"Too Many Buttons!"

[PetersenIII]

Or "I Need More Keys for Binding!"

So this is an issue for some people and/or some classes, I'm curious why Blizzard doesn't look at trying to take a Guild Wars (one, because I've not played two) approach where you have a limited number (now that I think about it, they kinda did this with Diablo III) of ability slots, and you have a wonderful plethora of abilities, but you can only choose a certain amount of them. Now, let me clarify, that I don't think the number of active abilities should be 6 like Diablo III, or 8 like Guild Wars 1, in fact, that was my chief complaint about Guild Wars 1, was that I get all these awesome abilities, and have to pick only 8 (was particularly frustrating as a ranger or whatever, because I had to use one of my ability slots just to have a pet).

If ability bloat is truly that big of a concern, and if they want there to be meaningful choice back in the game, this seems like a better way to do it than fucking around with the Talent Tree or just killing off abilities people liked.


EDIT: The new Talent Tree does kind of do this a little (it also gives you a couple neat choices where it's an active ability versus a passive ability, or even an modification to an existing ability), but it's obviously not 'enough' to fix the issue of "too many buttons".

[Supakaiser]

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/2...bility-squish/

[wych]

The issue is with your idea of meaningful choice, that unless they somhow manage to balance it for all 27 specs then it probably won't be a "meaningful choice" and there'll be a cookie cutter set of abilities to use that everybody sticks to with lots of abilities never getting used. It also removes the use of lots of cool situational abilities

[PetersenIII]

It also removes the use of lots of cool situational abilities

That's the meaningful choice I'm talking about. The ancillary abilities, not the "main rotation" stuff.

[Griffter]

The classes that I feel like there's an "ability bloat" problem with are the ones that have multiple self-buffs on cooldowns. It feels redundant and like you have to work too hard just to keep up a baseline dps/heal output.

I don't think a GW2 style system would work out very well, though, because theorycrafters would just figure out the best 5 spells or whatever and everyone would use those. WoW players are generally more concerned with numbers and min/maxing than GW2 players, in my experience.

[melodramocracy]

Not sure how folks think there are too many buttons to deal with in this game, but nothing should really surprise me at this point.

[peedei]

The classes that I feel like there's an "ability bloat" problem with are the ones that have multiple self-buffs on cooldowns. It feels redundant and like you have to work too hard just to keep up a baseline dps/heal output.

I don't think a GW2 style system would work out very well, though, because theorycrafters would just figure out the best 5 spells or whatever and everyone would use those. WoW players are generally more concerned with numbers and min/maxing than GW2 players, in my experience.

Do you have reading trouble? He clearly said GW1 not 2. They have very different combat systems and ability controls.

- - - Updated - - -

Not sure how folks think there are too many buttons to deal with in this game, but nothing should really surprise me at this point.

Sometimes it's skill bloat and somtimes it's over redundancy. A ret paladin went from being holy power starved in the last expansion to being holy power bloated this expansion. You have two main holy power generators and one long cooldown one that can turn up again whenever it wants. What happens is when it's up you can't get to it and when it's down you got nothing to do. Then you have to spend resources on a buff that flatly increases your damage.

There's no good reason why ret is the way it is, it never needed holy power. You had CS, J and DS that filled your time and then Exo would take priority with the proc. If you still wanted holy power you should remove Exo and give art of war to Judgement maintaining the 3 filler skills where one is temporarily buffed and then pump out WoG and Inq. TV never needed to be added ever.

When it was first introduced we just used it when we didn't have anything else to press because of resource starving and it was fine because it scaled linearly everyone wins, then they realized we weren't using it at full power and nerfed the first two tiers because they wanted full power to be optimal and then in pandaland removed the option all together. This shit for once was brought on directly by that moron GC and he was pretty excited about showing it off during the reveal. It sounded flashy and all but it was completely unecessary.

In WotlK the final ret piece bonus sometimes reset DS and made the rotation much more stable, there was always something to press you just didn't know what till it appeared and right on time too. I can't stand the doubled up resource tracking in WoW, there's so many UI elements you have to keep track of you barely ever look at the actual monster you're attacking.

Skill bloat has been fixed in many other games without removing skills, Blizzard yet again is behind the times on WoW.

[Radio]

I'm fairly happy with having lots of buttons personally, though certain abilities like Glaive Toss on a Hunter feel kind of superfluous in the standard single target rotation.

