oh wait... at 0:34 in the esper vid, did he say what I think he said? Limited action slots?
Holy cow I am totally onboard with that idea. You basically pick your play deck of 5 to 8 skills from a stack of 40+? Dude, that is a fantastic way to further differentiate your character from everyone else.
Plus, I don't need to buy a 40 button mouse to ''be competitive'' in PvP. You pick your skill list, and that is what you use for the arena or duration of combat.
oh wait... at 0:34 in the esper vid, did he say what I think he said? Limited action slots?
Holy cow I am totally onboard with that idea. You basically pick your play deck of 5 to 8 skills from a stack of 40+? Dude, that is a fantastic way to further differentiate your character from everyone else.
Plus, I don't need to buy a 40 button mouse to ''be competitive'' in PvP. You pick your skill list, and that is what you use for the arena or duration of combat.
Yep, limited action slots are great. It's player friendly, it gives players some of that much desired choice, and it makes it so that not every warrior is exactly the same.
So of course the "hardcore" "super skilled" MMO "veterans" hate it because it's a better system than the old ass games they grew up with.
well guess what ''hardcore'' ''super skilled'' MMO ''veterans'', this is the shit that should get your heart pumping because now you have to *ANTICIPATE* and *THINK* about what your opponent will bring to the fight.
I fucking hated limited skills slots in GW2, perhaps they implement it better in wildstar though.
Just felt limiting and boring overall. Not every game needs 40+ keybinds like I had in wow, but just 5-8 skills feels rather threadbare unless there is some actual choice involved (in gw2 it always felt like choosing between bad combos and worse combos).
I fucking hated limited skills slots in GW2, perhaps they implement it better in wildstar though.
Just felt limiting and boring overall. Not every game needs 40+ keybinds like I had in wow, but just 5-8 skills feels rather threadbare unless there is some actual choice involved (in gw2 it always felt like choosing between bad combos and worse combos).
That's because in GW2 it was choosing between bad and worse combos.
They made the traits uncreative, mostly useless shit so they wouldn't have any problems balancing pvp.
Wildstar sounds like they straight ripped off TSW where you have a whole deck of powers and choose from amongst them to build an active "deck".
The key difference here being that in TSW you have an empty ability bar and you populate active powers and passive traits from a robust pool of attacks, spells, and abilities that run the gamut from shotguns to hammers to chaos sorcery.
In GW2 you have a stock set of attacks that is tied to whichever weapon you have equipped and then you populate an ability list with some lackluster skills, choosing from amongst "uninteresting but technically better than an empty slot", "useful in extremely specific situations that will never ever come up ever", and "completely useless filler".
-edit-
I guess probably many people didn't play TSW?
Otherwise this would sound really familiar, because TSW did it really well.
My only concern if they go with a TSW style system is that said system really doesn't favor long cooldown abilities. Panic buttons and the like.
Anything with a cooldown longer than a minute is automatically trash because you don't have a lot of abilities. And of those 1-minute cooldown panic buttons you can't really take a lot of them. It makes short fights better and long fights less interesting.
GW1 also had a great LAS. i was disappointed with how GW2's LAS turned out, given how awesome they had done it the previous game.
Yeah, I was about to say, GW1's LAS was amazing. I very rarely met two people who were running the exact same build, especially once we'd gotten to Nightfall and EotN when there were SO DAMN MANY TO CHOSE FROM. Unless they were bandwaggoning onto a really hyperspecialized build (like the 55 monk or IWAY rangers) and EVEN THEN people often had different takes on it. And yet nothing ever felt useless (well, okay, the post-Dervish nerf took them from overpowered to redundant and boring but that's another rant)
I think part of it was that you had to FIND skills. You didn't just HAVE them, you had to hunt down teachers in the wide world to get the basic skills, and then you had to go on these crazy-ass scavenger hunt quests to find the bosses that would give you an Elite, AND you had to do this with a slot missing from your skill bar, so often it was a tough hike. This meant that in PVE at least, some people just didn't have skills because they hadn't taken the time to hunt down the right boss.
I once spent a whole day doing nothing but capping every last Dervish elite, it was actually a lot of fun.
Ain't nothing wrong with folks being the same though. Two carpenters, in spite of owning the same tools, will produce different output.
But, but, but special snowflakes...
I agree with you mostly. I thought GW2's ability bar made things fun & interesting. I won't pass judgment on Wildstar's ability bars and unique-ness until launch has happened and I've had a good feel for the flow of the game based on the ability bars. We really won't know the implications until later in the game, as more choices open up via more possible abilities become unlocked for players to use.
