Who cares how many total abilties your character can have, when you only can have max 5 + 1 Active at a time?
Ummmm, I do?
Actually I suspect a lot of people do.
Mind I've always enjoyed having multiple hotbars filled with situational and "Oh %*#*(@!" buttons, but I don't really consider it an essential feature. What I do consider an essential feature is choice. Give me a limited skillbar, I'm fine with that, but I'd best be able to decide what to put on that hotbar myself and it had best not be a choice between three versions of essentially the same thing or, worse, basing my skillbar "choices" on what weapon i have equipped.
GW1 had a very limited skillbar, but let me fill it as I liked from a huge number and variety of options. Give me that -- and TESO does, or at least close enough for my purposes -- and I don't really care that at any given time I can't instantly access all gazillion possible skills.
Having 5+1 Abilities/Skills to work with at a time - is just so not 2014. It just feels like a step back in time.
Really? I think it's vice versa, the farther back in time you go, the more abilities games had. My 10-yr old EQ2 has something like 50 different things on my hotbars. While the more recent games I've played - TSW had 7, GW2 had less than that i think, ESO with 6, EQN is being developed for 8 abilities. I don't think thats less skills is a "throwback" to old times, if anything it's an indication of a very boring future.
I have 7, count them 7, skill bars in EQ2 and could have more if I were to make more macros. Anyone that thinks that fewer skills is a throwback or is so outdated hasn't a clue about what they are talking about. I would guess that only 30% to 40% of those skills are used regularly and the rest are purely situational.
There are plenty of games out there that have skills coming out your ears so if those are the types of games they like, let them play them. I for one am tired of trying to figure out where I'm going to put and use a new skill every level or so. More is not always better.
Can we get away from the stigma that few abilites = boring and low skill?
Ive played a Hunter in WoW and at one point in the game had over 100 keybindings. I was literally FORCED to buy a razer naga to play my hunter at the classes maximum capacity and speed. It was difficult, but in an unsatisfying way. This is because every class has many abilities, you can get away with making mistakes much more, because you have a lot of stuff to compensate for your mistakes.
In Dota2, you have 4 abilites. The game is 100000x harder and the skillceiling is somewhere around Jupiter if you compare it to WoW. Less abilities means more room for mistakes. You only have 1 stun? Use it wrong and you're screwed. You have 1 Stun, 3 interrupts, 1 reflect, 2 immunities, 4 escape mechanisms? Make a mistake and its not a big deal.
The player making the least mistakes should win. This is only possible if a mistake has severe consequences. The less room you have to play with, the more severe a mistake is.
However, this does not mean that less abilities to CHOOSE from is a good thing! The best system is a huuuuge pool of abilities where you can pick the abilities that suit the playstyle of your group the most. Being able to change the metagame, finding combinations of abilities that work well against what is the current trend. Each hero in Dota2 has only 4 abilities, but there are over 100 heroes to choose from. This adds a strategic layer to the game that is very important for long-term fun.
Games like GW2, who tried this "10 ability combat" did this wrong. Because of the lack of defined roles, each class plays very similarly and has 3 basic builds - berserk damage, tanky damage and tanky conditions. This gets boring extremely fast.
ESO, in theory, offers a lot more room for different builds, with several layers of playstyles to choose from. Armortype, weapons and class-tree-choices all influence how a certain character plays in a drastic way. A nightblade focussing on siphoning and evasion can be a very strong tank for example. A lightarmored Dragonknight can be a magicka-oriented caster-tank or ranged dps.
Having access to a limited amount of abilities at any given time makes balancing a lot easier as well. Reason for this is, there will be "builds". If a build is overpowered, it can only be due to a combination of a few very limited abilites, thus making it easy to identify what needs to be changed. If each class has access to 100 abilities and several talent-trees at the same time, it is much harder to put your finger on what exactly needs to be changed. You can see this already in the way people perceive and words these things. Its easy to fix a "build" that is overpowered, but much harder to fix a "class" that is overpowered.
I am not saying ESO is the messiah of MMOs and does everything right. However, it is necessary to note that at the very least ESO does something DIFFERENT at the very fundamental mechanics of how the MMO is built, something I havent seen in a long time. ESO combat and character progression is different from any MMO Ive played so far to the very core, even if, at a surface level, it might seem very similar.
The intent of my original post was not to ignite a flamewar over the amount of active skills on the toolbar.
