Many of the abilities in this game are very situational. It's very easy to tell what abiities are used for tanking/healing/pvp/pve etc.
For example: If you roll a SI Sorc you get healing abilities no matter what. If you're playing a dps sorc you are rarely going to need to use those abilities. You rely on your dps.
A DPS shadow/assassin isn't going to be using their taunts. A tank Juggernaut/Guardian will put away things like DPS stances and abilities that don't help them tank.
A lot of abilities for some classes are different stances or different ammo, these don't need to be keybound to be easily accessible and will rarely be activated.
It's simple really. You aren't going to need 40 abilities keybound to play the game. If you do for some reason try to use all 40 abilities all the time, well then you're doing it wrong.
There are some abilities that you will only use in PvP, and some that will be terrible for PvP.
It's up to you to determine which abilities you need for which situation you are going into. If you have any kind of mmo experience this should be easy.
Exactly this!
I played 3 classes to level 24 and in no point i found myself overwhelmed with my toons abilities. Many of them are indeed situational and you must cloose which ones to use on different occasions, you don't have to apply all of them. On my BH powertech i had 2 sets on different bars, 1 for questing and 1 for tanking in flashpoints none of them had more than 6 abilites.
At level 50 one should be able to tell which goes for what, if not then he is a bellow average player.
If your choice is do you use the blue lighting or the purple fireball to kill somthing when they both do the same damage cost the same amount of recources are virutally identical than its not a chioice. A choice needs to have a meaning, no meaning = no choice...
Belabouring the obvious. However, you'll rarely find two abilities that are exactly alike except for f/x. This is what minmaxing is all about, squeezing out that half of one percent more damage.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
All the abilities have their own unique combat animations, so if they did condense some of the abilities we would lose a lot of awesome looking combat animations. The game would end up looking like SWG-NGE, poke, poke, poke, slash, poke.
I don't mind that we have too many abilities, what bothers me is that we have way too many useless abilities, duplicate abilities or situational abilities cluttering up the hotbar rarley getting used.
All the abilities have their own unique combat animations, so if they did condense some of the abilities we would lose a lot of awesome looking combat animations. The game would end up looking like SWG-NGE, poke, poke, poke, slash, poke.
They could have instead spent that budget for animation on making it so that your dark/light side score influences the animation of attacks. So a Dark Jedi has attacks that look more similar to a Sith and a Light Sith has attacks that look more similar to a Jedi.
Or you could always have the same ability have multiple potential animations. No need for a loss of anything. That would add more variety than having 4 abilities where you just use the best one since they share a CD or whatever.
One of the main ones is that there is just way too many abilities in this game, by the late teen levels the average class gets around 2.5 bars of diffrent skills(including non-class specific/combat abilities like travel, rest, and spank!).
Combined with a horrible keybinding system and oversized UI it seems just way way too many abilities for a "non-macro/add-on" centric game.
The sheer amount of abilities is another indicator to me that that game i just not ready for release, they are hoping that that playerbase will help them to refine the amount of abilities(because some of them were just sick, like the Shadow's backstab, or the Agent's snipe in PVP..)
You aren't alone. Alot of folks feel the same way.
Almost as though Bioware is making up for the lack of massively-multiplayer content and feel with several poorly thought-out situational skills and splitting-out skills that should be combined with a core and have a % chance to activate with that core skill from the tree instead of the overly available micro skills that leaves one with playing their hot-bar as opposed to the game.
It has been suggested many many times to combine micro skills, bolster existing skills with progressively better % chance from specializing in it in the skill-tree for greater specialization and making skill trees more unique than they are. But that isn't the case.
Unfortunately as you mentioned the ui is terribad and lacks customization, combined with too many abilitities that can't be handled by the existing ui, let alone needing a 30-button mouse to micro-manage and handle what is there.
consider i payed about 40us for it on a 50% off "black friday" sale i dont think so, i had the impenetrator(?) before it and i wanted somting wireless becasue of my new desk redesign.
And i've used 4800 dpi perfectly when working with Maya
Second off, I like having a large toolset to deal with the situations that I find in the game.
If you think this is the kind of game where you can rotate the same set of abilities on every mob / group of mobs....you're doing it wrong. 1,1,4,3,1,2,1 over and again isn't going to do anything for ya.
Second off, I like having a large toolset to deal with the situations that I find in the game.
If you think this is the kind of game where you can rotate the same set of abilities on every mob / group of mobs....you're doing it wrong. 1,1,4,3,1,2,1 over and again isn't going to do anything for ya.
