How many spells do you want?

Simple question. How many spells or abilities do you want access to at a time? Would you prefer it to be like the original Guildwars where you could only have 8 abilities on your bar at a time, or as it is in WoW or FFXIV where some classes have up to 30 abilities they can use in combat?

For me personally, I prefer to have fewer buttons to press since I don't like using a lot of modifier keys when I'm playing. I also prefer to be able to use my abilities in multiple different ways rather than having a separate spell for each occasion. For example, instead of having a separate spell for healing and dealing damage, I like having an ability that, depending on the target, would either heal or deal damage.

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lunarsky

Somewhere between 20-30 equipable skills with dozens more that are chosen via specs within the class.

[Deleted User]

For me, this is less about the number of skills/abilities, more about the UI.
And to answer, I'm going with.... it depends on what screen I'm playing on.

I like being able to quickly see what spells/abilities I have and making a choice during battle.
However that choice just isn't possible on some screens, there just isn't space without crippling something else like vision.

I'd love to be able to swap instantly between multiple UI layouts to solve this.
So, monitor 1, I can use UI 1, monitor 2, well you get it.

I also would love for UI's to be swappable for group plays or solo.

I'd also love for 'reactive' UI's.

So for instance, you fix a healing skill as permanent, but then can fix reactive skills in slots as well.
So that if you select someone, yourself or a mob, you've got your OWN menu to choose from that depend upon the situation of that selection.

Not good at explaining right now... let me try again.

Say I am a healer.

I know that I will always want skill 1 + 2, so attach those to the relevant bars.
That bar is unreactive and will never change.

I can then choose to attach further skills that appear when my criteria of my active in game selection are met.

So as a healer, I select player A. Their health is good, they're taking minimal damage from a creature with no massive damage attacks - I'd probably leave them to it, or might want to attach a general buff/debuff if appropriate. It's ok, because I've already preset the criteria, so the skills I want are available.

Player b is then selected, and the UI changes because the criteria I've put in, is now no longer the same as before.
Their health is good, but they are taking damage - I might want to attach a slow heal over time, or go for a damage reduction/shielding or a buff/debuff. That's fine, the UI now has prioritised those for me.

Player c, they're getting slaughtered, lots of quick heals, HOT's etc etc.

Basically, I would love a game that could produce responsive UI's depending upon certain criteria, that I can pre-set.

This would be useful to all classes and players...
So I've decided to tank. Click on mob A, they meet set criteria 1, pre-chosen UI priorities adjust accordingly.
Maybe they're low level and insignificant. So you might want one quick death blow or aggro keeping bleeds because the group can handle them, but you want the focus to remain on you whilst you store up your energy for mob B.
Mob B, is criteria 2 though. It's the boss. What you want then is really going to change what options you'd prefer to see/have on the UI.

I hope you can see what I maen.

---

TLDR:
The number of skills/abilites matters less to me than the UI flexibility.
Saved UI settings so that we can swap depending upon the monitor and style of gameplay of the moment.
Lets get reactive skill menu's.

Just a waffle.

Tatiana

Can't really say what number would feel good since I haven't played the game at all, but I will say I absolutely loathe having too many buttons to press, and too many hot-bars stacked full of skills making the screen and game look cluttered and ugly.

Plateau

Alpha Soul

I'd like to see a "choosing" of spells to be usable by each class. but.. more importantly what I would also like to see is potential spells, abilities that are rare and have to be found/earned to be used.

Damokles

Something interesting that i thought of today are casting "stances".

Example: A mage can choose between three different casting approaches.

1. The fast stance: The casting time is considerably shorter but the damage is diminished, like a peashooter where you dont think about the direct damage but rather want to stack dots and other effects on the enemy.

2. The neutral stance: No changes to casting speed, but the mage cant be interrupted while casting (except through interrupt abilities).

3. The power stance: The casting time is nearly doubled but the direct damage of the spell is heavily increased. The mage is interruptable by direct damage (depends on damage amount and type)

RockHound

I really don't want another WoW clone where I have 20+ hot key combos and a cluttered ass screen full of hot bars that I need to click on from time to time. I prefer the ESO type of setup where you have 5 abilities on 2 bars determined by your equipped weapon. I'd be ok if it went up to 6 or 7... but any more than that is just too much.

HalfHazardous

I hope abilities or spells aren't too "mechanical" but fall into a more natural contingent. For example, attempting to charge or produce a spell before it has the "strength" (say too little mana) to conjure up the desirable effect can have alternate or otherwise unexpected results. I think some fun or interesting ideas come from that.