I was hoping to highlight the potential for customization that exists in ESO.You can go to a crafter and order a weapon that is equivalent to virtually anything dropped by any mob in the game. You can even request the exact trait and enchant combo that you want, and he rarity level that you can afford.
Every weapon and armour piece comes in 10 racial styles, and changes it's appearance at least once every 10 levels !
Variety !
Customization !
Jeez, some people will go to any lengths to find something negative....
While the thread has derailed into the ever popular "this and that has so and so many skills more"
MMO's with 20-40+ skills are mostly placebo skills to fill the bars and fool players
Lets count how many skills there really are
Damage:
Direct damage
Dot
Control:
Snare
Root
Stun & Daze & knockdown & fear etc. (the same thing, you lose control of your character for a set duration)
Mezz-break
Healing:
Direct heal
HoT
Purge / Cleanse
Combinations from the lists above
I count 9 skills in total (10 with combination skills), games with 20-50 skill slots don't have any more skill, but combinations, and ranks of those said 9 skills with graphical variations to fool the player into thinking there are "tons" of skills.
I suspect that some players will find the amount of choices a bit overwhelming. YouTube guides and how-to's are going to be extremely popular
Choose from:
3 factions
9 races (10 if you buy or upgrade to at least digital Imperial CE level)
Each race has 4 passive traits (many are unique) and can potentially belong to any* of the 3 factions (any faction if you've pre-ordered or upgrade later).
4 "character classes", each with 3 branching skill lines
Each combination of the above can choose to use any of the following:
6 weapon skill categories (covering 13 weapon types), each with branching skill lines
13 weapon types available in 5 different quality levels (available by upgrading the weapon)
3 armor types available in 5 different quality levels (available by upgrading)
8 different traits that can be chosen to be added to any weapon or armour (1 trait per item)
Each weapon, armour and jewelry piece can hold 1 enchantment
17 different types of enchantment in 14 different potencies, each at 5 quality levels (NOTE: not all enchantments can be applied to all item types. Each type seems to be specific to either weapon, armour or jewelery)
At least 10 to 20 different Food and Drink buff types (many quite significant)
At least 10 to 20 different Alchemy Potion buff types (many quite significant)
Then there's additional skills/traits from the Mage's and Fighter's Guilds, the Undaunted and RVR campaign. And the Veteran Ranks (10 VR's after L50)
All weapons, armour, traits, enchantments, food and potions can be crafted by players. Crafters can upgrade items to Legendary level if they have the required components.
Balancing this lot is going to be interesting...
Edit: (changed the title due to obsessive nitpicking by respondents)
This and the combat, is why and I'm buying. Still think EACH skill line, and each weapon ability needs 5 more skills. I've went to my skill page a few times and felt somewhat limited while within specific lines.
Originally posted by Fendel84M Too many skills means you start playing the UI too much and that takes you out of the game.
Sorry for the triple posts I'm on my phone so it's harder to edit when I thought of something to add lol.
Just because you have different situational abilities, doesn't mean you need to stick them all on your screen 24/7. I have 70-90 different things I cast (not all in-combat!) on this particular character in EQ2, yet I choose not to block my UI with them:
I agree with you on this. And also for all buttons lovers:
Desire to have a lot of abilities on screen during the fight could be justified if you do not know anything about your opponent. So you might need to try different abilities to find out more effective ones for particular fight. But after you find out that you will need to use only few, most effective of them in different sequence for the rest of the fight. It calls TACTICS. It is not that developers couldn’t provide you with more buttons to push. I think, they did not want to. I think, they want to make a game in which you would be required to use your brains from time to time. They want you to plan your fight. They want you to learn something about your opponent before the fight. They want you to make sound decision about what abilities might be more effective against your opponent even before the fight starts. It is a part of so called STRATEGY. It is not only might make this game more complex, but could be more fun also. It could also lead to different outcomes of fight of same opponents again and again, when they choose differently their on-screen abilities. It will largely depend of how you prepared to this fight. Again, if you would make a strategic mistake… well you might learn something after all.
It is my opinion, to have more abilities available on-screen during the fight might make this aspect of the game more shallow.
Originally posted by Fendel84M Too many skills means you start playing the UI too much and that takes you out of the game.
Sorry for the triple posts I'm on my phone so it's harder to edit when I thought of something to add lol.
