I agree this is one of the major drawbacks of that wildstar has people simply do not understand the fact that more abilities = more ability to impact the game, more choices, .. LESS BUTTON MASHING (though much of this is a function of cds). Now it doesn't equal fail, but less popular for sure.
I also feel the game will level too fast (remember wow's leveling while it gained popularity was kinda slow); basically you should have to work for everything in game, if any core aspects are easy then they might as well hardly exists people like a challenge.
I will also add the lack of apparent very class specific buffs / abilities is a major negative. Now it has unquie abilities for sure just none of them seems really required to particularly useful which is just bad game design in the name of easy balance. Every game i have played that had fun classes/combat had very powerful differences between classes/specs. Bloodlust (when wow was gaining population), power/end/bubble buffs in daoc, EQ too many, etc. The current theory is well allow any mixe of player to win or any mix of the trinity to be the same (close to) but thats a bad idea largely created by the 4-5 man group sizes. Until mmo dev.s understand this mmos will not overcome the existing giants. (Look at it this way the market share is larger than ever, but games haven't even approched the market share % they used too , some of this is competition but not all of it). I guess games now don't require effot, they only have awful treadmills at end game of farming instances for seals or w/e - thats not game design thats game bandaid.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
I also prefer about 15 active abilities, but I am fine with WildStar's eight. But right now they have 30 abilities to chose from, and since all classes are hybrids if you want to play a dps for example, you will have a really limited set of abilities to chose from. That is my problem with the system. If you had like 50 abilities to chose from, and could have only 8 active I wouldn't mind. But right now there are 30 to chose from and only 8 active, which to me is a problem.
But WildStar does a way better job than ESO in this department.
In other words Wildstar will fail cause it's not doing what you want. Yes... the amount of active skills a player can have is a great indicator of a successful game. Good grief... If Wildstar is going to fail, it'll fail for other reasons. It's silly to try attribute a games success to the number of active skills.
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed: And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!" ~Lord George Gordon Byron
Well seeing as how in wildstar the way you set up your bar makes your spec
If you play a stalker and want to dps you will build your bar for your prefered dps build, say half way threw the raid a tank has to bail. You get out of combat and change up your bars to defense abilities and you are now a tank. Allowing all the skills to be on the task bar would IMO ruin the way wildstar is doing its trinity and in turn ruin the combat as a whole.
the more you bring in action bars the more people will simply macro themselves into rotations. ill use my own play experience as a example.
I play Rift and TSW at the moment.
Basic Rotation
TSW rotation is 3 buttons
Rift I use macros to make my rotation 2 buttons
TSW 3 Rift 2
Situational
TSW I have 5 buttons that do different things to save my ass when nessessary.
Rift, My heals are all macroed to one button and my buffs stay on me for a hour so I only need to use them hourly.
my reactive attacks are macroed to my builder so they don't take up a extra button. I have a Interrupt that holds its only slot because all interrupts hold the same cooldown together.
TSW 8 Rift 4
That being said if I were to stretch these abilities out by removing macros, I would have a full action bar for my basic rotation.
So for people who want the completxity of multiple skill bars, it will quickly turn itself into 4 buttons anyways. so why not just cut out the middle man and use a Build system. My builder macro uses a good 5 or 6 attacks and my finisher alternates between 5 different ones on cooldowns. And if you use the passives system TSW has you can have your basic attack cause the same status effects that you would normally do by mashing 5 abilities togeather. thus if you use a single weapon system instead of TSW's Dual weapon system, you can turn the fight into a 2 button similar to a macro system and then have 6 abilities for situationals.
Because i can. I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out. Logic every gamers worst enemy.
So let's see. You are basing the fact most of those games have a limited skillbar to be the reason they aren't as succesfull as WoW while still have a reasonable player base but just not as of that huge size which most likely no new mmo will ever have.
What have we seen up till now from Wildstar? Up to maximum of level 15! There were quite a few skills available when they checked those skill menus to select abilities. Yet here are you complaining about lack of skills while you haven't actually seen more then the first 15 levels unless you're of course part of the beta and leveled far past it and just using it to check out the game instead of looking for bugs.
I played games with 9 bars full of skills and games with 1 bar max. I must say that out of those 9 bars more then often you only use limited abilties anyway and why? 90% of those skills do the same thing just less efficient.
All in all complaining about skills without any pure knowledge besides the fact you can rotate your skills outside of combat and no clue on the max amount of abilties available is near useless.
From what ive seen of the abilities in Wildstar is that they sit close to a 6/8 grid (if memory serves me) which does give us a good amount of abilities to choose from. I am personally with the group for 8 skill limit with 50+ to choose from.