I actually really dislike limited action bars, and it is the primary reason that I will likely not get this game. I can never get on board with the idea that less options is somehow preferable.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
I actually really dislike limited action bars, and it is the primary reason that I will likely not get this game. I can never get on board with the idea that less options is somehow preferable.
And that's why many different games exist for people who enjoy different things!
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Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
I actually really dislike limited action bars, and it is the primary reason that I will likely not get this game. I can never get on board with the idea that less options is somehow preferable.
I would describe this as more options over your standard MMO, which has essentially no options and you just get what you get.
That said, from what I've seen of Wildstar's combat, I think they're on the right track. But who knows until we play it?
It seems to me like the limited action set in Wildstar is partially their way of having you differentiate between playstyles. Part of being a Warrior tank versus DPS would be the actions you put on your bar. Nothing wrong with that.
The reason I'm a fan of limited action set is that in games like WoW, SW:ToR, and others that have lots of abilities for you to hit, you get a lot of overlap. What happens is any good ability will just have a long cooldown and you will just smash them all one after another or in X order until they're all on cooldown.
If you limit the abilities on the bar at any given time, you can make each individual ability more powerful which I think is a good thing. GW2's utilities were this way. It wasn't perfect, but if I had access to every single utility skill at all times on any class in that game it would've been broken as hell. Because you could only have a few at a time you got to have several powerful abilities on hand that served different purposes depending on the situation you were in.
WoW model: You get access to 40 abilities and only 10 of them are very powerful and useful most of the time. The rest are situational at best.
Wildstar model: You get 40 abilities and all of them are powerful, but you can only equip 10 at a time, so you choose the ones that fit your playstyle best.
Basically the Wildstar model lets you have access to more powerful tools, just fewer of them at a time. I totally get that there are people that prefer having 20+ buttons at a time to use even if half of them aren't notable.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
The deck-building system was the best part of TSW, by far.
Agree'd.
Though it is tied with the characters, setting, music, stories, locations, voice acting, and overall style. :P
Limited action set sounds good to me. However, the reason it worked so well in TSW was because there were no classes. You can mix and match tank abilities with healer abilities with DPS abilities. So I would hope that each class in Wildstar has enough useful abilities that people can have some variation instead of one deck coming out as supreme.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
The deck-building system was the best part of TSW, by far.
Agree'd.
Though it was tied with the characters, setting, music, stories, locations, voice acting, and overall style. :P
Disagreed. Try tanking Nightmares in TSW. Half your bar is taken up with abilties you don't even want but have to use for impairs so you end up pushing the same button over and over with only occastionally hitting a different button to do a finisher move instead of the builder. The characters, setting, stories, lore and overall style was enough to make up for the terribly limted abiltiy system.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
The deck-building system was the best part of TSW, by far.
Agree'd.
Though it was tied with the characters, setting, music, stories, locations, voice acting, and overall style. :P
Disagreed. Try tanking Nightmares in TSW. Half your bar is taken up with abilties you don't even want but have to use for impairs so you end up pushing the same button over and over with only occastionally hitting a different button to do a finisher move instead of the builder. The characters, setting, stories, lore and overall style was enough to make up for the terribly limted abiltiy system.
Well to be fair, in my experience anyway, this has pretty much been the song and dance of tanks everywhere since the dawn of MMOs.
"Use these skills and only these skills!"
"But, I don't really care for those."
"Well too bad! Now press these same three buttons until you are told to stop."
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
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Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
I'm a big fan of 'choice' being cosmetic and everyone has the same tools. Granted, this works best in a more action game environment which ... Wildstar appears to be?
Other MMOs, which do not have a limited active skill system, it doesn't matter that your interupt skill is just sitting there unused for most of the fight. In a limited active skill system, that action bar real estate is precious, and could be filled with a defensive cooldown or an attack that would cleanse your dots or some sort of self heal abiltiy, but it can't be, because you are forced to have that damn interupt there for when the bosses big insta-kill ability starts getting cast. Then it goes back to sitting there, unused, instead of a myriad of other, more fun, more interesting skill that you HAVE, but you arne't allowed to put on your bar because somehow limited action bars are better, somehow?
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
you're sort of using circular reasoning, though. you have already assumed a scenario where the "interrupt ability" isn't going to be used except for that one special time. so of course it follows that it sucks to have to have it on your bar in place of something more interesting.
plus, if you build a character as a tank then you probably want to put tanking abilities front & center in your build. in a non-LAS game you can use your non-tank abilities, but if the game is balanced at all then they will be severely limited in power, right? does that seem like "more options" to you? because it doesn't really to me.