Just because you have different situational abilities, doesn't mean you need to stick them all on your screen 24/7. I have 70-90 different things I cast (not all in-combat!) on this particular character in EQ2, yet I choose not to block my UI with them:
I agree with you on this. And also for all buttons lovers:
Desire to have a lot of abilities on screen during the fight could be justified if you do not know anything about your opponent. So you might need to try different abilities to find out more effective ones for particular fight. But after you find out that you will need to use only few, most effective of them in different sequence for the rest of the fight. It calls TACTICS. It is not that developers couldn’t provide you with more buttons to push. I think, they did not want to. I think, they want to make a game in which you would be required to use your brains from time to time. They want you to plan your fight. They want you to learn something about your opponent before the fight. They want you to make sound decision about what abilities might be more effective against your opponent even before the fight starts. It is a part of so called STRATEGY. It is not only might make this game more complex, but could be more fun also. It could also lead to different outcomes of fight of same opponents again and again, when they choose differently their on-screen abilities. It will largely depend of how you prepared to this fight. Again, if you would make a strategic mistake… well you might learn something after all.
It is my opinion, to have more abilities available on-screen during the fight might make this aspect of the game more shallow.
Good players never stared at their action bars. They knew where all 25+ abilities were.
Who cares how many total abilties your character can have, when you only can have max 5 + 1 Active at a time?
Why they even botherred with PC version, should have just kept it on PS4 and Xbox.
Oh how awesome the system is where you have dozens of buffs and debuffs you need to spam in mandatory manner without it adding anything interesting into the gameplay.
Also, action combat in itself reduces the need for huge amount of abilities because the core combat alone is more engaging to begin with, compared to the autoattack games.
And finally, most games that I have played where I have 3 rows x 10 slots of abilities, you only actively use 2-4.
I do think the TESO combat system could be better and more rich, with a couple of additional situational special abilities and perhaps something new and unique implemented into the combat, but the oldschool 30 abilities system isnt better imo. TESO combat looks just fine as long as they tune a bit some of those horrible animations.
Heh Skyrim only had like 3 attacks you could use at a time. Not sure I'd even like to have 30+ on bars all over the place. That would feel more like a generic mmo.
The mix of light/heavy basic attacks, blocks, bashing and a few useful situtational skills is enough for me.
Oh how awesome the system is where you have dozens of buffs and debuffs you need to spam in mandatory manner without it adding anything interesting into the gameplay.
I think that making strategic choices about which of the 50 abitlies to use at any given point adds quite a lot to gameplay.
Also, action combat in itself reduces the need for huge amount of abilities because the core combat alone is more engaging to begin with, compared to the autoattack games.
This is true, but at the same time, having to go left-click, left-click, left-click over and over in games without without auto-attack just makes my hand hurt and i don't find that it adds much complexity. Movement, dodging, etc. THOSE things add complexity, having to manually click to shoot an arrow every time is just painful imo.
I do think the TESO combat system could be better and more rich, with a couple of additional situational special abilities and perhaps something new and unique implemented into the combat
Yeah. idk about adding 30 abilities, but i liked to have abilities that situational, not just being limited to 5 because that results in easiest controls. Games shouldn't sacrifice strategic play for sake of controls. One good example is DCUO, which despite other flaws has one of the best combat systems. What it does is that in addition to giving you limited hotkey abilities, many special abilities can be executed by a combination of clicks/movement (i.e. street-fighter style - "left, left, right click, left-double-click"). This allows having more abilities without having more buttons. Other games (i think AoC did this) has buttons that change - so you may have the same 6 buttons, but as you execute combos, your abilities change into different ones.
So there are ways of accomplishing more tactical combat, with more choices, without going back to 50 buttons.
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall Currently Playing: ESO
Oh how awesome the system is where you have dozens of buffs and debuffs you need to spam in mandatory manner without it adding anything interesting into the gameplay.
I think that making strategic choices about which of the 50 abitlies to use at any given point adds quite a lot to gameplay.
Also, action combat in itself reduces the need for huge amount of abilities because the core combat alone is more engaging to begin with, compared to the autoattack games.
This is true, but at the same time, having to go left-click, left-click, left-click over and over in games without without auto-attack just makes my hand hurt and i don't find that it adds much complexity. Movement, dodging, etc. THOSE things add complexity, having to manually click to shoot an arrow every time is just painful imo.
I do think the TESO combat system could be better and more rich, with a couple of additional situational special abilities and perhaps something new and unique implemented into the combat
Yeah. idk about adding 30 abilities, but i liked to have abilities that situational, not just being limited to 5 because that results in easiest controls. Games shouldn't sacrifice strategic play for sake of controls. One good example is DCUO, which despite other flaws has one of the best combat systems. What it does is that in addition to giving you limited hotkey abilities, many special abilities can be executed by a combination of clicks/movement (i.e. street-fighter style - "left, left, right click, left-double-click"). This allows having more abilities without having more buttons. Other games (i think AoC did this) has buttons that change - so you may have the same 6 buttons, but as you execute combos, your abilities change into different ones.