Because i can. I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out. Logic every gamers worst enemy.
Originally posted by fantasyfreak112 Agree with OP. Part of the reason GW2 got boring so fast was the lack of usable abilities made the gameplay dry up faster then Joan Rivers. No idea why companies think this is a good feature to copy. Sick of every other new game having a cheesy dodge roll too. It isn't even used to dodge, it's just a cheesy 1 second immunity whether you roll right into the attack or not.
i would completely disagree with you.
the problem, imo, with gw2 was not the number of abilities, but infact much larger things.
1. no pure healers, the reason the holy trinity has been around so long is because it appeals to such a large amount of people, it gives everyone something they prefer doing, remove that and you destroy 1/5th of your consumers.
2. most of the classes feel too similar. people want things to really stand out, but alot of the classes feel like M&M's. different colors, same taste.
3. poor endgame, pvp and pve content were both released too slow. same mistake warhammer made.
even after all this a ton of people still play gw2 though, but i positive that it wasnt the limited action set that hindered them, it was the other much larger aspects of the game that did. also, i have a theory that many people have a preference for slightly lighter and more cartoony graphics. something about them soothes people and makes them prefer to play, check the interview or world of warcraft in general if you want some proof of that. my theory is darker, more realistic graphics cause people to be slightly more depressed than lighter brighter graphics, something like comparing people who dont get much sunlight and not even vitamin D, they have depression. just my theory though.
I agree with both of you to a degree. It was not that there were no pure healers its that dps skills seem to be the only ones that scale in a meaningful way. All the interesting non pure dps skills are basically gimped. CC, healing either traditional or Vampirism, if it looked like a fun build the stats were going to be gimped. So you didn't have control Hunters, Heal spec engineers, Vampire Necros or Resurrection builds. None that were that useful anyway. That is why along with similar AOE/instacast skill spam for every class that they all pretty much felt the same.
Limited skills on the bar is not that bad as long as you have diversity of choice. GW2 has a few handful of skills divided into basically a handful of skill types per class and If I turned it into a skill tree it would be even more limited or almost the same as what MOP now refers to as a "skill tree". DCUO and the Now dead mmo Chronicles of Spellborn did do action combat right in my view, combos, multiple talent, skill, movement trees, rotating skill bars and action based attacks that work off latent and non latent skills. They also did not gimp CC and healing to make "balancing" easier. GW2 didn't supplement the small skill bar with anything to make it interesting and add to complexity. Easy to learn is one thing but it cannot also be easy to master.
the more you bring in action bars the more people will simply macro themselves into rotations. ill use my own play experience as a example.
I play Rift and TSW at the moment.
Basic Rotation
TSW rotation is 3 buttons
Rift I use macros to make my rotation 2 buttons
TSW 3 Rift 2
Situational
TSW I have 5 buttons that do different things to save my ass when nessessary.
Rift, My heals are all macroed to one button and my buffs stay on me for a hour so I only need to use them hourly.
my reactive attacks are macroed to my builder so they don't take up a extra button. I have a Interrupt that holds its only slot because all interrupts hold the same cooldown together.
TSW 8 Rift 4
That being said if I were to stretch these abilities out by removing macros, I would have a full action bar for my basic rotation.
So for people who want the completxity of multiple skill bars, it will quickly turn itself into 4 buttons anyways. so why not just cut out the middle man and use a Build system. My builder macro uses a good 5 or 6 attacks and my finisher alternates between 5 different ones on cooldowns. And if you use the passives system TSW has you can have your basic attack cause the same status effects that you would normally do by mashing 5 abilities togeather. thus if you use a single weapon system instead of TSW's Dual weapon system, you can turn the fight into a 2 button similar to a macro system and then have 6 abilities for situationals.
Bingo. As you have probably seen from the responses from the OP and other supporters, you will see that they don't use macros because they enjoy the illusion of depth that many buttons provides. But this doesn't actually make the combat deep, usually quite the opposite.
the more you bring in action bars the more people will simply macro themselves into rotations. ill use my own play experience as a example.
I play Rift and TSW at the moment.
Basic Rotation
TSW rotation is 3 buttons
Rift I use macros to make my rotation 2 buttons
TSW 3 Rift 2
Situational
TSW I have 5 buttons that do different things to save my ass when nessessary.
Rift, My heals are all macroed to one button and my buffs stay on me for a hour so I only need to use them hourly.
my reactive attacks are macroed to my builder so they don't take up a extra button. I have a Interrupt that holds its only slot because all interrupts hold the same cooldown together.
