Ah okay. I stand corrected, I don’t play Guild Wars 2.
But it’s fixed, that’s my point. The developers have designed the classes to revolve around certain fixed numbers, like 2 weapon slots, 5 additional slots, and so on – all that you mention. That doesn’t change (correct me if I’m wrong). That’s the defined design space. You know it at the top of your head because it’s fixed.
WoW doesn’t have that. No one knows at the top of their head how many abilities the various classes or specs have. It’s completely random. Blizzard adds more abilities and you enable more action bars to fit them. Sometimes they remove some abilities and you are left with some empty action bar slots. Different classes have different amounts of abilities, some gain more in expansions, some don’t. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s not defined.
Most games define their action bars, their design space. WoW doesn’t.
Well, it changes between class AND weapons you pick - the minimum is 15 spells, the maximum is 30 I think (but dunno if anyone is playing such a build). So if your point was, that the design is based around some basic rules, than yes, but they aren’t fix!
So it’s actually also like:
It’s the same in gw2 afaik (don’t play it that much ^^). As already written above: they are limited within 15-30 spells and you only need 15 binds to use/control them all (since the abilities changed based on the weapon or some other skills you use (they kinda act like a weapon)) - but the amount of spells highly depends on the skills/talents you pick and also on the class you play.
I think there is also a min and max for spells in wow based on the class/talents - but ya, I get what you want to say. Dunno tho if such a system would fit perfectly into wow - limits can be good but also bad in my opinion. But something to orientate around (not fixed, just something to look at) is deffo not bad - I agree.
Blizzard can basically stuff as many abilities into the spell book as they want to.
And everything they put into the spell book you have to put onto the action bars.
There’s no methodology to it though. It’s just whatever the developers feel like. It’s changes on a class by class basis, spec by spec, patch by patch, and expansion by expansion.
Other games have an action bar of a certain size (or several, different), so that’s how many abilities you get to work with. It’s fixed.
Then the developers can add more abilities, weapons, talents, or whatever, but what the player has to utilize is always limited by the size of the action bar. They can swap things out, which adds customization, but they can’t just add on top. WoW always adds on top.
Nah it would mess too much with what the game is at this point. It’s just a reflection thing. In retrospect there are many areas in which WoW could have been designed better back in the early 2000’s, but that ship has sailed long ago.