Something less calculated, I mean. It would be like trying to lift a weight before you fully recovered, so you can only lift it half way, but potentially enough to reach your desired destination, but then it could come falling back on you. A double edged sword, if you will in some capacity? But that depends on the natural flow of events, the circumstances that is.

Wandering Mist

@auraticus that sounds like a ton of programming work for something that I know would frustrate a lot of people.

seaber

Given that, in alpha 0 one could have each skill at rank 0, 1, 2 or 3 with each rank increase costing skill points and Intrepid have said 'fewer than 30' for the number of skills one will have available at once, I would like to see:
Total number of skills a character has** = 29
The minimum number of skills available at once = ((29 - the number of required*** skills) / 2) + the number of required skills
The maximum number of skills available at once = 29
The number of skill points = The minimum number of skills available at once * the cost of ranking up a skill * 3

Assuming uniform costs, no 'tree' structure and no required skills, this would result in roughly:
18,500,000,000,000,000 possible builds.
If the total number of skills a character has = 10, then, there would be roughly:
115,000 possible builds.

It's a pipe dream to think there will not be any required skills and, in alpha 0, costs were not uniform and there was a 'tree' structure so these numbers will be a lot lower.

It would be very exciting if skills had infinite (or as many as you have skill points and they all cost 1 skill point) ranks because you may see people running around with all their points in one skill and that skill would be very powerful but cost so much mana that they can only cast it once a day. It would also result in a lot more possible builds.

**in their skill book or whatever
***skills that would be detrimental to not take

Does everyone wanting a very low number of skills have arthritis or similar? I feel like any able bodied person should be able to reach shift, ctrl and atleast 8 other keys if their hand rests on wasd, which would give them access to a minimum of 24 keybinds.

Sarevok

I'm hoping they have schools of magic and allow you to learn the simple and basic spells of each school. Reaching the higher spells deeper in those schools of magic should be a little more challenging. Finding, learning and mastering those spells should be an adventure and not something you walk up to a trainer, hand over a pouch of gold and instantly know how to summon meteors from the sky or resurrect everyone in your party that had fallen during combat.

On that same note, acquiring the ancient texts for the stronger spells should not be a random drop found in random/specific locations. I'd prefer it to be something similar to an Easter egg hunt or a quest line.

When it comes to the number of spells, the more the merrier!

Schools of Magic:
Fire/Earth
Air/Lightning
Water/Ice
Mind/Morphing
Nature/Shapeshifting
Soul(cures)/Holy(healing)
Blessings(buffs)/Smite(mix of holy and lightning dmg)
Summoning/Conjuring
Blood(sacrifice HP for uses)/Draining
Curses(debuffs)/Agony(dots)
Darkness/Subterfuge(stealth)

... and many more!

lusiphur

As far as skills and spells go I want enough to do what I need to do and not so few that everything is a struggle that requires meticulous planning and not so many that my brain locks up trying to pick something. Conversely, I want my opponents to have too few to be functional and to many to be decisive. \

If this appears to be a conundrum, that's because it is, I wouldn't wrap it in an enigma though that is going a bit too far.

Vampora

I want so many spells and abilities that I literally can sit for a week trying to figure out what I want to use. The one thing that turns me off from most MMORPG is the fact that you see tons of characters that are exactly the same as you in every way but gear.

I want to be able to build lets say a mage that does massive dps in dungeons, but then if I want to go PVP maybe I want to play something stupidly annoying with no damage spells but 20 different crowd control spells just to be annoying. That is what is fun to me.

zerkerz

Ignoring passive skills and abilities, I want about 10, with different ways to configure them. Maybe I want as low as 6 or 8.

Noaani

My issue with a low spell count is that it simply means there are fewer choices to make during combat.

While having spells to chose from - and even having augments to chose from - is great and all, we only do that once (once per build, at least).

Once we have selected our spells and augments, if we only have 6 - 8 spells, that means when we get in to combat, there are VERY few options we have. It is perfectly conceivable that with so few spells available to us during combat, there may be times when we only have a single spell ready to be cast. In this system, deciding what spells to take out with you would be more fun than actually going out and killing things, as that is the only time you have any options in front of you.

An MMORPG where the fun lies in sitting in town creating builds rather than out in the world using builds to kill stuff is not an MMORPG I want to play.

