We have not received permission from DerToastinator to share the quoted post.
I think that you can probably make a reasonable game with 20 hotbar slots, 12-15 of which are commonly used. Realistically this is a question of what type of game you're going to make and how you're going to structure your combat and character growth.
As you mentioned, there are solid games with Basic+3+Ult. I don't know of any Basic+3+Ult MMOs however, and I feel like a MMO absolutely needs more than this simply because they want to vary the combat experience through diverse bosses and experiences in PvE. MOBAs and Battle Royales specifically do
not
do this. They get their variation from PvP tactics, dynamic map and positional interactions, and "select and adapt your build over the course of the match" strategy. MMOs aim to provide
many thousands
of distinct bosses, which innately requires a broader set of abilities for both enemies, and the players who wish to confront them. It's a different design goal with a different intended challenge type and balance structure. I do love me some
Predecessor
, but it wouldn't make for a good MMO with a long lifespan worth of PvE content, and even with its PvP aspects, in its vision as a PvX MMO, Ashes does still have to care about keeping up the other half.
We have not received permission from DerToastinator to share the quoted post.
First of all, you get to triple it. Ctrl+? and Shift+? both, so your 13 keys are 39 before you go reserving those 3 you mentioned. I'd like to add to this consideration that you also get 7-9, 0, -, and =, (plus their Ctrl and Shift variants) for
lesser used and non-timing-critical
abilities. This means that while you may only have 36 keybinds available for quick-action things, you can still bind another 18 longer duration buffs, rare cleanses, items, UI windows, or other interactions indicated by your game.
At that point you can have 4 full hotbars, with at least 30 "quick-reaction" abilities, effortlessly. Key bindings are not the constraint. The player experience you want, and the overall structure of your combat design are what dictate your ability pool, and how many abilities you allow, and expect/require your players to take.
We have not received permission from DerToastinator to share the quoted post.
This is a much better reason to have fewer abilities available to players, one that I can agree with, and one that I think we'll get. Steven has said repeatedly that you will not be able to take all abilities your class offers. He has spoken as well about the decision to go 'wide' or 'deep' with your skill tree, such that even choosing to buy
more
abilities has a meaningful tradeoff in terms of their power.
But even this doesn't answer the question of how many hotbar slots a player should tend to have. That can only be decided by the type, level, and variety of tactical complexity you choose for your combat design, and a developer has a large degree of freedom to tune those various aspects against each other to produce the experience they want.
We have not received permission from DerToastinator to share the quoted post.
I would like to see meaningful choice in weapon specialization, but at the end of the day, the basic attack combo sequence you spec into, the proc types, the durations, etc, still only amount to 1-2 abilities worth of tactical complexity and decision making. You get to decide "what target needs my damage?", "what target needs my debuff?", and "is my debuff more valuable on that target than something else I could be doing?" (i.e. "do I finish my combo?"). That's more or less it. "Who do I hit?" and "Do I finish my combo chain to get the proc, right now, instead of doing something else?".
The main way that weapon specialization that relates to abilities is "Is it ever worth hitting something with my weapon at all?".
You should always have a couple of abilities that are better than your basic attack combo (and its proc)
in most any given situation
, but those will cost "mana" and go on cooldown. Unless the devs fall into the "noob trap" of giving everyone tons of damage abilities without proper costs, such that using them all the time is a good idea, this
also
isn't what determines how many hotbar slots a given player should have.
We have not received permission from DerToastinator to share the quoted post.
That sounds like a pretty reasonable hotbar for a Fighter. It probably isn't remotely enough for an effective Bard.
For a Fighter, "having options" is about having the ability to respond to, and create, situations on the field, through the judicious use and timing of... as you say: movement, CC, damage, and AoE, a bit of interrupt and maybe some recovery. For them, that hotbar is a pretty good coverage of their required options, without too much duplication or excess.
For a Bard, "having options" means something completely different. Having options, for a Bard, is not about using them all, or even most of them. We need to have abilities that cover a wide range of situations, including situations that we will not encounter
today
. While a fighter may be able to use similar tools in a wide variety of situations, a Bard will need perhaps the same
amount
of buffs, but
different
buffs, in any given content. When one party, or one calls for a Health Regeneration buff, another party, or another situation may require Mana Regeneration. Where one situation requires Defense, another might require Movement Speed.
For a Fighter, "having options" is about what they will use in the moment to moment tactics of a situation. For a Bard, "having options" is about the ability to change their (and their party's) approach to a situation by choosing to use a completely different
set
of abilities than they would use in a different scenario. I will only be
using
perhaps 8-12 abilities at a time, but if I don't have
have
the other 8-12 (or even 15-20 depending on the design), that means that I can't do my job if the situation changes, and sooner or later, it will.
While a PvE only game can get around this by having a Bard re-shuffle their hotbar before any given encounter based on what they know to expect, this would be cumbersome, and it becomes outright impossible in a PvX game. When PvP begins, the situation that your party faces changes completely, and so too do the flow, strategy, tactics, and needs of your group. When PvE becomes PvX (or when you defeat the invaders and your PvX becomes PvE once more), I, as a Bard, need to be able to completely change my approach, and fast. I can't do that without having my options available.
While there will be
strong
spec-based identity differences, both between Support and Debuff focused Bards (an already slightly contentious topic in the feedback threads), and in terms of
which
buffs or debuffs any given bard chooses to take (and whether they spec into Weak AoE or Strong Single-Target), most if not all bards will need to have a variety of options available to them.
If we don't have that, then combat will end up being very flat (so that we can handle all its variety in a small ability set), or Bard will end up being frustrating and ineffective (due to our inability to adapt in the way that our
Archetype (in the original sense of the word)
demands).
I believe that something like Bucky showed us in the Bard Preview stream will end up being correct for Ashes of Creation, with something like 22 abilities (before Basic/Dodge/Block/Sprint/etc) for a mid-level Bard. (See screenshot.)
Bucky's hotbar from the Bard Showcase:
This also lines up reasonably well with the roughly 25 unique songs at level 50 (excluding Elemental Defense, Elemental Weaken, and lower-level duplicates) that I'm used to from
Final Fantasy XI
(not FF14).
I think Ashes is right in line with where they should be in terms of Bard design, and the variation and ability choice in the skill tree. We'll surely see more Bard abilities than they've shown off (they even told us as much in the stream), but I do not expect Bucky's design to end up either too small and limited or too overwhelming or bloated. They're in just about the right place (both in spec choices, and hotbar) for a mid-level Bard, and I have no doubt that Bucky will give us a high-level Bard of the same quality.
But one part of doing that will be having significantly more than 12 abilities in our hotbar. Even before Basic/Block/Dodge/Sprint.