Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
The road map is what is going to be developed.
The button bar is not intended to be a limiting factor for the player, it's the limited skill points for the tree which Steven has repeatedly said would be what forces choices upon the player.
The wiki link your providing links to a source video,
The question is first read by Steven "How many abilities will be made or are planned to be made for each archetype" The answer he gives verbatum.
First the question never asks about 'only' active abilities, it asks about ALL, so Steven is gonna give the most expansive number that fits the question. It is unfortunatly clear that Steven is sloppy with his use of the words 'skill', 'ability' and 'passive'. And makes reference to both 'active ability' and 'active skill' with no dicernable distinction, but the fact that he says 'active ability' and in close assosiation with 'passives' means to him their exists the possibility of passive abiliites, aka ability is not automatically active.
But it is clear that ALL of the things he is referencing are picked with skill points and are on a tree that you can not fully speck out due to limited points, it's that tree size which he is trying to convey, trees we have now seen which perfectly match size he specified. Maybe the questioner MEANT to ask about 'active abilities', but they did not and Steven clearly didn't interpret the question that way.
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.
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.
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.
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".
well if that doesn't sound like every fighter will have the same exact abilities on their hot bars i don't know what does. What console you play on?
Active Skills
Passive Skills
Augments
All are a subset of Abilities, I think.
Active Skills and Passive Skills are associated with Skill Points.
Augments are not associated with Skill Points.
"Active Abilities" are not really a thing.
The Skill Tree cannot be fully specced into. Skill Points limit how many Active and Passive Skills can be chosen.
Steven wants to keep slots on the Hotbar down to 20. Some of those slots might be filled with Potions or other items besides just Active Skills.
Of course, everything is subject to change so we may end up with more than 20 slots on the Hotbar.
Those Skills would essentially be greyed out and useless.
You place the specced Active Skills you like to use most often on the Hotbar.
Some players may not want all of the Active Skills they've specced into to be on the Hotbar.
In the Bard Preview, there appear to be around 30 Skills in the Skill Tree.
But, there seems to be room for twice that in the UI Window.
And A2 is capped at Level 25 - halfway to max Level 50.
Right which is why all their servers are full now...Oh wait their all off. Because the game couldn't make it to the 5 year mark. Now that wasn't completely due to the combat alone but one of the chief complaints was the combat was boring, and it was, hit the same 3 - 5 buttons every time you fought anything. People like the action combat but they didn't like the limited abilities.