TSW 8 Rift 4
That being said if I were to stretch these abilities out by removing macros, I would have a full action bar for my basic rotation.
So for people who want the completxity of multiple skill bars, it will quickly turn itself into 4 buttons anyways. so why not just cut out the middle man and use a Build system. My builder macro uses a good 5 or 6 attacks and my finisher alternates between 5 different ones on cooldowns. And if you use the passives system TSW has you can have your basic attack cause the same status effects that you would normally do by mashing 5 abilities togeather. thus if you use a single weapon system instead of TSW's Dual weapon system, you can turn the fight into a 2 button similar to a macro system and then have 6 abilities for situationals.
Lets make this clear, since you seem to ignore everything I have written in this thread.
1) Macroing combat rotatitions etc-- is an optional way of making the game easier than it was intended to be. Just because people decide to use this system as a shortcut in no way means that macroing is the status quo or the game doesn't have more depth by giving the player more choices in active combat. It is the equivalent to someone only choosing an easy difficulty in a single player game and then complaining that the game is too easy to complete when other modes of gameplay are much harder.
Therefore, if macroing is the issue, criticise macroing and stop including it in this thread since it is irrelevant to the OP. This thread is proof that there are a lot of people on mmorpg.com with very limited critical thinking skills, using such flawed logic repeatedly when it has been pointed out to be wrong in numerous ways.
2) TSW - gives you 7 active abilities that have absolutely little to no depth or complexity advantage over most abilities in Wow (outside of some of the RP fluff abilities). You are mistakenly claiming that in addition to reducing the number of skills down to 7, that the skills are some how so deep and special that abilities in a game like Wow pale in comparison. You might have a point if that were the case, but sadly it is not. Please give examples of active skills that are any different than what I can find in a game such as wow? I played TSW and found nothing original or improved in that regard, same old DPS moves, Dots, etc etc that I can find in Wow but with horrible animations. The builder/finisher mechanic is not unique either or inovative in the sense i t justifies giving the player less than 1/3 as many active abilities in combat.
3) The skill rotation thing is another flawed argument you are making. I never asked for that in the OP, you seem to imply that in order to have more than 6-8 skills you have to have some long attack chain that involves pressing 1, then 2, then 3, then 4 then 5 etc in that order. It is entirely possible to create a game that doesn''t involve that type of attack rotation and still uses 15-20 active skills. I am talking about making the user choose between different attacks depending on the situation. One attack might work well against a healer when standing behind them, one might work well against a tank who is holding a shield, I could even have 3-4 dodge defensive moves that when timed properly work differently depending on what type of attack is used against you. If I have multiple skills to choose from, and have to mix things up or else deal/take considerably less DPS, there is definitely an increase in player skill involved by having more abilities available.
4) I could care less if all the 15-20 abilities are on multiple hotbars or not, they can easily increase the number of active combat abilities and use some sort of hotbar swapping mechanism etc to get rid of screen clutter and provide more active abilities. So people really need to stop acting like having an increased number of abilities necessarily means a huge increase in screen clutter.
the more you bring in action bars the more people will simply macro themselves into rotations. ill use my own play experience as a example.
I play Rift and TSW at the moment.
Basic Rotation
TSW rotation is 3 buttons
Rift I use macros to make my rotation 2 buttons
TSW 3 Rift 2
Situational
TSW I have 5 buttons that do different things to save my ass when nessessary.
Rift, My heals are all macroed to one button and my buffs stay on me for a hour so I only need to use them hourly.
my reactive attacks are macroed to my builder so they don't take up a extra button. I have a Interrupt that holds its only slot because all interrupts hold the same cooldown together.
TSW 8 Rift 4
That being said if I were to stretch these abilities out by removing macros, I would have a full action bar for my basic rotation.
So for people who want the completxity of multiple skill bars, it will quickly turn itself into 4 buttons anyways. so why not just cut out the middle man and use a Build system. My builder macro uses a good 5 or 6 attacks and my finisher alternates between 5 different ones on cooldowns. And if you use the passives system TSW has you can have your basic attack cause the same status effects that you would normally do by mashing 5 abilities togeather. thus if you use a single weapon system instead of TSW's Dual weapon system, you can turn the fight into a 2 button similar to a macro system and then have 6 abilities for situationals.
Bingo. As you have probably seen from the responses from the OP and other supporters, you will see that they don't use macros because they enjoy the illusion of depth that many buttons provides. But this doesn't actually make the combat deep, usually quite the opposite.