Oh rly? Well R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F where R was a strike and F was the force knock back worked very well on my Jedi Shadow.... during instances it was replaced with the "backstab" and that stance dependant abilty which is either a DoT in dps stance or a aggro building AOE in tank stance. and an occasional CC in form of a stun to get a mob which was running to the healer or force lift...
There is a big diffrence between a situational and reactive abilities, ToR has 0 reactive/reactional abilities you dont need to react at all to your oponent not in PVP and not in PVE you can fairly easy just use the same abilties(alltough bit diffrent ones) in PVP and PVE.
In PVP the only "situational" abilities i've had to use was force potency to increase the range of my kinetic throw to slow down runners which went out of range the 2 second dash ability to close gaps with annoying ranged classes... beyond that it was the normal mix of frontal/back hits and a stund/knockback to break casting or to annoy people.
To all those suggesting people buy a special keyboard or mouse, please stop, proper game control design means the devs should make it so it is efficient and effective to use standard PC hardware to properly play the game. (no outside hardware required)
Those other items should be for convenience only, and not impart any real advantage to players who use them. (Just my opinion)
But SWTOR isn't doing anything really new, I remember playing DAOC many years ago and it had a boggling number of abilities per class to keep track of and a poor UI made it very challenging to do so, especially if you were trying to "twist" as a Paladin or Minstrel. (+5 pts to players who know what twisting is, talk about a lost art)
As someone said, EQ2 (which I'm currently playing) has a staggering number of abilities) and I could never keybind them all without additional hardware as others say, so I end up mouse clicking many of the lesser known ones when necessary, getting pretty good at it in fact. (works well for PVE, not so much in PVP, but hey, its EQ2, not much PVP anyways)
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Second off, I like having a large toolset to deal with the situations that I find in the game.
If you think this is the kind of game where you can rotate the same set of abilities on every mob / group of mobs....you're doing it wrong. 1,1,4,3,1,2,1 over and again isn't going to do anything for ya.
Oh rly? Well R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F where R was a strike and F was the force knock back worked very well on my Jedi Shadow.... during instances it was replaced with the "backstab" and that stance dependant abilty which is either a DoT in dps stance or a aggro building AOE in tank stance. and an occasional CC in form of a stun to get a mob which was running to the healer or force lift...
There is a big diffrence between a situational and reactive abilities, ToR has 0 reactive/reactional abilities you dont need to react at all to your oponent not in PVP and not in PVE you can fairly easy just use the same abilties(alltough bit diffrent ones) in PVP and PVE.
In PVP the only "situational" abilities i've had to use was force potency to increase the range of my kinetic throw to slow down runners which went out of range the 2 second dash ability to close gaps with annoying ranged classes... beyond that it was the normal mix of frontal/back hits and a stund/knockback to break casting or to annoy people.
Ya rly. You're not playing your class to it's full potential if you're only using a few abilities.
At level 30+ especailly, it is important to know the proper application of your skillset, and make full use of them.
And if you're using the same few abilities in PVP, you're going to get stomped on.....just sayin'.
To all those suggesting people buy a special keyboard or mouse, please stop, proper game control design means the devs should make it so it is efficient and effective to use standard PC hardware to properly play the game. (no outside hardware required)
Those other items should be for convenience only, and not impart any real advantage to players who use them. (Just my opinion)
But SWTOR isn't doing anything really new, I remember playing DAOC many years ago and it had a boggling number of abilities per class to keep track of and a poor UI made it very challenging to do so, especially if you were trying to "twist" as a Paladin or Minstrel. (+5 pts to players who know what twisting is, talk about a lost art)
As someone said, EQ2 (which I'm currently playing) has a staggering number of abilities) and I could never keybind them all without additional hardware as others say, so I end up mouse clicking many of the lesser known ones when necessary, getting pretty good at it in fact. (works well for PVE, not so much in PVP, but hey, its EQ2, not much PVP anyways)
Its a sad day for game design if 100+ key on a keyboard is not enough for a game...
If you think SWTOR has "too many abilities" then you shouldn't try any other of the past-popular MMOs from old. SWTOR has so few abilities it's laughable. The game is too simplified, and offers no differentiable choices from everyone else's build :'(.
ps: Please don't use their WoW-copied "Talent" system as an example of complexity, it's too simplistic to be anything more than a joke to me, thank you.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity: Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
I don't agree, and while I won't retort to "L2P noob", I do think this is a player related issue. The keybinding system is nothing special, it certainly doesn't rise above the average, but it isn't horrible either. In a way, TOR goes back to older MMO's with this setup.
