I keep seeing the word "rotation" thrown around and that has me a little worried.
If all that's meant is that abilities are meant to be comboed to together with other abilities, I have no problem with that. It's a good thing.
But more and more often these days, in the context of MMORPGs, this means the creation of a system where you play a Simon Says game with 50 different buttons that all do the same basic thing. For instance:
- Do damage
- Do damage except more with a wind up
- Do damage except more with a cool down
- Do damage except less, but it gives a debuff (that does more damage)
- Do damage except more when there is the aforementioned debuff
- Do damage except less right now, but more over time
- Do damage except less, but it generates a resource
- Do damage except more, but it costs the the aforementioned resource
So on and so forth.
I really just see this as game-ifying the spamming of attacks. If in the old days attack spams took 1-3 buttons, now they take 10-12. It's false difficulty.
Different abilities should have different mechanics attached to them. You shouldn't have one or two ability bars full of abilities that all do the same basic thing. It's actually fine to have only 1-4 basic "do damage" buttons, for instance. The rest of your bar should be dedicated to actual mechanics.
