Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
How many abilities do you want?
meddyck
Member UncommonPosts: 1,282
GW 2 only gives you 5 weapon + 1 heal + 3 utility + 1 elite skill at a time. Plus 5 more if you switch weapons. It seems like TESO is going to have a similarly limited system of abilities. This is one of the big things I disliked about GW 2 especially since you unlocked all of your weapon skills within minutes of playing. I hope CU will have a more old school approach with more abilities available for you to use at one time than can fit on one quickbar.
In DAOC you have 3 quickbars each with 10 pages. Each page has 10 (or is it 12? been a few years) abilities. On a class like my druid, I had one main quickbar with my most commonly used heals and CC spells; another with realm abilities, rez, and summon pet; and the third with buff shears. Then on page 2 of my main quickbar I had my stat buffs. On page 3 I had all my heals including lesser used ones. On another page I had resist buffs and AE buffs. All my Master Level abilities were on another page. Several pages were devoted to alchemy and spellcrafting. And various miscellaneous stuff like summon horse, macros for Labyrinth obeslisks, and champion level abilities were on a page too. A few important abilities were also keybound for faster use.
I'm not saying classes in CU have to have that many skills and I wouldn't want classes to have lots of random, little-used skills just to increase the skill count (something SWTOR was bad at), but I'd rather it be more like DAOC than take the FPS/console approach of games like GW 2.
DAOC Live (inactive): R11 Cleric R11 Druid R11 Minstrel R9 Eldritch R6 Sorc R6 Scout R6 Healer
Comments
Totally agree with you.
I didn't play GW2, but i know than each of my 16 characters in DAoC needs at least 3 macro bars, 1 for self buffs, 1 for most used spells/fighting skills and macro, and 1 for the instants spells or situational skills. And it brings more tactics than just spamming 1 key.
Add to that the champion and master level skills, as well as the /use of your stuff and the secondary skills if you're not a pure spec, and you easily grow to 3 more pages of skills. And only for fighting. Add a few other for crafting, travelling and other, and even though you're far from using all 300 slots, you still use a good half of them.
Btw, DAoC macro bars have 10 slots^^
For me the number isn't important, rather it's the quality of the abilities.
I can easily do without having 2+ hotbars of skills if many of those skills I hardly ever use/need and ar eextremely situational or just minor "buffs" over some other skills.
I'd rather be focused on having higher quality skills that open up more strategy and tactics then simply having a "large number" of skills that don't feel vastly diffferent from other abilities or are rarely used but on extremely rare situations.
It's true than it bother me to have extremely situational skills, as if you don't play the class regularly you will forget them and have your effectiveness reduced.
On the other hand, if you do master your class, the enemy won't be able to predict your every movements simply because there are so many abilities he can't know which one you'll use.
Something halfway between the two with enough skills to have some choice would be better.
Neither!
DAoC had too many and quite a few obsolete ones. There is no need to have a new skill that is in fact the same but updated. The only reason would be lower power consumption, although that hints to bad game design. Melee style chains can all be gathered under one button (e.g. GW2 dagger primary).
In fact most melee had the [always chain],[parry chain], [evade chain] , [back chain], [side chain]. Not to mention shield/LA chains on top of that. In fact GW2 is not so different as it gives you 5 skills per weapon which might chain or be conditional.
The biggest problem with GW2 was that as soon as you had your skills set, most choice in your rotation/use of skills was gone. However it allowed for 'twitch' skill differentation, no 'slow' hotbar navigation. And for those who've played, I'm sure you would agree having all your non weapon skills to your disposal would OP certain classes by a lot.
My biggest beef with DAoC was the sheer amount of useless space, stuff that should either be part of the normal controls (sprint, protect, guard, face, stick) took a spot. Every buff etc. And why should I have a rez ability on a hotbar, just let me right click my dead realm mate and check if I actually have a rez ability. Same goes with our caster's standard AF shield, why do I need to recast it?
The PVP skill check should not consist out of who has the most efficient hotbar order of 20+ skills. It should be about proper use, timing and choice of core skills.
Another bad game design example is the baseline single stat debuff, and the spec line double stat debuff. They stacked, so why not add the base debuff bonus to the spec debuff. There is no reason I would not want to use both debuffs except power usage, which IMO is part of tweaking the 'stacked' version.