In vanilla WoW, I had all number keys from "1" up until "-" bound, all keys from "F1" to "F12" (didn't need to select group members as a DPS, clicked that) and most of the keypad. It worked just fine with those 30 and then some abilities.
You never use everything on your screen in one fight, a great player knows when to use what.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
If you think SWTOR has "too many abilities" then you shouldn't try any other of the past-popular MMOs from old. SWTOR has so few abilities it's laughable. The game is too simplified, and offers no differentiable choices from everyone else's build :'(.
ps: Please don't use their WoW-copied "Talent" system as an example of complexity, it's too simplistic to be anything more than a joke to me, thank you.
I've got three completely full hotbars. That seems like plenty to me. Just enough for 1-0, shift 1-0, and ctrl 1-0.
Also, if you think there's no difference in builds, I dunno what to tell you. Try tanking with a Powertech specced for Pyrotech, or as an Assassin specced for Madness. Let me know how that works out for ya.
Second off, I like having a large toolset to deal with the situations that I find in the game.
If you think this is the kind of game where you can rotate the same set of abilities on every mob / group of mobs....you're doing it wrong. 1,1,4,3,1,2,1 over and again isn't going to do anything for ya.
Oh rly? Well R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F where R was a strike and F was the force knock back worked very well on my Jedi Shadow.... during instances it was replaced with the "backstab" and that stance dependant abilty which is either a DoT in dps stance or a aggro building AOE in tank stance. and an occasional CC in form of a stun to get a mob which was running to the healer or force lift...
There is a big diffrence between a situational and reactive abilities, ToR has 0 reactive/reactional abilities you dont need to react at all to your oponent not in PVP and not in PVE you can fairly easy just use the same abilties(alltough bit diffrent ones) in PVP and PVE.
In PVP the only "situational" abilities i've had to use was force potency to increase the range of my kinetic throw to slow down runners which went out of range the 2 second dash ability to close gaps with annoying ranged classes... beyond that it was the normal mix of frontal/back hits and a stund/knockback to break casting or to annoy people.
Ya rly. You're not playing your class to it's full potential if you're only using a few abilities.
At level 30+ especailly, it is important to know the proper application of your skillset, and make full use of them.
And if you're using the same few abilities in PVP, you're going to get stomped on.....just sayin'.
Actually you are, at the end of the day all of your main role abilties will be counted as dps(or hps) per resource + auto-attack fillers.
I haven't reached 30+ but i've PVP'ed quite a bit and did get stopmed, use stun/slow/interupt when needed use a cc breaker if you got stranded and CCed, and for the rest? 1 damage abilitie + 1 resource builder/free spam abilties, full potential my rear mass...
Second off, I like having a large toolset to deal with the situations that I find in the game.
If you think this is the kind of game where you can rotate the same set of abilities on every mob / group of mobs....you're doing it wrong. 1,1,4,3,1,2,1 over and again isn't going to do anything for ya.
Oh rly? Well R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F where R was a strike and F was the force knock back worked very well on my Jedi Shadow.... during instances it was replaced with the "backstab" and that stance dependant abilty which is either a DoT in dps stance or a aggro building AOE in tank stance. and an occasional CC in form of a stun to get a mob which was running to the healer or force lift...
There is a big diffrence between a situational and reactive abilities, ToR has 0 reactive/reactional abilities you dont need to react at all to your oponent not in PVP and not in PVE you can fairly easy just use the same abilties(alltough bit diffrent ones) in PVP and PVE.
In PVP the only "situational" abilities i've had to use was force potency to increase the range of my kinetic throw to slow down runners which went out of range the 2 second dash ability to close gaps with annoying ranged classes... beyond that it was the normal mix of frontal/back hits and a stund/knockback to break casting or to annoy people.
Ya rly. You're not playing your class to it's full potential if you're only using a few abilities.
At level 30+ especailly, it is important to know the proper application of your skillset, and make full use of them.
And if you're using the same few abilities in PVP, you're going to get stomped on.....just sayin'.
Actually you are, at the end of the day all of your main role abilties will be counted as dps(or hps) per resource + auto-attack fillers.
I haven't reached 30+ but i've PVP'ed quite a bit and did get stopmed, use stun/slow/interupt when needed use a cc breaker if you got stranded and CCed, and for the rest? 1 damage abilitie + 1 resource builder/free spam abilties, full potential my rear mass...