So there are ways of accomplishing more tactical combat, with more choices, without going back to 50 buttons.
The strategic choise of which ability of the 50 you will use becomes too much a memory game imo, instead of combat. I dont think it's the worst system but these days I lean more towards the action combat, there's just not many games that does that style very good either.
I'm not a huge fan of spamming a single button repeatedly over extended periods of time my self too (think a boss fight), so I was wondering cant you just hold down the button like in shooters, to swing repeatedly as long as needed if an ability or strike does not have a cooldown?
I have played DCUO and I think similar system but with a lot shorter combos would be perhaps a good middle road. I mess my combos when they become too complex and long. Simple things like starting with block and then doing a basic melee strike would turn into something bigger. Blocking and then reblocking could be shield bash etc, simple stuff but adding more moves into the game.
Who cares how many total abilties your character can have, when you only can have max 5 + 1 Active at a time?
Why they even botherred with PC version, should have just kept it on PS4 and Xbox.
The skill system and the limited skill bar is done masterfully and have nothhing to do with controllers at all in any way, so get that out of you head, dont mention it again, its dead, its wonr, its over, stop it withhthe controller crap even if was PC only it wouldnt change a singe thing, get a clue man .
I played all of Skyrim and never once wondered about a hot bar. So now we have to? No....you people need to get used to something different or move on.
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
With only 5 skill slots and so many abilities to choose from, everyone's character is different and so many combinations to play with. This is one of the good things of this game.
Unlike some other mmo limited action set and "limited" skills to choose from, everyone plays almost the same.
Yes a limited skill bar system in a game where each character only has like 10-15 skills anyway is just horrid, everyone eventually feels the same. But in a game with well over 250 skills open to the player, a limited skill bar works masterfully, and opens up 1000's of build possibility's.
Originally posted by MMOExposed I have to disagree with the OP.
That's a very cryptic statement, and I'm intrigued as to just what it is that you "have to disagree with".
You cannot disagree with the amount of choices, because those numbers are hard facts.
You could of course simply say that you think 90% of the choices are meaningless, and for you that could be true. For everybody else they could be a very attractive range of choices that lead to a large variety of viable builds...
Especially the class - weapon combos is one of the BIG assets, I really loved about ESO. I never could make up my mind though. My curse of Altitis. XD
I am not sure, I didn't get really out of the box. Maybe rolling a mage and wearing plate and using shield a sword is interesting, but I am not sure one would simply gimp himself horribly in that way.
Does anyone have experience with such odd combinations, like a plate and sword wielding mage or what?
I tried a plate wearing, dual wielding sorcerer in the last beta. Added a lot more survivability in PvE but it's a trade off. The build is viable if you intend to be a dps melee class that can curse and then bring a lightning bolt down on your enemies head ( which does sound cool when I put it like that ). But for a primarily ranged dps spell chucker light armour is the way to go.
Comments
There was a study done a few years ago :
Scenerio 1 : PVP with over 15 abilties on screen
Scenerio 2: PVP with nothing but white hits and CC
Results : PVP with nothing but white hits and CC's was rated "alot more fun" by the players involved in the study.........
Ummmm, I do?
Actually I suspect a lot of people do.
Mind I've always enjoyed having multiple hotbars filled with situational and "Oh %*#*(@!" buttons, but I don't really consider it an essential feature. What I do consider an essential feature is choice. Give me a limited skillbar, I'm fine with that, but I'd best be able to decide what to put on that hotbar myself and it had best not be a choice between three versions of essentially the same thing or, worse, basing my skillbar "choices" on what weapon i have equipped.
GW1 had a very limited skillbar, but let me fill it as I liked from a huge number and variety of options. Give me that -- and TESO does, or at least close enough for my purposes -- and I don't really care that at any given time I can't instantly access all gazillion possible skills.
I have 7, count them 7, skill bars in EQ2 and could have more if I were to make more macros. Anyone that thinks that fewer skills is a throwback or is so outdated hasn't a clue about what they are talking about. I would guess that only 30% to 40% of those skills are used regularly and the rest are purely situational.