Wrong, reading your posts people should realize that having limited active abilities gives players the illusion that these limited abilities are some how more meaningful than abilities in a game with more active options. In reality, I haven't seen much innovation at all in that regard in the last 10 years. A few games have added a block move and a builder/finisher mechanic such as DCU, but these are very subtle differences, more of a slight refinement in existing systems than something that justifies limiting options. If the whole combat system in modern mmos changed dramatically you may have a point. With the some what limited type of combat in modern mmos, the extra abilities are needed to add depth. If people choose to circumvent this depth by using a macro, that is there choice, but that does not make the actual combat/gameplay any less deep.
But the real reason most of you prefer the new dumbed down action combat is due to overplaying. When you sit there playing 4-8 hours in a stretch non-stop it probably does become tedious and you prefer an auto-pilot style system that is less stressful on the hands and wrists. Your average mmorpg player does not have that sort of time to play video games, and plays more for the fun but for limited periods of time.
The number of hotbar slots available has NOTHING to do with the overall enjoyment of a combat system. A combat system is enjoyable because it's, well fun....
Honestly, from what I've seen, combat is the least of my worries about WildStar.
Originally posted by Mad+Dog Im old, I only want 5 abilities max. 4 for each finger and 1 for my thumb
These two gentlemen speak the truth. Most people just spam a couple of keys and the constant telegraphing has already ruined combat anyway,
Originally posted by reckoner2 But the real reason most of you prefer the new dumbed down action combat is due to overplaying.
The real reason that you want more abilities is because you want somewhere to place blame when you get rolled in Pvp, just because you can fool other people here on your real motivation, doesn't mean you are pulling the wool over everyones eyes.
You will have to deal with 8 abilities just like the other players and it's not going to be changed just because you don't know what cards the other player has in his hand. Please tell everyone here that you are rolling on a Pvp server, cause you are aren't you?
GW1 didn't exactly fail, but I and many others only played for small stretches due to the limits of the combat system. Arenanet knew this was a mjaor issue in Gw1, that is why they made a somewhat significant increase in active abilities in GW2. I applaud them, but i think they should have made a lot of the abilities not so directly linked to a specific weopon type. I think people would have played Gw2 longer with more variety in combat.
Whoah... You REALLY got that all backwards...
Limitations was NOT an issue in Guild Wars. Complexity in buildsynergy/learning curve was, and subsequently Anet felt they needed to dumb down the skillset/variation a lot for GW2. I am sorry you don't understand what made the Guild Wars skillsets/buildvariety a thing many Guild Wars veterans miss in GW2, but you are far from the only one. Some people have a really hard time dealing with games that hover outside the mold of "hotbars from hell".
We dont need casuals in our games!!! Errm... Well we DO need casuals to fund and populate our games - But the games should be all about "hardcore" because: We dont need casuals in our games!!! (repeat ad infinitum)
The most fun I had actually playing a class in wow was with my survival hunter in TBC. I think we used the 3:2 rotation then which consisted of threading two or maybe three abilities tops between autoshots to do dps. That was it. I liked it because you could get good at it and never clip an autoshot, and because you could actually watch the fight because it was all about your rhythm. There were other abilities you had which you actually got to use when the situation arose, and the situations actually did arise.
The last time I tried playing it was all about playing whackamole with cooldowns. You can get good at timing your cooldowns perfectly, by staring at them. Fucking yay, I'd play Simon Sez if I wanted to do that because that shit is at least random. There was also no call to trap or distracting shot or whatever anymore, it was just stare at cooldowns and press the right button at the correct time to collect your prize. Our space program trained monkeys to be able to do that when they were building up to manned flights. I'm not a fucking monkey, and I don't want to play a game which treats me like one.
It's more about presenting choices, in my opinion. A game with 12 abilities that has no choices is just cooldown watching.
But, just look at Neverwinter. That game has only three/four choices for encounter powers, and none of them stay off of cooldown for very long.
I played Neverwinrter for the past few days and I can see why lots of reviews say the combat is boring. I can get through a lot of content by just holding down my left and right mouse button and then double tapping to dodge every now and then when I see a red ring on the ground. If this is a fine example of "superior streamlined combat" of future mmorpgs, you are going to see a lot of failures in the near future.
And the part about cooldowns is wrong as well, even with the limited number of abilities I still had cooldowns just like in Wow.
Originally posted by reckoner2 But the real reason most of you prefer the new dumbed down action combat is due to overplaying.
The real reason that you want more abilities is because you want somewhere to place blame when you get rolled in Pvp, just because you can fool other people here on your real motivation, doesn't mean you are pulling the wool over everyones eyes.