Ok. Feel free to ignore advice given by someone people who have been playing for several months, and have actually gotten to the higher levels.
Not my loss.
I used to get a kick out of people who spammed one or two buttons in fighting games too, while getting their arses beat by people using combos, timing, and practice. Same applies here.
I don't agree, and while I won't retort to "L2P noob", I do think this is a player related issue. The keybinding system is nothing special, it certainly doesn't rise above the average, but it isn't horrible either. In a way, TOR goes back to older MMO's with this setup.
In vanilla WoW, I had all number keys from "1" up until "-" bound, all keys from "F1" to "F12" (didn't need to select group members as a DPS, clicked that) and most of the keypad. It worked just fine with those 30 and then some abilities.
You never use everything on your screen in one fight, a great player knows when to use what.
Again you are confusing sheer amount with complexity, i have a wow NA account with the stupid pink honor tabard, WoW's PVP system especially during vanilla was well - lol grind, especially for certian classes like rogues :P
ah the fun of doing WSG with a green whelp armor and watching people fall a sleep for a year... i prefer to use the correct ability as a reaction to what the player is doing, to combo various abilties in order to counter the opponents move, having 3 hot bars beyond showing a very primitive game design is nothing complicated, i have a decent keyboard i can bind every button to be activated by my ear if it wanted too, but it doesnt makes the game neither complex, nor challenging.
It's the same thing that happend to FPS games since UT/Q3A when they removed skill shots and crazy high speed strafing and added weapon mods and flashbangs... Is COD a harder game than UT or Q3A? not even close, except the new tribes(and the dead UT game) Halo is the one that comes closest to the old school fast paced shooters, but sadly its plauged by aim console aim assists and very bad mouth players.
Take pen and paper RPG's how many skill your char had? take MOBA games... you can create a deep combat systems from a low amount of abilties by using abiltiy combinations and reactive situational abilties... your opponent is trying to block? hit a combo to attempt to break the block. your opponent charges you in frenzy? hit a counter attack combo.. for that you dont need 40 abilties, and that type of combat will be much more engaging and intersting than press X to do 578 damage + weapon damage...
Second off, I like having a large toolset to deal with the situations that I find in the game.
If you think this is the kind of game where you can rotate the same set of abilities on every mob / group of mobs....you're doing it wrong. 1,1,4,3,1,2,1 over and again isn't going to do anything for ya.
Oh rly? Well R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F where R was a strike and F was the force knock back worked very well on my Jedi Shadow.... during instances it was replaced with the "backstab" and that stance dependant abilty which is either a DoT in dps stance or a aggro building AOE in tank stance. and an occasional CC in form of a stun to get a mob which was running to the healer or force lift...
There is a big diffrence between a situational and reactive abilities, ToR has 0 reactive/reactional abilities you dont need to react at all to your oponent not in PVP and not in PVE you can fairly easy just use the same abilties(alltough bit diffrent ones) in PVP and PVE.
In PVP the only "situational" abilities i've had to use was force potency to increase the range of my kinetic throw to slow down runners which went out of range the 2 second dash ability to close gaps with annoying ranged classes... beyond that it was the normal mix of frontal/back hits and a stund/knockback to break casting or to annoy people.
Ya rly. You're not playing your class to it's full potential if you're only using a few abilities.
At level 30+ especailly, it is important to know the proper application of your skillset, and make full use of them.
And if you're using the same few abilities in PVP, you're going to get stomped on.....just sayin'.
Actually you are, at the end of the day all of your main role abilties will be counted as dps(or hps) per resource + auto-attack fillers.
I haven't reached 30+ but i've PVP'ed quite a bit and did get stopmed, use stun/slow/interupt when needed use a cc breaker if you got stranded and CCed, and for the rest? 1 damage abilitie + 1 resource builder/free spam abilties, full potential my rear mass...
Ok. Feel free to ignore advice given by someone people who have been playing for several months, and have actually gotten to the higher levels.
Not my loss.
I used to get a kick out of people who spammed one or two buttons in fighting games too, while getting their arses beat by people using combos, timing, and practice. Same applies here.
It's not about the "advice" its about the fact that ToR has 0 reactinal abilties, and no abilty chaining/combination to speak of(and no stun + backstub doesnt count, or needed in a game with no collision just ghost trough and do a 180_, you saying it's not a cycle based game at 30+ when it's one at 20+ is quite unrealistic.