There are plenty of games out there that have skills coming out your ears so if those are the types of games they like, let them play them. I for one am tired of trying to figure out where I'm going to put and use a new skill every level or so. More is not always better.
remember also that with most mmos with lots of skills usually
- combat is not active
- no active attacking or blocking
- position is less important
- combat is less situational
Can we get away from the stigma that few abilites = boring and low skill?
Ive played a Hunter in WoW and at one point in the game had over 100 keybindings. I was literally FORCED to buy a razer naga to play my hunter at the classes maximum capacity and speed. It was difficult, but in an unsatisfying way. This is because every class has many abilities, you can get away with making mistakes much more, because you have a lot of stuff to compensate for your mistakes.
In Dota2, you have 4 abilites. The game is 100000x harder and the skillceiling is somewhere around Jupiter if you compare it to WoW. Less abilities means more room for mistakes. You only have 1 stun? Use it wrong and you're screwed. You have 1 Stun, 3 interrupts, 1 reflect, 2 immunities, 4 escape mechanisms? Make a mistake and its not a big deal.
The player making the least mistakes should win. This is only possible if a mistake has severe consequences. The less room you have to play with, the more severe a mistake is.
However, this does not mean that less abilities to CHOOSE from is a good thing! The best system is a huuuuge pool of abilities where you can pick the abilities that suit the playstyle of your group the most. Being able to change the metagame, finding combinations of abilities that work well against what is the current trend. Each hero in Dota2 has only 4 abilities, but there are over 100 heroes to choose from. This adds a strategic layer to the game that is very important for long-term fun.
Games like GW2, who tried this "10 ability combat" did this wrong. Because of the lack of defined roles, each class plays very similarly and has 3 basic builds - berserk damage, tanky damage and tanky conditions. This gets boring extremely fast.
ESO, in theory, offers a lot more room for different builds, with several layers of playstyles to choose from. Armortype, weapons and class-tree-choices all influence how a certain character plays in a drastic way. A nightblade focussing on siphoning and evasion can be a very strong tank for example. A lightarmored Dragonknight can be a magicka-oriented caster-tank or ranged dps.
Having access to a limited amount of abilities at any given time makes balancing a lot easier as well. Reason for this is, there will be "builds". If a build is overpowered, it can only be due to a combination of a few very limited abilites, thus making it easy to identify what needs to be changed. If each class has access to 100 abilities and several talent-trees at the same time, it is much harder to put your finger on what exactly needs to be changed. You can see this already in the way people perceive and words these things. Its easy to fix a "build" that is overpowered, but much harder to fix a "class" that is overpowered.
I am not saying ESO is the messiah of MMOs and does everything right. However, it is necessary to note that at the very least ESO does something DIFFERENT at the very fundamental mechanics of how the MMO is built, something I havent seen in a long time. ESO combat and character progression is different from any MMO Ive played so far to the very core, even if, at a surface level, it might seem very similar.
The intent of my original post was not to ignite a flamewar over the amount of active skills on the toolbar.
I was hoping to highlight the potential for customization that exists in ESO.You can go to a crafter and order a weapon that is equivalent to virtually anything dropped by any mob in the game. You can even request the exact trait and enchant combo that you want, and he rarity level that you can afford.
Every weapon and armour piece comes in 10 racial styles, and changes it's appearance at least once every 10 levels !
Variety !
Customization !
Jeez, some people will go to any lengths to find something negative....
While the thread has derailed into the ever popular "this and that has so and so many skills more"
MMO's with 20-40+ skills are mostly placebo skills to fill the bars and fool players
Lets count how many skills there really are
Damage:
Control:
Healing:
I count 9 skills in total (10 with combination skills), games with 20-50 skill slots don't have any more skill, but combinations, and ranks of those said 9 skills with graphical variations to fool the player into thinking there are "tons" of skills.
This and the combat, is why and I'm buying. Still think EACH skill line, and each weapon ability needs 5 more skills. I've went to my skill page a few times and felt somewhat limited while within specific lines.
I agree with you on this. And also for all buttons lovers:
Desire to have a lot of abilities on screen during the fight could be justified if you do not know anything about your opponent. So you might need to try different abilities to find out more effective ones for particular fight. But after you find out that you will need to use only few, most effective of them in different sequence for the rest of the fight. It calls TACTICS. It is not that developers couldn’t provide you with more buttons to push. I think, they did not want to. I think, they want to make a game in which you would be required to use your brains from time to time. They want you to plan your fight. They want you to learn something about your opponent before the fight. They want you to make sound decision about what abilities might be more effective against your opponent even before the fight starts. It is a part of so called STRATEGY. It is not only might make this game more complex, but could be more fun also. It could also lead to different outcomes of fight of same opponents again and again, when they choose differently their on-screen abilities. It will largely depend of how you prepared to this fight. Again, if you would make a strategic mistake… well you might learn something after all.