Other MMOs, which do not have a limited active skill system, it doesn't matter that your interupt skill is just sitting there unused for most of the fight. In a limited active skill system, that action bar real estate is precious, and could be filled with a defensive cooldown or an attack that would cleanse your dots or some sort of self heal abiltiy, but it can't be, because you are forced to have that damn interupt there for when the bosses big insta-kill ability starts getting cast. Then it goes back to sitting there, unused, instead of a myriad of other, more fun, more interesting skill that you HAVE, but you arne't allowed to put on your bar because somehow limited action bars are better, somehow?
Because it exists in a game where all attacks are avoidable and you are talking about a single slot and therefore you have to make a choice. Some people like to build CC machines. Bring one of them along and you no longer need to worry. Or go CC free and live dangerously with a trust in your dodging skills!
Or maybe those CC skills have a secondary use and timing when you use them is all part of it! And bosses have interrupt armor so you are going to be using those CC skills to break down that armor ahead of time to make the stun be possible.
Or you can continue to look at it through a close minded view.
Seriously, it's fine to like a different playstyle. They both have their ups and downs.
Refusing to accept that one has benefits over the other though? That's some goosey business.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
edited November 2013
Sure to some it may seem annoying or whatever to have only 8 ability slots, but have 40 abilities. However, how is that any different from other games where you can have all 40 on screen at once, but are only allowed to use 8 specific skills (in a specific pattern) or risk wiping the entire raid?
A game with limited slots and a game with hotbars all over are functionally the same at the end game. In either case you will end up using the community approved spec or else get kicked out of the raid.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
Sure to some it may seem annoying or whatever to have only 8 ability slots, but have 40 abilities. However, how is that any different from other games where you can have all 40 on screen at once, but are only allowed to use 8 specific skills (in a specific pattern) or risk wiping the entire raid?
A game with limited slots and a game with hotbars all over are functionally the same at the end game. In either case you will end up using the community approved spec or else get kicked out of the raid.
Hyperbole.
Plenty of non asshole guilds exist.
If you don't want to play with assholes don't hang around with assholes.
+5
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Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
So long as my different, limited builds can be swapped without penalty, I think I'll be okay. They don't even need to be swappable mid-fight.
Like if I can, hypothetically, swap out of my AOE 'trash killer' build and into my single-target 'boss' build between fights quickly with no cost I'm cool.
In a well-designed limited action bar system, bosses shouldn't be designed around interrupting their abilities the way you're describing. That's part of WoW because off GCD interrupt skills are just part of their skill design. In a game like Wildstar that uses action combat and telegraphs, there may not be specific interrupt skills at all. So if you choose to equip things that have CC attached to them, you do it because you value that skill for the current encounter.
I already explained the benefit of LAS. It lets ALL abilities be powerful because you can only equip X amount at a time, instead of having 75% of your abilities just be weak and not even that good for 90% of scenarios. Allowing access to all abilities at once inherently forces the developers to not make them all powerful because then the characters would just rotate through them all for every situation.
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
So long as my different, limited builds can be swapped without penalty, I think I'll be okay. They don't even need to be swappable mid-fight.
Like if I can, hypothetically, swap out of my AOE 'trash killer' build and into my single-target 'boss' build between fights quickly with no cost I'm cool.
You can have multiple saved Action Sets saved and switch with no penalty. They have confirmed this.
I guess that's the disconnect between styles, I have always been able to find a way to use the vast majority of my availible abilities in a fight, not just eight or less, and I feel crippled by being forced to use such a small amount. I can not fathom how being so crippled (in my opinion) can possibly be benefictial in any way. I like having my options open, and to have a game forcibly remove options is not fun for me.
That's why it is disapointing to me that a game that looks moderately fun to play has this ability system that to me is bad enough that the game no longer looks appealing.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
Even WoW has done limited action set now. They just did it by making a bunch of each class's abilities only available when you're in that talent spec. They wanted to make all the abilities more powerful for the specs, but to do so meant they had to only give access to X ability if you're a Ret paladin, only access to Y if you're Holy, etc.
