I am sure someone has raised this before, but if not, here we go.
We should be able to bind more than 6 abilities on to our hot bars, especially when we are given so many choices.
For example, I was trying out a support barb, and I had a choice between an extra shout, or my ultimate ability. I don’t see why I can’t just bind it to another button or have an extra bar?
What are everyones thoughts?
Edit #1:
To summarize feedback from everyone so far these are the camps:
Ultimate gets its own button
8 skills instead of 6.
Let us keybind the skills
Leave it alone, you are old, go back to D2.
The point of asking these questions is to create discourse, not for people to spread vitriol. If you find yourself getting insulted, maybe relook at how you phrase your criticism.
Personally, 1 works for me.
I understand that there needs to be a balance between casual and dedicated players, and I think this creates a good middle ground.
Edit 2:
I was able to hot-swap abilities in combat by using the “S” key. So I could use all my shouts and swap out to my ultimate. Unless this is a bug, I can already do what I want, but it’s clunky and feels bad to play like that.
i was doing a throzen orb build, i used : blizzard - fronze orb - teleport - ice armor - frost nova… but i had to sacrifice something for my ultimate, felt terrible
8 would be nice, especially with all the items that give spells and you can’t really fit them into your build most of the time. I never used an Ultimate because it didn’t fit into my build, and I didn’t feel like dropping out the spells I did have.
They have gone with 6 to continue with D3 style because it works well, and regardless of our feedback they aren’t changing this in the next 2 years, probably not ever since there is not a lot of feedback surrounding it.
it’s good and force more tactical perspective. Opens door for more variety of builds. Having everything is like having nothing.
D3 was a bad game from perspective of gameplay based only on brainless zooming and collecting only sets that destroy entire genre of hns purposes of thinking and utilizing your brain.
here you need to invest into some survivality, players need to positioning and think about dps / utility / survivality and not only DPS like in D3 where every point goes into crit.dmg and everything else is useless.
Diablo 3 started out where to clear Inferno as a Barbarian you had to go 100% fully into survival, and builds were based heavily around control and survival, in group based play Barbarians still focus on survival to play the support role which is vital. But D3 changed because the playerbase preferred faster paced gameplay, they responded well to the DPS based stuff, “survival” based D3 was unpopular.
Even then, survival is a heavy element of clearing higher GRs in D3, it’s just not the primary goal, you have enough survival to survive and everything else into damage to make the timer. I did a GR150 on my Barb this season, searching for an 80% band of might, trying to get resist all on my boots, legs and chest, trying to get singular resists as secondaries on every other item, and to balance them.
Even Vitality, I think I had 1500 Paragon into Vitality in order to survive so that I could run a Helm with Crit and skill damage… To call D3 mindless in this aspect is just wrong, a lot of focus goes into survival. Even from a gameplay perspective, bad players die constantly because they don’t play correctly, you can only be mindless on low difficulty.
And in D4 beta, almost all of my gearing optimisation was for damage, and with bosses dropping potions every 25% boss health you will find that damage plays a huge part in survival.
Other aRPGs give you way more choices than 6 abilities, and yet your build is still unique and far from feeling like you can do ‘everything.’
PoE and Torchlight… Oh, and Diablo 2, to name a few. All better games than this. I swear it’s like the people who defend D4 design choices have never touched an aRPG in their life.
The only reason the limit of 6 makes sense is because their are almost no choices to begin with. Just brings us to another flaw.
When you have extra skills, you can just change them on the fly with S key. Allow you to adapt. Everything depend on how it will be easy or hard to respect at 50-100 lvl.
When I look at the Sorceress, I just wonder why the ability to turn a skill into passive isn’t available for all classes (and find something else for the sorceress specialization, like be able to change spell element!). Be able to turn the skills you can’t use into extra passives… really cool mechanic.
Absolutely agree. 6 skills is not enough. We need an extra button for ultimate at the VERY LEAST for builds to feel interesting or satisfactory. At least this way you can still use your ultimate without compromising the rest of your build.
