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Too Damned Many Buttons
MightyUnclean
Member EpicPosts: 3,531
in Everquest
I'm sick of current MMO's where you have to keep track of 200 ability buttons. Does EQ still offer a simple interface like it used to, at least for melee classes? I want to relax and just hit a few keys, not feel like I'm putting on a concert with a pipe organ.
Thanks!
Comments
I am probably not the best person to speak on this, since I'm a very casual mostly-solo player with no characters out of the teens. EQ is certainly nothing like EQ2 where you can easily fill 3 bars with buttons by level 20, no matter what class you're playing. An EQ Ranger in the upper teens can about fill 1 hotkey bar with direct combat abilities and a few utlities, and mostly fill a spell bar (about half with buffs and 2-3 combat spells). I play with the default UI.
I guess the days of auto-attack and a couple of other melee buttons are long gone...Maybe I should play Minecraft. =/
No no - it is the same. You still have more powers than your spell bar can hold. Melee classes have significantly more things they can do, but compared to the 'all powers all the time' mode of other games, this one still set limits.
Looks like GW2 is also going to be a game where you pick and choose from what you have for the situation rather than having access to all your powers all the time.
Also TSW limits the amount of skills available on screen...
But give EQ a shot as its f2p now..
Once you get to max level and start getting a bunch of AAs, you will have several ability bars filled with activated AAs. I can't speak to rangers, but when I finally retired about a year and a half ago, my magician, bard, and cleric, all had very full ability bars from activated AAs, however, many of them are quite situational and aren't used all that often.
Before you start working on AAs, you will stll have a very limited set of spells/abilities.
If you have a lot of AAs you could easily fill 4 hotkey bars (not including the 10 spell gems). As for using them in combat, in a normal grind group you probably won't use but a few. Situations like buffing you can use many spells/hotkeys, but this is mitigated by alternate spell gem sets. Potions, long cooldown AAs and discs might cause you to need quite a few buttons on harder mobs or raid targets. You can also macro together 2-4 hotkeys with similar cooldowns (like bash, taunt, kick or evade).
It is sad to say that EQ is no longer the 8 spell gems affair that it once was. Actually you would be hard put to find an MMO these days that doesnt use a ton of buttons. The one that comes to mind is Vindictus. It makes an effort to make moves just take the buttons of the mouse and only have rare things that do not.
Personally I am hoping that EQ Next (when it comes out next year) will tend more towards the old 8 gem type of play and less toward the 4 skill bars full of things that you loop through EQ2 model. Doing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 c-1 c-2 c-3 c-4 c-5 c-6 c-7 is not any more skillful than doing 1 2 3 -- it is just more tedious. At least in EQ1 the things had a real purpose -- especially for some classes like shaman (which is what I played).
i doubt EQNext will be next year, the game design is still functioning with a press blackout
we havent even seen a valid screenshot yet
Smokejumper on EQ3, June 2012
http://eq2wire.com/2012/06/19/eqnext-news-late-this-year/
We’re being very particular about what needs to be in the game before revealing it to folks, so until that stuff is ready, we won’t be showing anything. (Screens you saw from a couple years ago are completely obsolete now and are not pertinent to the current game at all.)
EQ2 fan sites
GW2 will have 1 to 10 and F1 to F4, a weapon switch and a dodge button.
You have avves to much more skills, but the interface itself has got clean of all the buttons, and the extra skills are all available through an inutitive way. Personally i think GW2 has the answer to your wishes. There is enough tactical depth, but they got rid of the endless numbers of buttons and bars.
Same goes for TSW, just 7 buttons, and thats all there is, your complaint is legitime, and developers allready started to go that way.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
If all you want is a few ranged shots while closing then simple melee, that's fine. If you want any real degree of versatility (like any caster, cleric or bard), it's totally inadequate. Then there's buttons for the skills you want to practice like Tracking, Foraging or Sense Heading (EQMac starts you at zero and the compass spins a lot in the woods). And more buttons for crafting (more in some games than others.) In SWG you could more than fill a two-dozen hotkey panel just for the Entertainer profession: starting/stoppping/changing songs and dances, instrument switching, flourishes.
It does get a bit overwhelming, really. I would say that, if you need more than one hotkey bar to handle basic combat, you'll be spending more time managing the bars than paying attention to the fight.
Ah man reading this thread has me missing the music during the loading screens.... and the in person bartering in the mountain cave.... i give this thread a -10 for making me feel old
The good thing about playing EQ is the relaxed pace of combat. You can easily watch TV here and there if want to just chill and solo a bit. You can even click abilities and move with the keyboard and not feel bad about not mashing keys frantically.
I freaking hope not. The screns we saw a couple years ago looked like WoW 2.0. If there's one thing we don't need more of, it's more WoW clones.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
I was actually doing a search earlier for any news regarding EQ Next and they actually said any old screens you can throw out as the game in its current form looks nothing like that.
This is what I appreciate about EQ.