Show one video doesnt matter if it's PVP or PVE where some one uses more than 5 abilties in every givven fight, i havent seen it, and honestly havent needed to use more than that either. The jedi shadow seems to have a very simple PVE rotation, the Operative seems to have a simple one too, so saying well it changes at 30+ with out any explanation doesn't cut it in my book.
Again you are confusing sheer amount with complexity, i have a wow NA account with the stupid pink honor tabard, WoW's PVP system especially during vanilla was well - lol grind, especially for certian classes like rogues :P
ah the fun of doing WSG with a green whelp armor and watching people fall a sleep for a year... i prefer to use the correct ability as a reaction to what the player is doing, to combo various abilties in order to counter the opponents move, having 3 hot bars beyond showing a very primitive game design is nothing complicated, i have a decent keyboard i can bind every button to be activated by my ear if it wanted too, but it doesnt makes the game neither complex, nor challenging.
It's the same thing that happend to FPS games since UT/Q3A when they removed skill shots and crazy high speed strafing and added weapon mods and flashbangs... Is COD a harder game than UT or Q3A? not even close, except the new tribes(and the dead UT game) Halo is the one that comes closest to the old school fast paced shooters, but sadly its plauged by aim console aim assists and very bad mouth players.
Take pen and paper RPG's how many skill your char had? take MOBA games... you can create a deep combat systems from a low amount of abilties by using abiltiy combinations and reactive situational abilties... your opponent is trying to block? hit a combo to attempt to break the block. your opponent charges you in frenzy? hit a counter attack combo.. for that you dont need 40 abilties, and that type of combat will be much more engaging and intersting than press X to do 578 damage + weapon damage...
Sorry, but I find most of what you just said rather irrelevant, we're not talking about WoW's grind here (which I admit was there).
And TOR isn't an action hack&slash type of game that has the system you described (it never will), we've known that for ages. There are plenty of MMO's with a lower amount of skills, like the original guild wars. I know some people like that system better, I don't, because I find it repetitive.
It isn't a problem of the game, it's a player issue (whether simply disliking this system or not coping with it efficiently).
At level 20, like you, I found myself having a rather large number of abilities on my sniper. So what do you do?
First, you start to sort the abilities, and place the ones that you always use and that are off cooldown frequently in an easy spot.
Then you look at the ones you will only use in a certain situation and place those further off (like adrenaline probe, which you only use to recover energy once in a while).
Thirdly, you put those abilities that are on long cooldowns in their own secluded little area (or use a modifier like shift+... if you like that better).
Then you put the extremely situational or consumables / fluff away on your keypad or something.
TOR really isn't the only game that follows this exact same procedure: WoW, EQ, WAR, RIFT, ... all require you to cope with a large number of abilities. It's definitely not a problem with the game.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Second off, I like having a large toolset to deal with the situations that I find in the game.
If you think this is the kind of game where you can rotate the same set of abilities on every mob / group of mobs....you're doing it wrong. 1,1,4,3,1,2,1 over and again isn't going to do anything for ya.
Oh rly? Well R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F where R was a strike and F was the force knock back worked very well on my Jedi Shadow.... during instances it was replaced with the "backstab" and that stance dependant abilty which is either a DoT in dps stance or a aggro building AOE in tank stance. and an occasional CC in form of a stun to get a mob which was running to the healer or force lift...
There is a big diffrence between a situational and reactive abilities, ToR has 0 reactive/reactional abilities you dont need to react at all to your oponent not in PVP and not in PVE you can fairly easy just use the same abilties(alltough bit diffrent ones) in PVP and PVE.
In PVP the only "situational" abilities i've had to use was force potency to increase the range of my kinetic throw to slow down runners which went out of range the 2 second dash ability to close gaps with annoying ranged classes... beyond that it was the normal mix of frontal/back hits and a stund/knockback to break casting or to annoy people.
Ya rly. You're not playing your class to it's full potential if you're only using a few abilities.
At level 30+ especailly, it is important to know the proper application of your skillset, and make full use of them.
And if you're using the same few abilities in PVP, you're going to get stomped on.....just sayin'.
Actually you are, at the end of the day all of your main role abilties will be counted as dps(or hps) per resource + auto-attack fillers.
I haven't reached 30+ but i've PVP'ed quite a bit and did get stopmed, use stun/slow/interupt when needed use a cc breaker if you got stranded and CCed, and for the rest? 1 damage abilitie + 1 resource builder/free spam abilties, full potential my rear mass...