Well Diablo 4 is crossplatform game. how players on PS/Box use on gamepad more than 6 buttons? I dunno I a PC gamer and played PS/Xbox about 10 times in my 33 years life. But still I m not sure about console players.
Diablo 2 has far more abilities than Diablo 4 and Diablo 2 is on consoles, it works really well with gamepad too. Having 8 abilities would not be a problem for gamepads, you literally have MMO’s with far more abilities being played on console.
Even WoW, people have been doing high M+ keys using Playstation controllers on PC.
I don’t even read the content of the post. I can tell by the title alone that it’s a stupid idea.
This is what the game mechanics are supposed to look like. This is how they designed it. Go back to playing D2 most preferably the version where you could not use keys to assign skills and use them by pressing a key. Preferably to version 1.11c and let people to play new productions and not 20-year-old games withs some ancient mechanics.
What they’re asking for is D4 NOT to feel like a 20 year old relic and instead feel like a modern game. We can handle more than 6 buttons. Diablo 4 is supposed to be more difficult. 6 buttons is not difficult and it makes builds small, simple and boring.
You got something wrong. In D2 you can assign skills to the entire keyboard. And that game is 20 years old. What you are describing is its a modernized game. Simple. Uncomplicated. For the average player. Not for the 1990s caveman
Well then put simply. 6 skills is boring. And I think a 1990s caveman could handle more than 6. 6 skills is for 2000s babies that need their hand held and never pushed to rise to the challenge. This should not be the design for D4.
D3 was clearly designed for the average player. No one wants this for D4. I want it to be designed for a specific type of player that likes hard, hellish games and the roleplay involved. Demons should not be easy to fight.
D4 should also be more complicated and have more depth than games like D3. It should have more than 6 skill buttons for these reasons. Plus many people have come to the forums to advocate for this.
POE has 8 skills. Lost Ark has 8 skills. Do the average player complain about this? No they don’t. But many have come to complain about D4 dropping the ball here in a major way with such a restriction on only 6 skills.
No one complains in POE or Lost Ark about 6 skills. Many complain about it in D4. It’s a problem and ruins every build and the entire games depth and class building. It’s far too simple.
That’s not the Diablo model though, at least not any more. If you give people more slots what will they do with them? Either add more damage skills that they don’t need - one builder and one spender is all you need - or add more utility/defense skills which makes the game easier not harder. In the latter case, where you don’t just waste the extra slot, you also make it harder to balance the skills and classes because for each button you exponentially raise the total number of combinations people could use.
I could see an argument to add an ultimate as an extra button but then I think the cooldown would need to be extended considerably to avoid balance issues. Likewise there could be a movement skill only assignment but then those skills would need to have no ranks or secondary effects for the same balance reasons.
You’ve already got 6 skills with 3 effects tied to most of them, other passives in the skill tree, passive effects on gear, class specific enhancements (Sorcerer passive enhancement, Rogue specialisation etc), plus the paragon boards to define your character. That’s quite a lot to choose as well as to balance.
There’s an argument that the game is much easier with 6 buttons. 7 buttons is harder to use, harder to build as there are MORE options. You said it yourself
This sounds like a far more interesting, harder to build and far more options to choose from making for a much more interesting and fun game to play. More depth, more complexity, more buttons to press.
This arguably makes the game harder and in turn yes harder to balance. But many games exist that have more than 6 skills and are able to balance no issue.
At the very least I think an ultimate skill slot assigned to pressing both shoulder buttons is not a big ask.
My build and button options are simple, run out too quickly and make for a simple less fun and easier game to play.
I don’t understand the argument that it makes the game easier to ADD more skills.
Demonstrably becomes harder with more complexity, options and buttons to press.
Diablo 4 is supposed to be a game with more complexity and depth and be harder.
Adding an extra skill slot would add to all of this. Right now it feels too simple in all of these regards. Builds too simple and easy to make because not enough options. Pigeon holed into your choices., combat too simple and easy to execute as I only have 6 buttons to press.