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Stacking multiple skills in one skillbar slot was a brilliant idea that more MMORPGs should adopt
A lot of MMORPGs have mechanics that demand a lot of skillbars. You might have 30 different skills, plus some consumables that you want quick access to, and maybe some other items that you want to be able to use there. World of Warcraft is the best known example, of course, but there are plenty of others, such as EverQuest II, Final Fantasy XIV, and so forth. Astellia also goes that route.
Having a custom key for every single spot on a skillbar can get awkward, even on a keyboard. Especially if you also want shortcuts to 20 other things to open menus, select party members, and the like, you end up having to use either combinations of keys or having to reach for more distant keys like the F-keys or the 10-key portion of a keyboard. If you want to play using a controller, then even in a game like FFXIV that actively tries to be controller-friendly, some slots that you want to use a lot end up taking combinations of three buttons to activate.
Astellia found a solution to this, as mentioned in the title. Like other MMORPGs, you can have several skillbars on the screen at once, and put lots of skills or items or whatever in them. Unlike any other game I've seen, each slot on the skillbar can have up to four skills in it. If you click on the slot, it opens up to show four spaces to put skills or items or whatever you want. You can put whatever you want in the four slots, with no obligation to use all four, then click again on the slot to collapse it down to a single square.
When you go to press the hotkey, it will activate whichever is the lowest of the four skills that isn't on cooldown. The icon displayed on the hotbar is whatever it will activate if you press the button. For example, when nothing is on cooldown, it will show the lowest skill. If you activate that skill and it then goes on cooldown, then the slot will show the second skill. Pressing the same key again will use the second skill, which then goes on cooldown, and then the slot will show the third skill. If all skills in a slot are on cooldown, it will show whichever will be the next to come off of cooldown, as well as the time until it becomes available again.
In principle, this could create a problem where you intend to use one skill, then another below it in the stack comes off cooldown just before you press the button, causing you to use a different skill. In practice, this doesn't seem to happen much. In some cases, it's because I tend to stack similar skills (e.g., single-target melee damage) on the same slot so that using the "wrong" one isn't such a big deal. You could make it into a problem with dumb choices of which skills to stack in the same slot, but that's fundamentally a problem of user error.
There is no requirement to use all four slots. It's completely fine to have some slots with only a single skill or item, some others with two, and some with all four. The same skill can appear in the stack for multiple slots if so desired, though obviously, using the skill from one slot puts it on cooldown for all of them. A skill that has no cooldown cannot have anything placed above it in the same slot, as anything above it would never be reachable.
One of the great things about this interface innovation is that you don't have to use it if you don't want to. If you'd prefer to reserve a dedicated skillbar slot for everything that you want to use, you can. Nothing is lost by making this into an option.
But if you notice that whenever you use skill A, it's immediately followed by B and then C, you can put A, B, and C all into a single slot. Rather than having to jump from one key to the next to go through your rotation, it's simpler to just press the same key three times in a row, and not have to assign other things to more distant keys that are hard to reach.
The reason I really like it is, of course, that I use a controller. This is the key feature that makes Astellia into the most controller-friendly of the MMORPGs that have dozens of skills for you to use. It's still not as controller-friendly as some games that only have a handful of skills, but that's a substantially different design choice.
And that's why I'd like to see it implemented in a lot of other games. If having 20+ skillbar slots visible on the screen isn't ridiculously excessive for how many skills you have available, then adding the ability to stack skills into a single slot would make the game a lot more controller-friendly.
That said, it's not something that is helpful to all MMORPGs. Some games like Guild Wars 1 or Neverwinter just don't let you have very many skills available. They have few enough that you care exactly which skills are available at a given time and always need direct access to every skill. Meanwhile, they have few enough skills that you don't need such awkward combinations of three or four buttons to do things, but never really need more than two. In some games, you can even get away with having a dedicated button for everything that you want quick access to. But that's a restriction on game design, and stacking skills in a single slot is a way to get around that restriction.
Having a custom key for every single spot on a skillbar can get awkward, even on a keyboard. Especially if you also want shortcuts to 20 other things to open menus, select party members, and the like, you end up having to use either combinations of keys or having to reach for more distant keys like the F-keys or the 10-key portion of a keyboard. If you want to play using a controller, then even in a game like FFXIV that actively tries to be controller-friendly, some slots that you want to use a lot end up taking combinations of three buttons to activate.
Astellia found a solution to this, as mentioned in the title. Like other MMORPGs, you can have several skillbars on the screen at once, and put lots of skills or items or whatever in them. Unlike any other game I've seen, each slot on the skillbar can have up to four skills in it. If you click on the slot, it opens up to show four spaces to put skills or items or whatever you want. You can put whatever you want in the four slots, with no obligation to use all four, then click again on the slot to collapse it down to a single square.
When you go to press the hotkey, it will activate whichever is the lowest of the four skills that isn't on cooldown. The icon displayed on the hotbar is whatever it will activate if you press the button. For example, when nothing is on cooldown, it will show the lowest skill. If you activate that skill and it then goes on cooldown, then the slot will show the second skill. Pressing the same key again will use the second skill, which then goes on cooldown, and then the slot will show the third skill. If all skills in a slot are on cooldown, it will show whichever will be the next to come off of cooldown, as well as the time until it becomes available again.
In principle, this could create a problem where you intend to use one skill, then another below it in the stack comes off cooldown just before you press the button, causing you to use a different skill. In practice, this doesn't seem to happen much. In some cases, it's because I tend to stack similar skills (e.g., single-target melee damage) on the same slot so that using the "wrong" one isn't such a big deal. You could make it into a problem with dumb choices of which skills to stack in the same slot, but that's fundamentally a problem of user error.