Ok. Feel free to ignore advice given by someone people who have been playing for several months, and have actually gotten to the higher levels.
Not my loss.
I used to get a kick out of people who spammed one or two buttons in fighting games too, while getting their arses beat by people using combos, timing, and practice. Same applies here.
It's not about the "advice" its about the fact that ToR has 0 reactinal abilties, and no abilty chaining/combination to speak of(and no stun + backstub doesnt count, or needed in a game with no collision just ghost trough and do a 180_, you saying it's not a cycle based game at 30+ when it's one at 20+ is quite unrealistic.
Show one video doesnt matter if it's PVP or PVE where some one uses more than 5 abilties in every givven fight, i havent seen it, and honestly havent needed to use more than that either. The jedi shadow seems to have a very simple PVE rotation, the Operative seems to have a simple one too, so saying well it changes at 30+ with out any explanation doesn't cut it in my book.
1: I don't need an ability to "light up" when it's time to use it. Many of the abilities I have can be used in the way that traditional "reactive" abilities are used, but I don't feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole in the process.
2: just because abilities don't light up after another abilitiy is used doesn't mean that you can't chain / combo abilities. You just have to do the thinking yourself. You have to be creative. I chain abilities together all the time, and not always in the same combo / chain.
3: if you're trying to use the same cycle over and again....you're cutting yourself short.
4: I don't live on youtube.
I have given examples of good combos to use with Power Tech in some of my other posts. You just need to get creative with the skills that you are given, and respond to each situation as it happens, instead of trying to use the same set of abilities over and again, and expecting the game to tell you what skills to chain together.
As an example (once again using powertech), Death From Above to aoe / knockdown a group of mobs, followed as you land by explosive dart on the center most mob, followed as they are all getting up by a rocket to the same mob, which launches him into the air over the heads of the rest....the AOE from the explosive dart detonating should finish off the entire group, but if there is one left you can use grapple to pull him into a rocket-punch, or maybe jet boost into the group and use flamesweep to finish them off.
Using a combo / chain in this way, you will take very little damage (if any) and take down the group quickly and efficiently (not to mention that it's FUN!) Certainly much better than spamming three attacks over and again.
I certainly prefer this to abilities that can ONLY be used once certain conditions are met.
Comments
Exactly this!
I played 3 classes to level 24 and in no point i found myself overwhelmed with my toons abilities. Many of them are indeed situational and you must cloose which ones to use on different occasions, you don't have to apply all of them. On my BH powertech i had 2 sets on different bars, 1 for questing and 1 for tanking in flashpoints none of them had more than 6 abilites.
At level 50 one should be able to tell which goes for what, if not then he is a bellow average player.
Belabouring the obvious. However, you'll rarely find two abilities that are exactly alike except for f/x. This is what minmaxing is all about, squeezing out that half of one percent more damage.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
All the abilities have their own unique combat animations, so if they did condense some of the abilities we would lose a lot of awesome looking combat animations. The game would end up looking like SWG-NGE, poke, poke, poke, slash, poke.
I don't mind that we have too many abilities, what bothers me is that we have way too many useless abilities, duplicate abilities or situational abilities cluttering up the hotbar rarley getting used.
They could have instead spent that budget for animation on making it so that your dark/light side score influences the animation of attacks. So a Dark Jedi has attacks that look more similar to a Sith and a Light Sith has attacks that look more similar to a Jedi.
Or you could always have the same ability have multiple potential animations. No need for a loss of anything. That would add more variety than having 4 abilities where you just use the best one since they share a CD or whatever.
Razer Naga
You aren't alone. Alot of folks feel the same way.
Almost as though Bioware is making up for the lack of massively-multiplayer content and feel with several poorly thought-out situational skills and splitting-out skills that should be combined with a core and have a % chance to activate with that core skill from the tree instead of the overly available micro skills that leaves one with playing their hot-bar as opposed to the game.
It has been suggested many many times to combine micro skills, bolster existing skills with progressively better % chance from specializing in it in the skill-tree for greater specialization and making skill trees more unique than they are. But that isn't the case.
Unfortunately as you mentioned the ui is terribad and lacks customization, combined with too many abilitities that can't be handled by the existing ui, let alone needing a 30-button mouse to micro-manage and handle what is there.