Other MMOs, which do not have a limited active skill system, it doesn't matter that your interupt skill is just sitting there unused for most of the fight. In a limited active skill system, that action bar real estate is precious, and could be filled with a defensive cooldown or an attack that would cleanse your dots or some sort of self heal abiltiy, but it can't be, because you are forced to have that damn interupt there for when the bosses big insta-kill ability starts getting cast. Then it goes back to sitting there, unused, instead of a myriad of other, more fun, more interesting skill that you HAVE, but you arne't allowed to put on your bar because somehow limited action bars are better, somehow?
It's all about choice, mate. And both systems offer choice. It's just a different take on how to offer the player that choice. Would you rather prefer having 40 buttons, but only use 6-8 in a battle? Or would you rather have 6-8 buttons, with 40 possible slots to fill those 6-8 and then go into battle? It's personal preference, really.
For me? Back in Warcraft, as a Rogue, I would use Sinister Strike, Eviscerate, and maybe a Kick or Kidney Shot in there. Now, I could use Backstab but my playstyle didn't fit it. So essentially, that was my rotation. Obviously this changed through expansions, but let's keep it simple.
In Wildstar, you are right, there are ability slots that take up valuable space. But it's only valuable because the system implies it is valuable (scarcity). I am still doing the same thing, it's just this time I need to make a decision, fight and if I lose....re-organize my bars based on my experience instead of just hunting through my myriad of skills on 5-6 action bars. To me, it makes the game more dynamic and faster-paced.
This type of fundamental game decision is really based on opinion and not one person can be right or wrong.
Sure to some it may seem annoying or whatever to have only 8 ability slots, but have 40 abilities. However, how is that any different from other games where you can have all 40 on screen at once, but are only allowed to use 8 specific skills (in a specific pattern) or risk wiping the entire raid?
A game with limited slots and a game with hotbars all over are functionally the same at the end game. In either case you will end up using the community approved spec or else get kicked out of the raid.
Hyperbole.
Plenty of non asshole guilds exist.
If you don't want to play with assholes don't hang around with assholes.
So you may not get kicked out, but the point still stands. At the end of the day you will be using a build/pattern of abilities that most everyone else is using. Sure you may have one or two different abilities or what-have-you, but it is unlikely you would stray far from the path.
edit- Granted there may be more than one approved build per class.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I guess that's the disconnect between styles, I have always been able to find a way to use the vast majority of my availible abilities in a fight, not just eight or less, and I feel crippled by being forced to use such a small amount. I can not fathom how being so crippled (in my opinion) can possibly be benefictial in any way. I like having my options open, and to have a game forcibly remove options is not fun for me.
That's why it is disapointing to me that a game that looks moderately fun to play has this ability system that to me is bad enough that the game no longer looks appealing.
If you're using 20 abilities in one fight in WoW it's because 10 of them are weak inconsequential abilities that you're merely using because better things are on CD, and so they add a marginal amount of DPS or utility between rotations. In a LAS system you have just as many powerful abilities, you just don't have access to the weak ones.
It's very simple. In one design, you have "Classes are designed around having 30 abilities at all times, and so must be balanced around that." In the other design, you have "Classes have 30 abilities available but only say 10 can be equipped. Having access to all 30 would be broken as hell because all 30 are powerful abilities."
It's not "crippling" to only have access to 10 abilities if your character is equally powerful with those 10 as another game's character is with 20. It just means more impact is given to each skill, and customization options are opened up because instead of being like a Ret Paladin who will never be a decent healer, a LAS game can say "This DPS class can equip a healing skill and it can actually still be good because they have to use an action slot for it forgoing more damage, etc," just for one example.
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On topic: Looking forward to the Spellslinger re-reveal. That class seemed right up my alley the first time I saw it.
Also, I'm in practically every other beta going on right now in the internet space. Why won't you let me be part of this one too, NCSoft?
FFXIV - Milliardo Beoulve/Sargatanas
Holy cow I am totally onboard with that idea. You basically pick your play deck of 5 to 8 skills from a stack of 40+? Dude, that is a fantastic way to further differentiate your character from everyone else.
Plus, I don't need to buy a 40 button mouse to ''be competitive'' in PvP. You pick your skill list, and that is what you use for the arena or duration of combat.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Yep, limited action slots are great. It's player friendly, it gives players some of that much desired choice, and it makes it so that not every warrior is exactly the same.
So of course the "hardcore" "super skilled" MMO "veterans" hate it because it's a better system than the old ass games they grew up with.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Its'....
not that innovative!
Just felt limiting and boring overall. Not every game needs 40+ keybinds like I had in wow, but just 5-8 skills feels rather threadbare unless there is some actual choice involved (in gw2 it always felt like choosing between bad combos and worse combos).
That's because in GW2 it was choosing between bad and worse combos.