Things I'm fine with:
- tons of situational abilities
- tons of 'fun' abilities
- complexity in performance

Things I'm not fine with:
- abilities that should be situational but end up being rotational, usually feel like buttons that you only hit rotationally because they exist
- more than ~2-3 1 min CD+ performance CDs

[Televators]

There are too many abilities, in my opinion. I have a 7 button mouse, use Alt/Shift/Crtl as modifiers and bind any additional 15-20 onto my keyboard and I still simply don't have enough slots to map every combat ability on probably 4-5 of the classes. Some are in a great spot (Frost Mage) others are literally insane (Prot Pally/BM Hunter).

Things would be MUCH better if talents modified existing spells on almost every occasion. This should be baseline. Things like mage level 90 talents and other spells that you must maintain to continue to do your baseline damage should be baked into other spells or removed. I think 15-25 bound spells would be a sweet spot. Having to bind 35 or 40+ spells is ridiculous.

[ReleaseDay]

i was just about to make a topic about this. First they are implementing the disaster that is item squish, a reactionary step to ruin the game and kill it off for old players, then there is the p2w store, now this?

Whats next? An Alt-squish
? We felt like you have to many characters so we squished them all together and made one character. But that character had too many abilities, so we removed all the abilities. Also we removed all the dmg. And the gear, but you can get that back from the store for only 99.99$

[hrugner]

There are a lot of abilities that are pretty extra in wow. mandatory key presses, buttons that make other buttons do what they're supposed to do, that sort of thing. It would be nice if you could just preset an ability cycle for these more or less automatic, non situational button presses.

Still, WoW's big differentiator is how many buttons you have to click to make your attack cycle happen, and I doubt the player base would view the removal of that tedious rhythm game favorably.

[Deleted]

Fact is we do have too many useless abilitys, I would rather they be removed or changed to fun/uniqe abilities. Secondly some classes rotation are ridiculously complex whereas others are immensely basic, it's all inconsistent and wasteful

[Warlord Booty]

Whats next? An Alt-squish
? We felt like you have to many characters so we squished them all together and made one character.

Wasn't there a crappy game caleld Old World or something like that which had the basis that you could have one character be everything? I'd... hate that so much.

[Deleted]

I have 30+ abilities keybound on my protection warrior, I use all of them at least once during a fight. This excludes banners and shouts which are macroed.
I certainly wouldn't mind a small squish at least.

[melodramocracy]

Fact is

No.

/10char

[crakerjack]

Assuming most of the people on here PvE and don't seriously PvP, you can just scrap half your abilities since you'll never find a way to use them. If we're talking about PvP, then yea, there's quite a large amount of abilities... I played a shaman and I literally had all my bars full of abilities and macros... There wasn't room for any more abilities, I even had to use the shift-scroll for another bar just so I could fit everything.

[Belloc]

The problem, OP, is that taking away useful abilities is not fun. Blizzard wants to design encounters (mythic) around the thought that you can bring every class to the raid... putting an ability cap in goes counter to that design (You may have every class in the raid, but they don't bring their full toolkit).

The problem isn't the amount of abilities, it's the thought that every ability has to be on your bars and keybound. I mean, I don't have a keybinding for Unending Breath, but you can bet your ass that some warlocks out there do and are possibly getting pissed that they can't come up with acceptable bindings for some of their other abilities. The problem is that there's not enough keys or key-combinations (within reach) to bind ALL of the abilities (even the ones that never get used).

Realistically, for most, if not all classes, ability bloat is a problem that can be solved by taking some of your abilities off of your bars (or, at least, unbinding them). Forcing us NOT to take them is not a working solution. All that will do is restrict Blizzard in encounter design. There's no such thing as an "interesting choice" when it comes to which abilities you can afford to put on your bars.

Assuming most of the people on here PvE and don't seriously PvP, you can just scrap half your abilities since you'll never find a way to use them. If we're talking about PvP, then yea, there's quite a large amount of abilities... I played a shaman and I literally had all my bars full of abilities and macros... There wasn't room for any more abilities, I even had to use the shift-scroll for another bar just so I could fit everything.

I'd hate to raid with your guild if you think that half of the abilities you use are only relevant in PvP.

[Deleted]

No.

/10char

So you use EVERY ability do you?

[Gangplank]

I liked the approach D3 took, where you've got several useful abilities, but must choose which abilities are best for the encounter. It would be waaaay more interesting if healers didn't have a dozen spells for every given situation.

[m777]

Not sure how folks think there are too many buttons to deal with in this game, but nothing should really surprise me at this point.

we do especially for pvp where i need 3 more keybinds for /tar arena123 and /focus arena123

and for example i play warrior so i need 2 keybinds for charge 2 for fear shout

2 for pummel 4 for intervene and for some macros so yes there too many keys