With so few spells, that means we wouldn't be able to have spells with long recasts. Some of the most fun I had in EQ2 was in maximizing the benefit of spells that were on 3 minute recast timers. Such spells simply can not exist in a system where players have less than 12 spells, yet due to how much more powerful they can be than a spell with a 5 second recast (while still remaining balanced), they make combat so much more fun.

Hexcat

I like the way of how some spells work in AION online, this combo spells that you link one after another, maybe a system like that could work, not only in a combo way but also by charging spells with the use of others, that way you have access to a lot of different abilities without having 30 icons in your screen

seaber

noaani wrote: »

With so few spells, that means we wouldn't be able to have spells with long recasts. Some of the most fun I had in EQ2 was in maximizing the benefit of spells that were on 3 minute recast timers. Such spells simply can not exist in a system where players have less than 12 spells, yet due to how much more powerful they can be than a spell with a 5 second recast (while still remaining balanced), they make combat so much more fun.

You could have one spell with no cd and another with a 10m cd. That would be one way you could have such spells in a system where players have only 2 spells.
You seem to have picked 12 as the magic number out of nowhere. Why 12?

Joseline

Largely depends on how the skillsystem will work

If its about investing skillpoints to unlock further skills - like those oldschool skilltrees where you actually had to think about what to skill - I want a lot. 50+ or something, including passives and perhaps weaker versions of other skills
Just a vast variety allowing really complex and unique builds

If the game follows the modern trend of"just skill w/e you want youll have anything eventually anyway", id be happy with less than 20

Either way its important that gameplay allows some variety, I dont want to just sit using the same rotation for 5mins straight because there arent enough skills to vary it properly. So I want enough skills to have multiple rotations within the same build as well as some "flex skills" for special purposes like a def boost to prevent teamwhipes or an atk boost for bursting or a low cooldown movement ability/block skill

Damokles

@lumbermark
The chainsystem from Aion was the only thing that kept me interested in the game for a year tbh xD
It was always cool to switch up your chains in the middle of it to throw off your oponents or to adapt to a new situation.
One starter could then go into two different spells and so on.
I learned that you can nowadays create your own chains, but i still like the very first chain system the most tbh.

Noaani

seaber wrote: »

noaani wrote: »

With so few spells, that means we wouldn't be able to have spells with long recasts. Some of the most fun I had in EQ2 was in maximizing the benefit of spells that were on 3 minute recast timers. Such spells simply can not exist in a system where players have less than 12 spells, yet due to how much more powerful they can be than a spell with a 5 second recast (while still remaining balanced), they make combat so much more fun.

You could have one spell with no cd and another with a 10m cd. That would be one way you could have such spells in a system where players have only 2 spells.
You seem to have picked 12 as the magic number out of nowhere. Why 12?

That would be an incredibly boring combat. Cast your 10 minute spell, and then use your one other spell for the next 10 minutes.

While one could technically say it is functioning, such a combat system would see virtually every player leave the game. Based on that, I would consider it to be broken.

12 spells was not just pulled out of nowhere, though I didn't give my reasoning, and so your question really is fair.

In order for a combat system with long recast spells to work, there needs to be a variation in recast timers. If everything is 1 - 5 second recast, other than your one big spell, then that one spell feels like a gimmick. If you have a 3 minute recast spell, then you also need a 1 minute recast, two 30 second recast and 4 15 - 20 second recast.

This variation then takes that one big spell from being a gimmick to being a part of a larger system and consideration during combat. It becomes a part of your core class, rather than a big shiny button you can occasionally press for "added effect".

That is 7 spells right taken up so far. These spells could all be reasonably expected to be on their recast timer more often than not, and it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect them to all be on said recast timer at the same time.

Further, if implemented well, the longer recast spells are something a player would want to use at the "right" time, rather than as soon as the recast timer is up. The easiest such consideration is if another player in your group has a buff they can cast on you to increase the damage of all your spells for 10 seconds - if you know and trust the player in your group with that buff, you would likely wait for said buff to be cast on you before using your biggest spells.

Because of all of this, along with the above 7 longer recast spells, players need shorter recast spells in their arsenal as well. If players can expect to have 12 spells, after the above 7 it would leave players with 5 short recast spells.These spells are where things like combo or chain building would take place, and from games I have seen, 5 such spells seems to be the least amount of such spells to not make things boring.

This all adds up to my assertion that a good system including long recast spells needing a minimum of 12 spells to function in a deep and enjoyable manner.

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