Sorry when i spend +100 US on a mouse i prefer not to buy an overpriced version of this:
I have a Razer Lycoss and a Mamaba, i love them my GF has the naga molten it just not comforitble and usless for other games
Well unless you are a cyborg and use 6400dpi you just wasted money on mamba.
consider i payed about 40us for it on a 50% off "black friday" sale i dont think so, i had the impenetrator(?) before it and i wanted somting wireless becasue of my new desk redesign.
And i've used 4800 dpi perfectly when working with Maya
First off:
Razer Naga
Second off, I like having a large toolset to deal with the situations that I find in the game.
If you think this is the kind of game where you can rotate the same set of abilities on every mob / group of mobs....you're doing it wrong. 1,1,4,3,1,2,1 over and again isn't going to do anything for ya.
Oh rly? Well R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F+R+R+R+F where R was a strike and F was the force knock back worked very well on my Jedi Shadow.... during instances it was replaced with the "backstab" and that stance dependant abilty which is either a DoT in dps stance or a aggro building AOE in tank stance. and an occasional CC in form of a stun to get a mob which was running to the healer or force lift...
There is a big diffrence between a situational and reactive abilities, ToR has 0 reactive/reactional abilities you dont need to react at all to your oponent not in PVP and not in PVE you can fairly easy just use the same abilties(alltough bit diffrent ones) in PVP and PVE.
In PVP the only "situational" abilities i've had to use was force potency to increase the range of my kinetic throw to slow down runners which went out of range the 2 second dash ability to close gaps with annoying ranged classes... beyond that it was the normal mix of frontal/back hits and a stund/knockback to break casting or to annoy people.
To all those suggesting people buy a special keyboard or mouse, please stop, proper game control design means the devs should make it so it is efficient and effective to use standard PC hardware to properly play the game. (no outside hardware required)
Those other items should be for convenience only, and not impart any real advantage to players who use them. (Just my opinion)
But SWTOR isn't doing anything really new, I remember playing DAOC many years ago and it had a boggling number of abilities per class to keep track of and a poor UI made it very challenging to do so, especially if you were trying to "twist" as a Paladin or Minstrel. (+5 pts to players who know what twisting is, talk about a lost art)
As someone said, EQ2 (which I'm currently playing) has a staggering number of abilities) and I could never keybind them all without additional hardware as others say, so I end up mouse clicking many of the lesser known ones when necessary, getting pretty good at it in fact. (works well for PVE, not so much in PVP, but hey, its EQ2, not much PVP anyways)
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Ya rly. You're not playing your class to it's full potential if you're only using a few abilities.
At level 30+ especailly, it is important to know the proper application of your skillset, and make full use of them.
And if you're using the same few abilities in PVP, you're going to get stomped on.....just sayin'.
Its a sad day for game design if 100+ key on a keyboard is not enough for a game...
If you think SWTOR has "too many abilities" then you shouldn't try any other of the past-popular MMOs from old. SWTOR has so few abilities it's laughable. The game is too simplified, and offers no differentiable choices from everyone else's build :'(.
ps: Please don't use their WoW-copied "Talent" system as an example of complexity, it's too simplistic to be anything more than a joke to me, thank you.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
I don't agree, and while I won't retort to "L2P noob", I do think this is a player related issue. The keybinding system is nothing special, it certainly doesn't rise above the average, but it isn't horrible either. In a way, TOR goes back to older MMO's with this setup.
In vanilla WoW, I had all number keys from "1" up until "-" bound, all keys from "F1" to "F12" (didn't need to select group members as a DPS, clicked that) and most of the keypad. It worked just fine with those 30 and then some abilities.
You never use everything on your screen in one fight, a great player knows when to use what.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
I've got three completely full hotbars. That seems like plenty to me. Just enough for 1-0, shift 1-0, and ctrl 1-0.
Also, if you think there's no difference in builds, I dunno what to tell you. Try tanking with a Powertech specced for Pyrotech, or as an Assassin specced for Madness. Let me know how that works out for ya.
Actually you are, at the end of the day all of your main role abilties will be counted as dps(or hps) per resource + auto-attack fillers.
I haven't reached 30+ but i've PVP'ed quite a bit and did get stopmed, use stun/slow/interupt when needed use a cc breaker if you got stranded and CCed, and for the rest? 1 damage abilitie + 1 resource builder/free spam abilties, full potential my rear mass...
Ok. Feel free to ignore advice given by someone people who have been playing for several months, and have actually gotten to the higher levels.
Not my loss.
I used to get a kick out of people who spammed one or two buttons in fighting games too, while getting their arses beat by people using combos, timing, and practice. Same applies here.