It really felt like DAoC was trying to outperfrom EQ with the amount of buttons (sprinting or facing is not a skill!) on your hotbar.
Hell on Uthgard I have a /whisper task macro QQ
About the AF standard shield, i will answer than it allow you to forget it. And if you do, bad surprises will happen to you. I still remember that time i got OS by an oil because i forgot to recast it. Or that time i almost OS a high RR caster with a critical bolt 900+800. I was glad i didn't fire the bolt first but destroyed their healer's life pool with base DD.
About the chain skills... i'm not sure, just hitting a button once then watch for the next few turn doesn't sound good for me.
You know it was up to you what went on your hotbar! If you didn't want it their you could key bind it.
sounds like you want code written so you click on an enemy and the game determines the best ability you have to fire!
clicking on a ded body doesn't mean you want to waste mana raisingbhem
Drakonal of Lancelot/Kay
Drakulaz of Mordred
http://www.riskymilk.com/Kujii/Player_Base.wmv (classic guild video alb no cloth group)
Not only that, how about if you start a positional chain ala frontal,
then a situational(evade/block/parry) with a better outcome arises?
No you need to press it each time of course, but instead of taking up 3 buttons you can do with one. Also away with backup styles/queuing, if you want a reactionary skill try to react! Instead of pressing 5,3 each time
As for "forgot to cast a buff" now you "suffer", that's a very poor game mechanic. And yes even poor game-mechanics can lead to fun and amazement. In the light of shield buffs, I'd rather see a choice of shield each with its own perk as well as it's downfall. Ie. fire shield which gives you resists to fire, burn's melee attacks, but give you no resist to projectiles and maybe minus cold/water resistance. You can think of the other's.
That is a mechanic of choice, it can be a boon or it can make you suffer. It also offers counterplay to your enemies. It shows in some foundations, but really counterplay should have a foundation on it's own.
You could bind sprint etc. to other keys. There were many types of rez from instant to not instant so it should be on bar.
Why should you recast AF? If somebody was rezzed he wasn't fully ready to fight. If he didn't cast AF he would be one shotted like he should be without his shield. Casters didn't born with shields but they could cast them.
Combat in GW2 was sooo dull. Not nearly tactical enough. DAoC had classes that were even less so, but it had enormous potential in classes like Healers, that had an incredibly wide spectrum of tactical choice.
To me, having a plethora of choices in combat, at least on a few of the classes, is extremely important.
I think I need to clarify.
Let's make a simplified example:
a frontal positional chain of [slash, sweep, stab] with each their own bonuses : hotkey 1
an on evade chain [kidney hit, face chop] : hotkey 2
In your normal frontal face to face fights you hit 1 to hit with a slash, if it connects hitting 1 will sweep and if that connects it will perform a stab. Of course if one fails to connect te chain resets to slash. (You could even add a timing meter for added dmg on perfectly timed swings).
Say you just hit your slash and you evade. Hitting 1 again will make you sweep BUT hitting 2 will make you perform a kidney hit and another 2 will make you do the face chop finisher.
Timing and window can be tweaked: you could argue that if you evade 0.1s before you hit with a 1 that you still should be able to use 2 on the next attack.
boring.
I think you are misunderstanding me, Cexy. My concern is with how many abilities are available to you to use at any given time. I want classes to have some complexity to them and not be restricted to only ever having 10 skills they can use with the option to switch out some skills with other skills but not to use all of your skills. For instance on a CU healer I might want to have skills such as:
DAOC Live (inactive): R11 Cleric R11 Druid R11 Minstrel R9 Eldritch R6 Sorc R6 Scout R6 Healer
Sounds like you never discovered the /qbind command. Skills like face or sprint don't belong on the quickbar, you had them qbinded so you can easily access them. And I really liked how for instance sprint worked. It added more depth to the game. Bad players forgot to sprint in combat, good players didn't.
This isn't bad game design, this is how the daoc base & spec skill system worked. For example, any eldritch had the baseline strength debuff, but only those who put skillpoints in the moon line had the spec strength/constitution debuff. This made your choice of skills important, unlike gw2 where you just get some passive traits and stats when you level up but your skills stay the same all the time.