They made the traits uncreative, mostly useless shit so they wouldn't have any problems balancing pvp.
Wildstar sounds like they straight ripped off TSW where you have a whole deck of powers and choose from amongst them to build an active "deck".
The key difference here being that in TSW you have an empty ability bar and you populate active powers and passive traits from a robust pool of attacks, spells, and abilities that run the gamut from shotguns to hammers to chaos sorcery.
In GW2 you have a stock set of attacks that is tied to whichever weapon you have equipped and then you populate an ability list with some lackluster skills, choosing from amongst "uninteresting but technically better than an empty slot", "useful in extremely specific situations that will never ever come up ever", and "completely useless filler".
-edit-
I guess probably many people didn't play TSW?
Otherwise this would sound really familiar, because TSW did it really well.
Anything with a cooldown longer than a minute is automatically trash because you don't have a lot of abilities. And of those 1-minute cooldown panic buttons you can't really take a lot of them. It makes short fights better and long fights less interesting.
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quiet, you!
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And that's just it. This isn't stopping cookie-cutter classes. Because someone will figure out the best build and everyone will just run that.
Ain't nothing wrong with folks being the same though. Two carpenters, in spite of owning the same tools, will produce different output.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
Yeah, I was about to say, GW1's LAS was amazing. I very rarely met two people who were running the exact same build, especially once we'd gotten to Nightfall and EotN when there were SO DAMN MANY TO CHOSE FROM. Unless they were bandwaggoning onto a really hyperspecialized build (like the 55 monk or IWAY rangers) and EVEN THEN people often had different takes on it. And yet nothing ever felt useless (well, okay, the post-Dervish nerf took them from overpowered to redundant and boring but that's another rant)
I think part of it was that you had to FIND skills. You didn't just HAVE them, you had to hunt down teachers in the wide world to get the basic skills, and then you had to go on these crazy-ass scavenger hunt quests to find the bosses that would give you an Elite, AND you had to do this with a slot missing from your skill bar, so often it was a tough hike. This meant that in PVE at least, some people just didn't have skills because they hadn't taken the time to hunt down the right boss.
I once spent a whole day doing nothing but capping every last Dervish elite, it was actually a lot of fun.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
But, but, but special snowflakes...
I agree with you mostly. I thought GW2's ability bar made things fun & interesting. I won't pass judgment on Wildstar's ability bars and unique-ness until launch has happened and I've had a good feel for the flow of the game based on the ability bars. We really won't know the implications until later in the game, as more choices open up via more possible abilities become unlocked for players to use.
Guild Wars 2: Tyreh, asura Warrior
And that's why many different games exist for people who enjoy different things!
I would describe this as more options over your standard MMO, which has essentially no options and you just get what you get.
That said, from what I've seen of Wildstar's combat, I think they're on the right track. But who knows until we play it?
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
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The reason I'm a fan of limited action set is that in games like WoW, SW:ToR, and others that have lots of abilities for you to hit, you get a lot of overlap. What happens is any good ability will just have a long cooldown and you will just smash them all one after another or in X order until they're all on cooldown.
If you limit the abilities on the bar at any given time, you can make each individual ability more powerful which I think is a good thing. GW2's utilities were this way. It wasn't perfect, but if I had access to every single utility skill at all times on any class in that game it would've been broken as hell. Because you could only have a few at a time you got to have several powerful abilities on hand that served different purposes depending on the situation you were in.
WoW model: You get access to 40 abilities and only 10 of them are very powerful and useful most of the time. The rest are situational at best.
Wildstar model: You get 40 abilities and all of them are powerful, but you can only equip 10 at a time, so you choose the ones that fit your playstyle best.
Basically the Wildstar model lets you have access to more powerful tools, just fewer of them at a time. I totally get that there are people that prefer having 20+ buttons at a time to use even if half of them aren't notable.
Agree'd.
Though it is tied with the characters, setting, music, stories, locations, voice acting, and overall style. :P
Limited action set sounds good to me. However, the reason it worked so well in TSW was because there were no classes. You can mix and match tank abilities with healer abilities with DPS abilities. So I would hope that each class in Wildstar has enough useful abilities that people can have some variation instead of one deck coming out as supreme.
Disagreed. Try tanking Nightmares in TSW. Half your bar is taken up with abilties you don't even want but have to use for impairs so you end up pushing the same button over and over with only occastionally hitting a different button to do a finisher move instead of the builder. The characters, setting, stories, lore and overall style was enough to make up for the terribly limted abiltiy system.