You will have to deal with 8 abilities just like the other players and it's not going to be changed just because you don't know what cards the other player has in his hand. Please tell everyone here that you are rolling on a Pvp server, cause you are aren't you?
I knew you were.
1) I get a chuckle out of people who whine about pvp or dieing in pvp, but I am not one of them that does the whining. I could care less if I die in pvp, it happens to everyone. I prefer hardcore FFA style pvp with consequences for getting killed, but I realize I am in the minority. I actually prefer fighting people that are better geared and higher level than myself. I enjoy the challenge, and games that have more options and abilities in combat require more skill and can be more challenging (assuming AI is decent etc).
2) You are another person who has not read my posts, or else you lack reading comprehension and basic critical thinking skills. I don't mind not knowing what skills a pvp opponent brings to battle, but that has nothing to do with the total number of active abilities a character can bring to combat in a game. They could easily double those 8 skills to 16, and still retain a system like in Guildwars where you are limited in what abilities you can bring to each battle, swapping them out for different roles or tactics etc.
To simplify things for you, it means they could add an increased 16 active combat ability cap in Wildstar and still retain a system where you don't know what the other player is bringing template wise into pvp.
Is that the best you can come up with as a counter argument? Laughable if so.
GW1 didn't exactly fail, but I and many others only played for small stretches due to the limits of the combat system. Arenanet knew this was a mjaor issue in Gw1, that is why they made a somewhat significant increase in active abilities in GW2. I applaud them, but i think they should have made a lot of the abilities not so directly linked to a specific weopon type. I think people would have played Gw2 longer with more variety in combat.
Whoah... You REALLY got that all backwards...
Limitations was NOT an issue in Guild Wars. Complexity in buildsynergy/learning curve was, and subsequently Anet felt they needed to dumb down the skillset/variation a lot for GW2. I am sorry you don't understand what made the Guild Wars skillsets/buildvariety a thing many Guild Wars veterans miss in GW2, but you are far from the only one. Some people have a really hard time dealing with games that hover outside the mold of "hotbars from hell".
I understand the buildsynergy/learning curve, it was quite simple to be honest. Apparently it wasn't simple for you which says a lot about you.
Having said that, my complaint was about the actual combat itself, not the build synergy or meta game of choosing what skills to bring to combat. There is a distinction there and you seem to have missed it when replying.
GW2 actually brought more abilities to combat and the actual combat itself was more deep, even if the skill selection meta-game wasn't as deep as the one in Gw1. And again, you seem to imply having an 8 skill cap is absolutely necessary to have a system like the one in Gw1 which had build swapping and tough choices about what to bring to combat, it isn't.
As for "hotbars from hell", you missed my point entirely. There are plenty of creative ways for developers to implement an increased active ability set without forcing players to have 4-5 hotbars or a cluttered screen. They can have true dual function skills, advanced combos (maybe something like a street fighter game), weopon swapping tied to skill (like Gw2) or some sort of UI swapping to pull it off. There are plenty of ways to do it, some would work better than others.
I am fine with them toning down the total number of abilities a bit (down from game like Wow/rift/eq2 )to keep it from getting out of hand, my main point is that 8 or fewer is far far too restrictive.
Comments
I agree this is one of the major drawbacks of that wildstar has people simply do not understand the fact that more abilities = more ability to impact the game, more choices, .. LESS BUTTON MASHING (though much of this is a function of cds). Now it doesn't equal fail, but less popular for sure.
I also feel the game will level too fast (remember wow's leveling while it gained popularity was kinda slow); basically you should have to work for everything in game, if any core aspects are easy then they might as well hardly exists people like a challenge.
I will also add the lack of apparent very class specific buffs / abilities is a major negative. Now it has unquie abilities for sure just none of them seems really required to particularly useful which is just bad game design in the name of easy balance. Every game i have played that had fun classes/combat had very powerful differences between classes/specs. Bloodlust (when wow was gaining population), power/end/bubble buffs in daoc, EQ too many, etc. The current theory is well allow any mixe of player to win or any mix of the trinity to be the same (close to) but thats a bad idea largely created by the 4-5 man group sizes. Until mmo dev.s understand this mmos will not overcome the existing giants. (Look at it this way the market share is larger than ever, but games haven't even approched the market share % they used too , some of this is competition but not all of it).
