I'm not talking about the road map, I'm talking about the final product, when classes are done.
What's the point of having a skill tree, where you only have 20 abilities to select, when you have 20 skill slots on your bar? There's literally no need to choose anything there.
What's the point with specializing into certain areas, where you only have that many abilities in total to select from?
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 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.
Well first it depends on the archetype, some archetypes will have some more active abilities available or some less active abilites available then others. it also depends on combination of passives as well and how that interchanges with the active skill sets and the aquisition of thouse skill points and distribution of thouse skill points.
But when we think about on average what each archetype is going to have from an ability standpoint, it is roughly going to be about 35 to 40. Right, and ofcourse that dosn't mean the player will have tha oportunity to speck into all of thouse abilites, your going to have a limited selection of skill points available in order to speck out your class. And that's gonna be imporatant because it provides not only agency to the player to make thouse kinds of decisions but it gives a subset diversity within that archetype where desicions kind of choose specialization paths within the skill tree for that particular archetype.
And we have talked about how we dont want to have what a lot of us have experienced see in other MMORPG's obsolete or not utilized abilities, right so we keep that selection relativly limited.
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.
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SongRuneMember, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
My idea for solutions would be:
1. to have seperate points for Abilities and their talented augmentations
2. to have the talents have "softcaps" the higher you go up in a ability specific branch
(small improvement => medium imp. => large imp. => med/small imp. => small imp.)
then ballance the ratio of "ammount of talent points to talent-tree-brance-nodes" in oder to enable a minimum and maximum of used abilities ranging from lets say 15 to 30 usable upgraded abilities per build.
This could ensure the possibility of varrying ability quantity while preventing powercreep in one ability.
Making both build styles viable.
Feel free to let me know how you feel about this approach or how you would improve/solve it.
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.
In the case of AoCs bard i hope they manage to give him options to specialize into 1 or 2 of the songs.
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.
The showcase showed the layering mechanic of 2 songs, but when they said they are thinking about bumping that up to all 5 songs i shivered, because that sounds like a buff bot.
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.
Now dont take me wrong, i think if you wana be a melody weaving bard thats fine by me, but if i wana stick to one melody and focus on the dances, i think i should be able to do so too. If i dont wana use abilities that i didnt spec into, i should be able to disreguard them. Ether because its suboptimal for my particular build or because its just not the version of bard fantasy im going for.
Immagine wanting to focus on building a fire mage, but the game forces frost magic into your rotation, because it doesnt give you the tools to build that fantasy in a viable way. This is in my experience the case with games that think only having many abilities = fun. BOTH can be fun in my opinion!
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".
I think its suppose to be, that you spec into abilities, and then use those, since they will be better than abilities you did not spec into. So your normal abiliti set will probably not be 3-4 bars, but more like 2 bars at the most, and then a bar for utility, like drinking potions, mounting, mining and what not.
I'm a 'less is more' kind of bloke. I don't particularly care for the bloated hotbars, where you have like 2-3 at the bottom, 2 more on the side, 2 more on the other side, as you fill up your screen with crap. You end up spending more time looking at the UI, rather then what is on screen.
I like more limited skill bars like that of Guild Wars, rather then that of GW2 or ESO. Where the former allows you to customize your skill set however you set fit, rather then the latter making half your choices for you, so you end up only choosing 3-4 of your skills, which sucks and tends to make combat become bland and samey after awhile.
While I do like the idea of having 'weapon skills', where you can swap between two sets of weapons for more total skills, I'm less fond of having them all be fixed and unchanging. I'd rather the weapons have their own skill bar, which you can customize using any of the skills from that weapons skill tree. So while two people using the same weapon might fight similarly, they need not fight the same. Throw in arguments, and then you have some serious customization.
As to actual numbers. I'd say about 3-5 weapon skills, for two sets of weapons. (ie main hand + offhand, or a two hander) Then about 5-8 class skills, any of which can be replaced by universal skills. Plus one ultimate.
In addition to dodge roll, sprint, block, basic weapon attack (thou this could just be a weapon skill).
In total we are looking at around 15-22 skills. Which should be ample for just about anybody to make an interesting build around, without everyone having a solution to every problem.
Of course with any limited skills system like this, you'd want to be able to save and load pre made builds.
Build crafting is really half the fun.
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?
There is games where 1 bar is more than enough. Wildstar, for example. It was quite hard ot stay alive and DPS or heal or whatever, and still use a whole bar. Game was lit, when it came to combat. I would venture saying, its the best combat system I have tried in an MMO. You really had to be quick and think on your feet, to get it done right. Such a fun experiance.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
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.
The official terms are:
Active Skills
Passive Skills
Augments
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. Tt'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.
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.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
I think its suppose to be, that you spec into abilities, and then use those, since they will be better than abilities you did not spec into. So your normal abiliti set will probably not be 3-4 bars, but more like 2 bars at the most, and then a bar for utility, like drinking potions, mounting, mining and what not.
I don't think you can place non-specced Active Skills onto 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.
There is games where 1 bar is more than enough. Wildstar, for example. It was quite hard ot stay alive and DPS or heal or whatever, and still use a whole bar. Game was lit, when it came to combat. I would venture saying, its the best combat system I have tried in an MMO. You really had to be quick and think on your feet, to get it done right. Such a fun experiance.
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.
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DygzMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Which is why we see space for 26 buttons in the Bard Preview. Yes.
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.