QFT
That's why I started with a firm "Neither!".
I do think you need to have a lot of (class specific pls) options at your disposal. However not the deflated amount of skills that my zerker has with hammer+LA.
As for boring remark above... I don't see a difference between pressing 4 (backup 1), 4 (backup 2), 4 (backup 3), rinse and repeat until 4 happens and I can press 5 and start all over again :]
Unless you count pressing two keys in rapid succession a skill?
yes it requires skill and it's not spamming one key. It requires you to read about all that skills. You have to read about them. You have to read what's better what's worse. It let's you think, it let's you do it differently. It allows you to make misstakes.
You misinterpret what I say....
A dark SM has a baseline dex debuff and a spec line dex/qui debuff, I always used those right after each other (they were instant remember?)
A supp SM also has the high base dex debuff, and perhaps the 21(around there, cant remember) dex/qui debuff as he specced dark second.
I'm saying with todays tech it's entirely possible to have the double debuff include the baseline one. Just like we are all used to improving skills now instead of getting a "new" skill called major instead of minor.
What I would like to see is a limited number of skills, similar to GW2, but with the ability to customize those skills quite a bit. For those who have played Ryzom, I would look to see a system which is kind of a mix of Ryzom and GW2. Have your 10 or so core skills and then also a series of "add-ons" that you can apply to your skills to slightly alter the effects to your desire. Increased power, faster cast times, added AoE effect, added status effects, etc with varying costs in exchange for those added effects.
I would much rather be able to have a small set of skills which I can tune to be exactly the way I want with the desired effects for my playstyle, rather than have 3+ hotbars full of crap, half of which does basically the same thing as everything else but just looks different or that has effects that are useless to my playstyle.
Both took power, so you had to choose. You could use dex/qui on tank but using dex on tank with mace was mostly lost of power. Why do you want it so simple? What's more dex/qui debuff was worse at some specs. Red dex/qui debuff was uber. But green one was average. In order to get for example red one on sorc you were killing many things in your spec. It made this game cool that you could do things in many ways. You didn't have everything told from above.
Bowbow (kob hunter) Infecto (kob cave shammy) and Thurka (troll warrior) on Merlin/Midgard DAoC
Thurka on WAR
This isn't bad game design, this is how the daoc base & spec skill system worked. For example, any eldritch had the baseline strength debuff, but only those who put skillpoints in the moon line had the spec strength/constitution debuff. This made your choice of skills important, unlike gw2 where you just get some passive traits and stats when you level up but your skills stay the same all the time.
You misinterpret what I say....
A dark SM has a baseline dex debuff and a spec line dex/qui debuff, I always used those right after each other (they were instant remember?)
A supp SM also has the high base dex debuff, and perhaps the 21(around there, cant remember) dex/qui debuff as he specced dark second.
I'm saying with todays tech it's entirely possible to have the double debuff include the baseline one. Just like we are all used to improving skills now instead of getting a "new" skill called major instead of minor.
Well back in the days before powerpool items and mythirians you couldn't use both debuffs all the time because they cost alot of power. You had to be careful and don't waste all your power in the first ten seconds of a fight.I'm either not explaining myself clear enough or you decided to neglect the important parts in my posts and get on my back for some minor disagreements.
I stand by my statement that I find backup styles require less skill than reactively hitting a button. We can agree to disagree on that. Same with the dex + dex/qui, I always hit those in quick succession on the same target, hell I'd bind it to my keyboard these days as one key.
I'm not for simplyfing, I enjoy having a lot of options and counterplay to those and my enemies options. I enjoyed having debuffs, dd with leech, mez, root, rez on my SM and would still love to have it.
I even despise full respecs or simplified spec lines or the idiocracy of skills in Diablo 3.
That said having a larger quantity of skills does not necessarily improve choice and/or counterplay. For a great pvp example take a look at LoL with generally 4(ONLY FOUR!) skills there is more option and counterplay in those battles than the last big "pvp" MMO's.
I hope CU will contain quite a lot of useful skills and no fillers or underused (read: non distinctive/ underpowered) skills.