It is my opinion, to have more abilities available on-screen during the fight might make this aspect of the game more shallow.
Good players never stared at their action bars. They knew where all 25+ abilities were.
Oh how awesome the system is where you have dozens of buffs and debuffs you need to spam in mandatory manner without it adding anything interesting into the gameplay.
Also, action combat in itself reduces the need for huge amount of abilities because the core combat alone is more engaging to begin with, compared to the autoattack games.
And finally, most games that I have played where I have 3 rows x 10 slots of abilities, you only actively use 2-4.
I do think the TESO combat system could be better and more rich, with a couple of additional situational special abilities and perhaps something new and unique implemented into the combat, but the oldschool 30 abilities system isnt better imo. TESO combat looks just fine as long as they tune a bit some of those horrible animations.
Heh Skyrim only had like 3 attacks you could use at a time. Not sure I'd even like to have 30+ on bars all over the place. That would feel more like a generic mmo.
The mix of light/heavy basic attacks, blocks, bashing and a few useful situtational skills is enough for me.
I think that making strategic choices about which of the 50 abitlies to use at any given point adds quite a lot to gameplay.
This is true, but at the same time, having to go left-click, left-click, left-click over and over in games without without auto-attack just makes my hand hurt and i don't find that it adds much complexity. Movement, dodging, etc. THOSE things add complexity, having to manually click to shoot an arrow every time is just painful imo.
Yeah. idk about adding 30 abilities, but i liked to have abilities that situational, not just being limited to 5 because that results in easiest controls. Games shouldn't sacrifice strategic play for sake of controls. One good example is DCUO, which despite other flaws has one of the best combat systems. What it does is that in addition to giving you limited hotkey abilities, many special abilities can be executed by a combination of clicks/movement (i.e. street-fighter style - "left, left, right click, left-double-click"). This allows having more abilities without having more buttons. Other games (i think AoC did this) has buttons that change - so you may have the same 6 buttons, but as you execute combos, your abilities change into different ones.
So there are ways of accomplishing more tactical combat, with more choices, without going back to 50 buttons.
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO
Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall
Currently Playing: ESO
The strategic choise of which ability of the 50 you will use becomes too much a memory game imo, instead of combat. I dont think it's the worst system but these days I lean more towards the action combat, there's just not many games that does that style very good either.
I'm not a huge fan of spamming a single button repeatedly over extended periods of time my self too (think a boss fight), so I was wondering cant you just hold down the button like in shooters, to swing repeatedly as long as needed if an ability or strike does not have a cooldown?
I have played DCUO and I think similar system but with a lot shorter combos would be perhaps a good middle road. I mess my combos when they become too complex and long. Simple things like starting with block and then doing a basic melee strike would turn into something bigger. Blocking and then reblocking could be shield bash etc, simple stuff but adding more moves into the game.
The skill system and the limited skill bar is done masterfully and have nothhing to do with controllers at all in any way, so get that out of you head, dont mention it again, its dead, its wonr, its over, stop it withhthe controller crap even if was PC only it wouldnt change a singe thing, get a clue man .
Press a button... it's a hot bar switch ffs
*sigh*
Still this non point?
I played all of Skyrim and never once wondered about a hot bar. So now we have to? No....you people need to get used to something different or move on.
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
With only 5 skill slots and so many abilities to choose from, everyone's character is different and so many combinations to play with. This is one of the good things of this game.
Unlike some other mmo limited action set and "limited" skills to choose from, everyone plays almost the same.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
That's a very cryptic statement, and I'm intrigued as to just what it is that you "have to disagree with".
You cannot disagree with the amount of choices, because those numbers are hard facts.
You could of course simply say that you think 90% of the choices are meaningless, and for you that could be true. For everybody else they could be a very attractive range of choices that lead to a large variety of viable builds...
I tried a plate wearing, dual wielding sorcerer in the last beta. Added a lot more survivability in PvE but it's a trade off. The build is viable if you intend to be a dps melee class that can curse and then bring a lightning bolt down on your enemies head ( which does sound cool when I put it like that ). But for a primarily ranged dps spell chucker light armour is the way to go.