I guess games now don't require effot, they only have awful treadmills at end game of farming instances for seals or w/e - thats not game design thats game bandaid.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
op: bs
from all mmos i have played, i liked the once where you had to choose a few skills from a larger set the most
30 skill mmos are done, over, 90s...deal with it
I also prefer about 15 active abilities, but I am fine with WildStar's eight. But right now they have 30 abilities to chose from, and since all classes are hybrids if you want to play a dps for example, you will have a really limited set of abilities to chose from. That is my problem with the system. If you had like 50 abilities to chose from, and could have only 8 active I wouldn't mind. But right now there are 30 to chose from and only 8 active, which to me is a problem.
But WildStar does a way better job than ESO in this department.
In other words Wildstar will fail cause it's not doing what you want. Yes... the amount of active skills a player can have is a great indicator of a successful game. Good grief... If Wildstar is going to fail, it'll fail for other reasons. It's silly to try attribute a games success to the number of active skills.
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"
~Lord George Gordon Byron
The matter is rather subjective.
Myself. I'd rather play the game instead of focusing on playing the key binds/hot bars.
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
Well seeing as how in wildstar the way you set up your bar makes your spec
If you play a stalker and want to dps you will build your bar for your prefered dps build, say half way threw the raid a tank has to bail. You get out of combat and change up your bars to defense abilities and you are now a tank. Allowing all the skills to be on the task bar would IMO ruin the way wildstar is doing its trinity and in turn ruin the combat as a whole.
15-20 ish is perfect. Any more is too many. 5-8 is too few.
1-4, Shift+1-4, Alt/Ctr+ 1-4
Q, E, F, Shift+ Q, E, F
Shift+Z and Shift+X as well as Shift+ D and Shift+ A is the setup I use.
It is the perfect, perfect setup.
You've got your 1-4 Q E F for your always use all the time abilities and shift Q E F for procs, short cooldown skills.
Shift+D and Shift+A for situational like a stun or interrupt.
Then you've got Shift+ 1-4 for longer duration cooldowns, Alt/Ctr+ 1-4 for more situational longer cooldowns.
Finally Shift+Z and Shift+X for like mounts, potions.
I could prune a couple of the Shift+1-4 or Alt+1-4 and be happy.
the more you bring in action bars the more people will simply macro themselves into rotations. ill use my own play experience as a example.
I play Rift and TSW at the moment.
Basic Rotation
TSW rotation is 3 buttons
Rift I use macros to make my rotation 2 buttons
TSW 3 Rift 2
Situational
TSW I have 5 buttons that do different things to save my ass when nessessary.
Rift, My heals are all macroed to one button and my buffs stay on me for a hour so I only need to use them hourly.
my reactive attacks are macroed to my builder so they don't take up a extra button. I have a Interrupt that holds its only slot because all interrupts hold the same cooldown together.
TSW 8 Rift 4
That being said if I were to stretch these abilities out by removing macros, I would have a full action bar for my basic rotation.
So for people who want the completxity of multiple skill bars, it will quickly turn itself into 4 buttons anyways. so why not just cut out the middle man and use a Build system. My builder macro uses a good 5 or 6 attacks and my finisher alternates between 5 different ones on cooldowns. And if you use the passives system TSW has you can have your basic attack cause the same status effects that you would normally do by mashing 5 abilities togeather. thus if you use a single weapon system instead of TSW's Dual weapon system, you can turn the fight into a 2 button similar to a macro system and then have 6 abilities for situationals.
Because i can.
I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out.
Logic every gamers worst enemy.
So let's see. You are basing the fact most of those games have a limited skillbar to be the reason they aren't as succesfull as WoW while still have a reasonable player base but just not as of that huge size which most likely no new mmo will ever have.
What have we seen up till now from Wildstar? Up to maximum of level 15! There were quite a few skills available when they checked those skill menus to select abilities. Yet here are you complaining about lack of skills while you haven't actually seen more then the first 15 levels unless you're of course part of the beta and leveled far past it and just using it to check out the game instead of looking for bugs.
I played games with 9 bars full of skills and games with 1 bar max. I must say that out of those 9 bars more then often you only use limited abilties anyway and why? 90% of those skills do the same thing just less efficient.
All in all complaining about skills without any pure knowledge besides the fact you can rotate your skills outside of combat and no clue on the max amount of abilties available is near useless.
From what ive seen of the abilities in Wildstar is that they sit close to a 6/8 grid (if memory serves me) which does give us a good amount of abilities to choose from. I am personally with the group for 8 skill limit with 50+ to choose from.
Because i can.
I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out.
Logic every gamers worst enemy.
I agree with both of you to a degree. It was not that there were no pure healers its that dps skills seem to be the only ones that scale in a meaningful way. All the interesting non pure dps skills are basically gimped. CC, healing either traditional or Vampirism, if it looked like a fun build the stats were going to be gimped. So you didn't have control Hunters, Heal spec engineers, Vampire Necros or Resurrection builds. None that were that useful anyway. That is why along with similar AOE/instacast skill spam for every class that they all pretty much felt the same.
