[Suggestion] More flexible combat ability bars

[Grief]

Currently, a player has the ability to have two "active" combat skills, utilizing six abilities from each skill. Though, considering the value of the combat refresh from the basic attacks, you technically only have five slots to wiggle around with.

Despite the diversity of combat skills and abilities, the five "active" skill slots and the inability to switch abilities during combat drastically reduce the variety of abilities that are viably chosen.

While increasing the amount of ability slots from six to ten would allow for more diversity, a solution that I believe would be more beneficial would be the decoupling of "active" combat skill bars. By decoupling the combat skill bars, you would allow players to have the freedom to mix and match the variety of chosen skills to better fill the archetypes they are aiming for.

Want to be a pure Fire Mage? You can have both bars dedicated to your choosing of fire magic skills - there are so many useful ones, you should not be limited to choosing only five.

Having the ability to freely slot different combat skills also gives the potential to add tertiary skills to your bar. Skills like Shield aren't very appealing on their own, but their taunts could be desirable in several builds that don't want to limit themselves to an entire bar of the skill.

If this change were to be implemented, the current skill restrictions would obviously remain (i.e. you need a shield equipped to use shield abilities, necromancer and priest require gear that enables their abilities, so on, etc.)

Additionally, experience would need to be further split between any active skills (skills used during the combat - using two of your three equipped combat skills would only provide experience for the two skills that were used), which would act as a way of balancing the training of versatile characters.
Gear modifiers would remain the same to further strengthen the ideology that you may be capable of becoming a "jack of all trades", but only those who specialize can ever truly master the combat skill.

There is huge opportunity for creative and unique builds in a free system, abilities should be interchangeable to increase diversity.


TLDR;
- Decouple "active" combat skills to allow for a free-form system where abilities from any known combat skill can be slotted anywhere.

[Citan]

We've discussed this one many times and this is definitely not going to happen, sorry! You're limited to six abilities from a skill for balance reasons. I want the choice of which abilities you use to be agonizingly hard, not trivial. And of course if you could use all the abilities at once I would have to rebalance them quite differently, because they're balanced around you not having them all.

[Citan]

... and I just realized I've responded to the same person negatively three times. Sorry! I appreciate the effort, so I wanted to respond to them in a straightforward way. Some things just aren't on the table as possibilities, so there's no reason to rehash them again. But you've brought up other things (like augment attunement) that I've let slip for too long, so I do appreciate the well-written suggestions! And apologize for the curt responses.

[Yaffy]

I've had this conversation before with other people plenty, regarding the idea of having more slots for combat abilities. The most common being that people want to have 7+ abilities per bar or something along those lines.

The thing with that idea and your idea of being able to pick an ability ratio of 0-14 between your two skills is that in the current system it actually wouldn't be as interesting or useful as it sounds like. As your progress through the game, your gear mods have a major effect on the strength of your abilities, and because of how gear mods are split between your two active skills you barely have enough mods for 6 abilities typically, never mind something like 14! Furthermore, splitting your mods between a lot of abilities will generally make you much weaker, since you'll end up doing less with each action you take in combat.

Because of this, you definitely wouldn't be a "Master of a combat skill" if you committed a lot of ability slots to it. In fact you'd probably be way weaker than other players because you're spreading yourself too thin and wasting equipment mods. If you were playing optimally, for most skills after 6 slots the most use you'd get from extra slots would be abilities that require minimal mods if any in order to be useful, which is to say that more slots would just be spent on utility skills. There are some skills that would be buffed with extra slots because they have a lot of utility abilities like psychology, but players would basically just be building the same with some weak bonus abilities tacked on at best.

[Grief]

We've discussed this one many times and this is definitely not going to happen, sorry!

Never say never!


I just realized I've responded to the same person negatively three times. Sorry!

I am a big boy, I can handle it.
*loud sobbing*


Some things just aren't on the table as possibilities, so there's no reason to rehash them again. I do appreciate the well-written suggestions! And apologize for the curt responses.

I am certainly not as familiar with the game, so I lack the imagination to fully comprehend the scale and vision that you have. I am merely voicing, as a humble player, my concerns and suggestions. It is ultimately your decision, based on your experience, to make those final choices.

I will continue to speak my mind, and I encourage you to do the same. These interactions are the only way for us to catch a glimpse into each other's worlds; it helps me to understand your goals, and hopefully this helps you see some of the flaws.

I look forward to more of these forum reciprocations!

[Mikhaila]

I came on this morning to express a thought that last night I was too tired to actually write down coherently. Yaffy probably did a better job.

Spreading out your mods over more attacks actually weakens your dps, as does using attacks with no armor mods. At lower levels, you don't have as many mods on your armor, you aren't re-rolling with transmutation to get what you want, and since mods scale with level, they don't do as much. At level 80, easily half of your damage is from armor mods and having them concentrated on 6 attacks is much better than spread out over more.

[Grief]

The thing with your idea is that in the current system it actually wouldn't be as interesting or useful as it sounds like. Your gear mods have a major effect on the strength of your abilities, and because of how gear mods are split between your two active skills you barely have enough mods for 6 abilities typically. Furthermore, splitting your mods between a lot of abilities will generally make you much weaker, since you'll end up doing less with each action you take in combat.

You definitely wouldn't be a "Master of a combat skill" if you committed a lot of ability slots to it. In fact you'd probably be way weaker than other players because you're spreading yourself too thin and wasting equipment mods. If you were playing optimally, for most skills after 6 slots the most use you'd get from extra slots would be abilities that require minimal mods if any in order to be useful, which is to say that more slots would just be spent on utility skills. There are some skills that would be buffed with extra slots because they have a lot of utility abilities like psychology, but players would basically just be building the same with some weak bonus abilities tacked on at best.


Spreading out your mods over more attacks actually weakens your dps. At lower levels, you don't have as many mods on your armor, you aren't re-rolling with transmutation to get what you want, and since mods scale with level, they don't do as much. At level 80, easily half of your damage is from armor mods and having them concentrated on 6 attacks is much better than spread out over more.

In my original post I mentioned how I recognized that an individual would be weakening themselves by taking on tertiary+ combat skills.

This change wasn't necessarily geared towards slotting every epic attack on a bar at once; I am a support player and my opinions are mostly formed around support and utility abilities.

Perhaps my argument instead should be for the use of utility abilities outside of the two combat skills you have equipped. Allowing more utility and support abilities, such as Priest's Remedy to cure poison, to be slotted on the sidebar. This would mean, while you have combat skill 'A' and 'B' equipped, you would be able to use support and utility abilities from combat skills 'C', 'D', and etc.