Well to be fair, in my experience anyway, this has pretty much been the song and dance of tanks everywhere since the dawn of MMOs.
"Use these skills and only these skills!"
"But, I don't really care for those."
"Well too bad! Now press these same three buttons until you are told to stop."
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
plus, if you build a character as a tank then you probably want to put tanking abilities front & center in your build. in a non-LAS game you can use your non-tank abilities, but if the game is balanced at all then they will be severely limited in power, right? does that seem like "more options" to you? because it doesn't really to me.
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Because it exists in a game where all attacks are avoidable and you are talking about a single slot and therefore you have to make a choice. Some people like to build CC machines. Bring one of them along and you no longer need to worry. Or go CC free and live dangerously with a trust in your dodging skills!
Or maybe those CC skills have a secondary use and timing when you use them is all part of it! And bosses have interrupt armor so you are going to be using those CC skills to break down that armor ahead of time to make the stun be possible.
Or you can continue to look at it through a close minded view.
Seriously, it's fine to like a different playstyle. They both have their ups and downs.
Refusing to accept that one has benefits over the other though? That's some goosey business.
A game with limited slots and a game with hotbars all over are functionally the same at the end game. In either case you will end up using the community approved spec or else get kicked out of the raid.
Hyperbole.
Plenty of non asshole guilds exist.
If you don't want to play with assholes don't hang around with assholes.
Like if I can, hypothetically, swap out of my AOE 'trash killer' build and into my single-target 'boss' build between fights quickly with no cost I'm cool.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
unfortunately true for the dick-face guilds out there.
there will always be FOTM builds, and there will always be assholes who kick you if you aren't "with it."
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I already explained the benefit of LAS. It lets ALL abilities be powerful because you can only equip X amount at a time, instead of having 75% of your abilities just be weak and not even that good for 90% of scenarios. Allowing access to all abilities at once inherently forces the developers to not make them all powerful because then the characters would just rotate through them all for every situation.
You can have multiple saved Action Sets saved and switch with no penalty. They have confirmed this.
That's why it is disapointing to me that a game that looks moderately fun to play has this ability system that to me is bad enough that the game no longer looks appealing.
*edit* also, @joshmvii i always read your posts in nick offerman's voice. good work.
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It's all about choice, mate. And both systems offer choice. It's just a different take on how to offer the player that choice. Would you rather prefer having 40 buttons, but only use 6-8 in a battle? Or would you rather have 6-8 buttons, with 40 possible slots to fill those 6-8 and then go into battle? It's personal preference, really.
For me? Back in Warcraft, as a Rogue, I would use Sinister Strike, Eviscerate, and maybe a Kick or Kidney Shot in there. Now, I could use Backstab but my playstyle didn't fit it. So essentially, that was my rotation. Obviously this changed through expansions, but let's keep it simple.
In Wildstar, you are right, there are ability slots that take up valuable space. But it's only valuable because the system implies it is valuable (scarcity). I am still doing the same thing, it's just this time I need to make a decision, fight and if I lose....re-organize my bars based on my experience instead of just hunting through my myriad of skills on 5-6 action bars. To me, it makes the game more dynamic and faster-paced.
This type of fundamental game decision is really based on opinion and not one person can be right or wrong.
I guess I am mentioning WoW but it's not about uselessness.
Guild Wars 2: Tyreh, asura Warrior
So you may not get kicked out, but the point still stands. At the end of the day you will be using a build/pattern of abilities that most everyone else is using. Sure you may have one or two different abilities or what-have-you, but it is unlikely you would stray far from the path.
edit- Granted there may be more than one approved build per class.
If you're using 20 abilities in one fight in WoW it's because 10 of them are weak inconsequential abilities that you're merely using because better things are on CD, and so they add a marginal amount of DPS or utility between rotations. In a LAS system you have just as many powerful abilities, you just don't have access to the weak ones.
It's very simple. In one design, you have "Classes are designed around having 30 abilities at all times, and so must be balanced around that." In the other design, you have "Classes have 30 abilities available but only say 10 can be equipped. Having access to all 30 would be broken as hell because all 30 are powerful abilities."
It's not "crippling" to only have access to 10 abilities if your character is equally powerful with those 10 as another game's character is with 20. It just means more impact is given to each skill, and customization options are opened up because instead of being like a Ret Paladin who will never be a decent healer, a LAS game can say "This DPS class can equip a healing skill and it can actually still be good because they have to use an action slot for it forgoing more damage, etc," just for one example.