Limited skills on the bar is not that bad as long as you have diversity of choice. GW2 has a few handful of skills divided into basically a handful of skill types per class and If I turned it into a skill tree it would be even more limited or almost the same as what MOP now refers to as a "skill tree". DCUO and the Now dead mmo Chronicles of Spellborn did do action combat right in my view, combos, multiple talent, skill, movement trees, rotating skill bars and action based attacks that work off latent and non latent skills. They also did not gimp CC and healing to make "balancing" easier. GW2 didn't supplement the small skill bar with anything to make it interesting and add to complexity. Easy to learn is one thing but it cannot also be easy to master.
Bingo. As you have probably seen from the responses from the OP and other supporters, you will see that they don't use macros because they enjoy the illusion of depth that many buttons provides. But this doesn't actually make the combat deep, usually quite the opposite.
Lets make this clear, since you seem to ignore everything I have written in this thread.
1) Macroing combat rotatitions etc-- is an optional way of making the game easier than it was intended to be. Just because people decide to use this system as a shortcut in no way means that macroing is the status quo or the game doesn't have more depth by giving the player more choices in active combat. It is the equivalent to someone only choosing an easy difficulty in a single player game and then complaining that the game is too easy to complete when other modes of gameplay are much harder.
Therefore, if macroing is the issue, criticise macroing and stop including it in this thread since it is irrelevant to the OP. This thread is proof that there are a lot of people on mmorpg.com with very limited critical thinking skills, using such flawed logic repeatedly when it has been pointed out to be wrong in numerous ways.
2) TSW - gives you 7 active abilities that have absolutely little to no depth or complexity advantage over most abilities in Wow (outside of some of the RP fluff abilities). You are mistakenly claiming that in addition to reducing the number of skills down to 7, that the skills are some how so deep and special that abilities in a game like Wow pale in comparison. You might have a point if that were the case, but sadly it is not. Please give examples of active skills that are any different than what I can find in a game such as wow? I played TSW and found nothing original or improved in that regard, same old DPS moves, Dots, etc etc that I can find in Wow but with horrible animations. The builder/finisher mechanic is not unique either or inovative in the sense i t justifies giving the player less than 1/3 as many active abilities in combat.
3) The skill rotation thing is another flawed argument you are making. I never asked for that in the OP, you seem to imply that in order to have more than 6-8 skills you have to have some long attack chain that involves pressing 1, then 2, then 3, then 4 then 5 etc in that order. It is entirely possible to create a game that doesn''t involve that type of attack rotation and still uses 15-20 active skills. I am talking about making the user choose between different attacks depending on the situation. One attack might work well against a healer when standing behind them, one might work well against a tank who is holding a shield, I could even have 3-4 dodge defensive moves that when timed properly work differently depending on what type of attack is used against you. If I have multiple skills to choose from, and have to mix things up or else deal/take considerably less DPS, there is definitely an increase in player skill involved by having more abilities available.
4) I could care less if all the 15-20 abilities are on multiple hotbars or not, they can easily increase the number of active combat abilities and use some sort of hotbar swapping mechanism etc to get rid of screen clutter and provide more active abilities. So people really need to stop acting like having an increased number of abilities necessarily means a huge increase in screen clutter.
Wrong, reading your posts people should realize that having limited active abilities gives players the illusion that these limited abilities are some how more meaningful than abilities in a game with more active options. In reality, I haven't seen much innovation at all in that regard in the last 10 years. A few games have added a block move and a builder/finisher mechanic such as DCU, but these are very subtle differences, more of a slight refinement in existing systems than something that justifies limiting options. If the whole combat system in modern mmos changed dramatically you may have a point. With the some what limited type of combat in modern mmos, the extra abilities are needed to add depth. If people choose to circumvent this depth by using a macro, that is there choice, but that does not make the actual combat/gameplay any less deep.
But the real reason most of you prefer the new dumbed down action combat is due to overplaying. When you sit there playing 4-8 hours in a stretch non-stop it probably does become tedious and you prefer an auto-pilot style system that is less stressful on the hands and wrists. Your average mmorpg player does not have that sort of time to play video games, and plays more for the fun but for limited periods of time.
These two gentlemen speak the truth. Most people just spam a couple of keys and the constant telegraphing has already ruined combat anyway,
The real reason that you want more abilities is because you want somewhere to place blame when you get rolled in Pvp, just because you can fool other people here on your real motivation, doesn't mean you are pulling the wool over everyones eyes.