There is no requirement to use all four slots. It's completely fine to have some slots with only a single skill or item, some others with two, and some with all four. The same skill can appear in the stack for multiple slots if so desired, though obviously, using the skill from one slot puts it on cooldown for all of them. A skill that has no cooldown cannot have anything placed above it in the same slot, as anything above it would never be reachable.
One of the great things about this interface innovation is that you don't have to use it if you don't want to. If you'd prefer to reserve a dedicated skillbar slot for everything that you want to use, you can. Nothing is lost by making this into an option.
But if you notice that whenever you use skill A, it's immediately followed by B and then C, you can put A, B, and C all into a single slot. Rather than having to jump from one key to the next to go through your rotation, it's simpler to just press the same key three times in a row, and not have to assign other things to more distant keys that are hard to reach.
The reason I really like it is, of course, that I use a controller. This is the key feature that makes Astellia into the most controller-friendly of the MMORPGs that have dozens of skills for you to use. It's still not as controller-friendly as some games that only have a handful of skills, but that's a substantially different design choice.
And that's why I'd like to see it implemented in a lot of other games. If having 20+ skillbar slots visible on the screen isn't ridiculously excessive for how many skills you have available, then adding the ability to stack skills into a single slot would make the game a lot more controller-friendly.
That said, it's not something that is helpful to all MMORPGs. Some games like Guild Wars 1 or Neverwinter just don't let you have very many skills available. They have few enough that you care exactly which skills are available at a given time and always need direct access to every skill. Meanwhile, they have few enough skills that you don't need such awkward combinations of three or four buttons to do things, but never really need more than two. In some games, you can even get away with having a dedicated button for everything that you want quick access to. But that's a restriction on game design, and stacking skills in a single slot is a way to get around that restriction.
Comments
Astellia has some built-in skill chains where a single "skill" is really a chain of two or three skills, generally all dealing damage. But that skill chain only takes a single slot--or one of the four stacked positions for a slot. But what's critical is that in addition to that, there are user-definable stacks of up to four arbitrary things that you can put on a skillbar. You could (but shouldn't), for example, stack a damage skill, a healing skill, a potion, and roll (think Guild Wars 2-style double-tap movement) in a single slot.
It really condenses the action bars. Instead of needing three full ones of them or something, you only need 5 buttons.
Annoyingly enough, they never added it for PvE.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
For starters, skill chains in Aion are mostly built in, that is, defined by NC Soft. As best as I can tell, there's a hard cap of 5 user-defined skill chains. In Astellia, you could literally have a user-defined skill chain for every single skillbar slot if you wanted to. It would be rather dumb to do that, but having 8 or 10 different user-defined skill chains is perfectly reasonable. Not having a cap gives the user the flexibility to do whatever they want.
It also looks like Aion's skill chains are intended to be, you stand there and then use the skills in order. That's a valid use in Astellia, too. But in Astellia, you could easily start a skill chain, finish off a mob, run to a different mob (or get out of the way of a mob attack), and then finish the skill chain. Or you could start a skill chain, stop to use some other skill not in that chain, and then return to finish the skill chain. Astellia skill chains are basically, "use skill A if it's available, or B if A is on cooldown, or C if A and B are both on cooldown, and so forth". It doesn't look like that's how Aion does skill chains. There's no requirement or even expectation that you use A and then B and then C without stopping to do anything else in between.
That seems to be partially due to Aion skill cooldowns having much greater variance in Astellia. Aion has a lot of very long cooldown skills that really can't be part of a heavily used skill chain because the cooldown takes minutes. Aion also has a lot of very short cooldown skills such that if they were the start of a chain with the functionality of Astellia, you wouldn't be able to finish the chain before the first skill comes off cooldown.
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One way to think of it is that if you imported Astellia's skill stacking approach to WoW today, you wouldn't break anything. It's just extra options, and people in WoW who wanted to ignore it could. If you imported Spellborn's skillbar approach to WoW, that would be a pretty radical change to combat and people would be furious about it. That's not to say that what Spellborn did was bad. It's just the sort of thing that if you're going to do it in a game at all, it had better be there before the game launches.
Seems like you could do some abusive macroing in the original Everquest as well that would get around this.
There were other games that acted similarly with combos - none come to mind directly, but seems like it was pretty popular in a lot of Asian titles. TERA perhaps, although it's been a while since I played that one.
I am not a big fan of the whack-a-mole skill set that EQ/WoW/FFXIV made popular - once it expands out past about 8 needed skill action buttons I start to get lost. But on the flip side, when you devolve it to just mashing one or two buttons over and over to perform combos, it tends to dumb it down a bit too much.
true that it isn’t as nice as having it part of the UI, it still possible to emulate
They consolidated skills for SHB so everything fits on 2 bars.. except certain classes, notably GNB (who stole other tank skills), has too many ACTIVE abilities to fit on the main bar, requiring awkward (or RSI inducing) modifier keys every time you want to use them. Well, unless you completely change your hotbar layouts for one specific job for a role with 4 classes (similarly designed), which isn't something many people are going to do.
Still, this system can be done with macros, and people do do it, but it's not something that's reliable, at all, especially for raid content.
All these mmorpg's since have been making worse designs both UI wise and combat wise and even often character design wise as well.GO figure all these years and none of these developers have learned a damn thing,no wonder the genre became stagnant.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Astellia does a good job of having a flexible UI that players can use however they want. A lot of games let you put skills and consumables on skillbars. Astellia also lets you put everything on your skillbar from changing equipped gear to emotes to marking particular mobs with symbols as a way to communicate with teammates.
Certainly, stacking dissimilar things on a single skillbar slot could be stupid. But sometimes stacking skills with something else could make sense, such as stacking healing skills with healing potions, if you have a preference of always making one a higher priority than the other if it's not on cooldown.