 123 isn't a much more compelling combo than 111.

Anyway, they really should condense as much as possible. With crossbars, 32 buttons is a great cap, but I really want them to use them on meaningful actions while condensing as much as possible. All combos with no diverging paths should be merged, all buttons that can only be used in certain stances should be merged... if a button is grey'd out it shouldn't appear at all, that's just a waste of space (yes yes there might be some exceptions like Dancer, let's not be pedantic).

[ZephyrMenodora]

After Picto having the combos condensed into one button, I prefer a cleaner hotbar.

I don't feel I have much more skill expression pressing 1/2/3 than having it auto-change to save bar space like Picto. Some jobs have more button bloat than others and this would help without removing much "skill."

[poooman]

yeah im all for combo button condensing. i dont even play on controller and it feels like with some classes i can barely fit all their skills on 3 bars. and even when i can fit everything, its impossible to get comfortable keybinds for more important skills because 5 of them are taken up my single target and aoe combos that could just be One Button each.

[Avoidy]

picto during downtime or during downsyncing feels like a special kind of braindead. there are moments where I am literally just mashing 1
then i hop over to bard and it's like they've taken the opposite approach on purpose. Got 2 different dot buttons for two different dots, and a third button that refreshes both of them. ok. got sidewinder, an ability that's just there to be pressed every 60s but doesn't actually add anything besides potency.
and then there's the real funny stuff like ast, where they talked this big game in endwalker about reducing its button bloat only to make its card system require even more buttons than before, like... lmao

[Shikiseki]

Having 1 button instead of 1-2-3 is basically the same but the key is to not have your basic filler be 96% of your button presses like the current healer design.

You do not need 50 buttons to achieve that either - all you need are a couple of meaningful buttons that come back frequently enough in a somewhat free-form rotation to have some skill ceiling left and you'd have the best of both worlds.

Despite Summoner (one of the most popular DPS during EW) being built in that very principle at its core, they just lacked the creativity to fill in the rotation itself with interesting effects other than "do 300 potency yay!" to compensate and screwed even further by expanding on it the wrong way with Bahamut2 - it had so much potential it's almost irritating!

[Valence]

Look no further than pvp kits with thrice less buttons and thrice more gameplay flavor and meaning.