Again you are confusing sheer amount with complexity, i have a wow NA account with the stupid pink honor tabard, WoW's PVP system especially during vanilla was well - lol grind, especially for certian classes like rogues :P
ah the fun of doing WSG with a green whelp armor and watching people fall a sleep for a year... i prefer to use the correct ability as a reaction to what the player is doing, to combo various abilties in order to counter the opponents move, having 3 hot bars beyond showing a very primitive game design is nothing complicated, i have a decent keyboard i can bind every button to be activated by my ear if it wanted too, but it doesnt makes the game neither complex, nor challenging.
It's the same thing that happend to FPS games since UT/Q3A when they removed skill shots and crazy high speed strafing and added weapon mods and flashbangs... Is COD a harder game than UT or Q3A? not even close, except the new tribes(and the dead UT game) Halo is the one that comes closest to the old school fast paced shooters, but sadly its plauged by aim console aim assists and very bad mouth players.
Take pen and paper RPG's how many skill your char had? take MOBA games... you can create a deep combat systems from a low amount of abilties by using abiltiy combinations and reactive situational abilties... your opponent is trying to block? hit a combo to attempt to break the block. your opponent charges you in frenzy? hit a counter attack combo.. for that you dont need 40 abilties, and that type of combat will be much more engaging and intersting than press X to do 578 damage + weapon damage...
It's not about the "advice" its about the fact that ToR has 0 reactinal abilties, and no abilty chaining/combination to speak of(and no stun + backstub doesnt count, or needed in a game with no collision just ghost trough and do a 180_, you saying it's not a cycle based game at 30+ when it's one at 20+ is quite unrealistic.
Show one video doesnt matter if it's PVP or PVE where some one uses more than 5 abilties in every givven fight, i havent seen it, and honestly havent needed to use more than that either. The jedi shadow seems to have a very simple PVE rotation, the Operative seems to have a simple one too, so saying well it changes at 30+ with out any explanation doesn't cut it in my book.
The more the merrier. Or at least more colour/variety, if well implemented.
Sorry, but I find most of what you just said rather irrelevant, we're not talking about WoW's grind here (which I admit was there).
And TOR isn't an action hack&slash type of game that has the system you described (it never will), we've known that for ages. There are plenty of MMO's with a lower amount of skills, like the original guild wars. I know some people like that system better, I don't, because I find it repetitive.
It isn't a problem of the game, it's a player issue (whether simply disliking this system or not coping with it efficiently).
At level 20, like you, I found myself having a rather large number of abilities on my sniper. So what do you do?
First, you start to sort the abilities, and place the ones that you always use and that are off cooldown frequently in an easy spot.
Then you look at the ones you will only use in a certain situation and place those further off (like adrenaline probe, which you only use to recover energy once in a while).
Thirdly, you put those abilities that are on long cooldowns in their own secluded little area (or use a modifier like shift+... if you like that better).
Then you put the extremely situational or consumables / fluff away on your keypad or something.
TOR really isn't the only game that follows this exact same procedure: WoW, EQ, WAR, RIFT, ... all require you to cope with a large number of abilities. It's definitely not a problem with the game.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
1: I don't need an ability to "light up" when it's time to use it. Many of the abilities I have can be used in the way that traditional "reactive" abilities are used, but I don't feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole in the process.
2: just because abilities don't light up after another abilitiy is used doesn't mean that you can't chain / combo abilities. You just have to do the thinking yourself. You have to be creative. I chain abilities together all the time, and not always in the same combo / chain.
3: if you're trying to use the same cycle over and again....you're cutting yourself short.
4: I don't live on youtube.
I have given examples of good combos to use with Power Tech in some of my other posts. You just need to get creative with the skills that you are given, and respond to each situation as it happens, instead of trying to use the same set of abilities over and again, and expecting the game to tell you what skills to chain together.
As an example (once again using powertech), Death From Above to aoe / knockdown a group of mobs, followed as you land by explosive dart on the center most mob, followed as they are all getting up by a rocket to the same mob, which launches him into the air over the heads of the rest....the AOE from the explosive dart detonating should finish off the entire group, but if there is one left you can use grapple to pull him into a rocket-punch, or maybe jet boost into the group and use flamesweep to finish them off.
Using a combo / chain in this way, you will take very little damage (if any) and take down the group quickly and efficiently (not to mention that it's FUN!) Certainly much better than spamming three attacks over and again.
I certainly prefer this to abilities that can ONLY be used once certain conditions are met.