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How many abilities is too many?
jusomdude
Member RarePosts: 2,706
How many abilities do you think is too many?
Personally, I think around 15 is a good amount... any more is just a hassle.
It's nice having a decent variety of moves but I think sometimes it gets overdone.
Comments
Getting new skills is an important part of the fun of leveling. Mythic certainly went overboard in WH Online, and I think that is a major reason why the game had so much CC in it.
Now, there are different categories of abilities. I think 15 comabt abilities is enough for a good variety of options, but there are also non-combat abilities like Druid animal forms and Mage portals in WoW. As long as you have enough good abilties to spread out among the classes, the more of those, the better. Again - Mythic blew it by having too many classes.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
3! Normal fire, alt-fire, and throw grenade. Maybe a 4th if you can think of something else to throw in there.
But in all seriousness, I'd wish more MMOs would try some more action oriented combat rather than making 100+ abilities on multiple bars for you to juggle around. I think Guild Wars (and Guild Wars 2) has the right idea here. I should be able to use my entire arsenal with just my number keys. Give me enough good options to choose what abilities I want to bring to the battlefield. I think at one point in WoW I had a UI with over 150+ buttons, most of which were bound to some key. I'd say the OP has it right where anymore than 15 is overkill.
There can be infinite amount of abilities for all I care- as long as you can only equip X number of them at time.
I'd say 10 to 20 is enough, depends though.
Skills and abilities, well if mmo's kept innovating like MUD's, as mmo's branched from MUD's, than in the 100's. But they have changed course to be more like CRPG's so we never got there and thus have stale CRPG flavors. But yeah, a selection from 100's.
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Probably 5 to 10 core abilities for any given fight for a class/spec. Another 15 miscellaneous skills is fine as well. Anything more than that seems to be a hassle.
It depends on the game and the combat system. Some combat systems can do well with only 4 - 6 abilities (or attack styles), others can have 15 - 25 abilities and still be fine with me.
more then 30 abilities usable in a single combat scenario? I think that would be too many.
It's hard to really put an exact number on it. There should always be some balance, no game or class should be exactly the same. I WoW's case, I felt like I was just using the same couple abilities the whole game, with a couple thrown in for specific siuations. Then like my Minstrel in Lotro having 5 hotbars of abilities that were not much different, could be confusing and overwhelming.
I think its important to have several solid and interchangeable combat abilites, with several supportive or responsive abilities. So i guess "15" could work.
I remember when i got to high level in EQ2, i had 40 abilities full and ready for use, and another 10 were buffs. And these 5 full bars of abilities were just too many. And if you have alts, remembering what every one of 50+ abilities do... it was a pain.
I think you should never have more than 3 full bars of abilities. With about 10-15 being used more often.
Thats why i liked EQ - memorize my 8 spells and it's enough. Well, later they added the 9th and then 10th spell slot available through alternat advancement, but 10 is still better than 50+
I am going to say around 4. When I am fighting something it makes more sense to utilize a smaller number of abilities rather than load you down with 30 abilities or whatever.
Smart ability design allows a single ability to have many uses, conditional effects, positional effects, combos, etc. In contrast if your ability lowers the targets armor and that is it, then it isn't a very well made ability, abilities that are one trick ponies are rather slopy.
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I feel like I'm from the school of thought on the opposite end of the spectrum. There is no such thing as too many, so long as none feature redundancy; such as scaling damage or extra forms of the same CC abilities. In essence you can have as many as you want, but the limitations therein are based on how easy they are to actually *use*, or dependant on how many you are *allowed* to use.
Examples;
AoC's combat favors anything closer to the movement keys, so as a mage you are going to swap out the directional combat keys for the spells you will use the most. Anything on hte regular hotbar up to the #5 key are easy to spring without having to look at the keyboard or move your hand from it's intended position. Your well-versed arsenal is only limited by how many keys are in a good range from the movement keys in order to use them often.
With the above point aside, the other tacet is how many abilities you are allowed to use in the first place, like Guild Wars giving you 8 to pick from the hoard of available abilites. That alone allows for a setup with lots of redundancy to allow perssonal choice in what skills to use. Maybe you don't like the particle effects of one CC, and they do not stack, so the player is going to just pick his favorites and go with it.
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I wanted to ask if someone know mmorpg with good PvP system, but the main point is that you use only very limited amount of abilities (let's say max 10). I'd also appreciate if there wasn't the option to choose from 20 classes and 60 subclasses/specializations. Thanks
ESO has a limited skill bar, but a ton of classes. Probably closest to what you may be looking for.
BDO you have to ptw to be PvP viable
WoW, forget about it.
GW2 a ton of meta, you'll probably get crushed... but not crazy on skills, but a lot of classes.
There are others I haven't tried.
I beta'd Mortal Online 2, really few skills... more technique... but I cannot recommend that game... it's not worthy of money or time at this point.
Anything more than about 10 total buttons I need to use is to much. After that to many games seem to make addons that basically play the game for you (or you macro it all together).