Quantity of Abilities

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I think this could work just fine. I don't think you even need to separate out the ability points and talent points to make it work.

Intrepid seems to be doing something like this already. They showed it off when they were discussing Counterpoint and Crescendo. If you assume that all the rest of those circles on the Bard skilltree (hidden below) are passive choices too, with more to come, you're going to have to make some hard choices between taking abilities and taking passives either way. If those passives all have the same level of impact you get from Counterpoint or Crescendo, I don't think we have to worry about them being underwhelming by comparison either. I will absolutely be giving up a potential ability to spend that point on Counterpoint in my own Bard build.

Now that your concept of ability slots is up to 15-30, I have no doubt you can make a good Bard design with that. My 'shallow buff-bot' concern came from the much more severe limitation. Having reread your OP, I think that you actually meant that as an example of the minimum, rather than the maximum, and I misunderstood that at the time.

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This seems like something Intrepid may do, and it will probably be useful for those Bards that prefer to specialize entirely in dance, for instance, and don't want to think about it or make the situational, tactical choices. In those cases trading off flexibility for power can be a reasonable choice.

If you only have one Melody, then your melody will be the wrong choice in many situations. The type of bard that cares about the melody style abilities cares about them for the adaptation they allow. This type of Bard needs to spend 5 ability slots on what will, in practice in any given situation, be only 1-2 actual abilities.

Back when I understood the idea to be "12ish slots", this was a problem . With 15-30, we'll be fine. That's plenty of room for both melody options for a variety of situations, and a reasonable amount of abilities to actually use in combat.

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I missed this one, actually. Thanks for the timestamped link. They definitely didn't mention bumping it all the way up to 5. That would absolutely be a terrible idea to do, for exactly the reason you think. But it was Steven that brought it up, not Bucky, and Bucky clearly knows what he's doing, so I'm going to have faith personally that if something like that happens, it's not going to be quite that simple.

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The "few melodies, many dances" style Bard should absolutely be a valid build. I just come from a very different perspective. To me, this is the kind of thing Ashes already intends to do. Steven constantly talks about his 'wide or deep' skilltree dichotomy. Having the option to build a narrowly focused character, but whose few abilities are highly impactful, is already one of their core concepts.

It's only a problem if you start forcing people down the other way, and that's why I brought it up initially. If you aren't thinking about Bard specifically, or you don't understand Melody Bards, it's an easy thing to miss. I don't think this actually comes up for many other classes. For a Bard, however, unlocking 5 melodies does not give you 5 abilities. It gives you 1 ability (or 2) that cost 5 hotbar slots. You're paying for flexibility, not for actions. That's fine when it's skill points, but it puts you at a massive disadvantage compared to other classes when ability/hotbar slots are the limiter . In your two-point-categories world, maybe "Melody" would be the ability, and "Cheerful, Pensive, Epic, Cathartic, Menacing" would be talents that expand it into multiple.

Nobody should be forced to go Wide, and nobody should be forced to go Deep. I think Intrepid will get it right, and your updated proposal both seems possible, to me, and also reasonably close (in spirit) to what I understand Intrepid intends to do.

It's just that in "Quantity of Abilities", I had to stand for "more than 12", because in the peculiar case of Bard, unlike almost everyone else, "5 abilities" doesn't mean "5 actions".