You will have to deal with 8 abilities just like the other players and it's not going to be changed just because you don't know what cards the other player has in his hand. Please tell everyone here that you are rolling on a Pvp server, cause you are aren't you?
I knew you were.
Whoah... You REALLY got that all backwards...
Limitations was NOT an issue in Guild Wars. Complexity in buildsynergy/learning curve was, and subsequently Anet felt they needed to dumb down the skillset/variation a lot for GW2. I am sorry you don't understand what made the Guild Wars skillsets/buildvariety a thing many Guild Wars veterans miss in GW2, but you are far from the only one. Some people have a really hard time dealing with games that hover outside the mold of "hotbars from hell".
We dont need casuals in our games!!! Errm... Well we DO need casuals to fund and populate our games - But the games should be all about "hardcore" because: We dont need casuals in our games!!!
(repeat ad infinitum)
The most fun I had actually playing a class in wow was with my survival hunter in TBC. I think we used the 3:2 rotation then which consisted of threading two or maybe three abilities tops between autoshots to do dps. That was it. I liked it because you could get good at it and never clip an autoshot, and because you could actually watch the fight because it was all about your rhythm. There were other abilities you had which you actually got to use when the situation arose, and the situations actually did arise.
The last time I tried playing it was all about playing whackamole with cooldowns. You can get good at timing your cooldowns perfectly, by staring at them. Fucking yay, I'd play Simon Sez if I wanted to do that because that shit is at least random. There was also no call to trap or distracting shot or whatever anymore, it was just stare at cooldowns and press the right button at the correct time to collect your prize. Our space program trained monkeys to be able to do that when they were building up to manned flights. I'm not a fucking monkey, and I don't want to play a game which treats me like one.
It's more about presenting choices, in my opinion. A game with 12 abilities that has no choices is just cooldown watching.
But, just look at Neverwinter. That game has only three/four choices for encounter powers, and none of them stay off of cooldown for very long.
I played Neverwinrter for the past few days and I can see why lots of reviews say the combat is boring. I can get through a lot of content by just holding down my left and right mouse button and then double tapping to dodge every now and then when I see a red ring on the ground. If this is a fine example of "superior streamlined combat" of future mmorpgs, you are going to see a lot of failures in the near future.
And the part about cooldowns is wrong as well, even with the limited number of abilities I still had cooldowns just like in Wow.
1) I get a chuckle out of people who whine about pvp or dieing in pvp, but I am not one of them that does the whining. I could care less if I die in pvp, it happens to everyone. I prefer hardcore FFA style pvp with consequences for getting killed, but I realize I am in the minority. I actually prefer fighting people that are better geared and higher level than myself. I enjoy the challenge, and games that have more options and abilities in combat require more skill and can be more challenging (assuming AI is decent etc).
2) You are another person who has not read my posts, or else you lack reading comprehension and basic critical thinking skills. I don't mind not knowing what skills a pvp opponent brings to battle, but that has nothing to do with the total number of active abilities a character can bring to combat in a game. They could easily double those 8 skills to 16, and still retain a system like in Guildwars where you are limited in what abilities you can bring to each battle, swapping them out for different roles or tactics etc.
To simplify things for you, it means they could add an increased 16 active combat ability cap in Wildstar and still retain a system where you don't know what the other player is bringing template wise into pvp.
Is that the best you can come up with as a counter argument? Laughable if so.
I understand the buildsynergy/learning curve, it was quite simple to be honest. Apparently it wasn't simple for you which says a lot about you.
Having said that, my complaint was about the actual combat itself, not the build synergy or meta game of choosing what skills to bring to combat. There is a distinction there and you seem to have missed it when replying.
GW2 actually brought more abilities to combat and the actual combat itself was more deep, even if the skill selection meta-game wasn't as deep as the one in Gw1. And again, you seem to imply having an 8 skill cap is absolutely necessary to have a system like the one in Gw1 which had build swapping and tough choices about what to bring to combat, it isn't.
As for "hotbars from hell", you missed my point entirely. There are plenty of creative ways for developers to implement an increased active ability set without forcing players to have 4-5 hotbars or a cluttered screen. They can have true dual function skills, advanced combos (maybe something like a street fighter game), weopon swapping tied to skill (like Gw2) or some sort of UI swapping to pull it off. There are plenty of ways to do it, some would work better than others.
I am fine with them toning down the total number of abilities a bit (down from game like Wow/rift/eq2 )to keep it from getting out of hand, my main point is that 8 or fewer is far far too restrictive.