More damage ability options?

phaneub17_ESO

It's generally dumb to have more than one direct damage attack as they are mutually exclusive to the purpose they serve which is usually filler time between light attacks while everything else is ticking away. You may have an execute as your secondary direct damage attack, but that serves its own purpose as well. You stack multiple dots as they all can do damage independent of each other, this ends up to what most if not all DPS builds focus on. Whether they are single target that attach on or cast at the ground and damages whatever walks into it, they can all stack together. If you want players to change their builds, to try something different you're going to need to make other damaging abilities more attractive to use.

Things like adding more action bar slots is often an idea that comes up, but the way the game currently plays that doesn't really work because you just end up stacking more of the same, more dots and more ground effects. But what if you have a reason to use more than one direct damage attack in your build? Make different direct damage attacks chain off each other or grant bonuses for being used in conjunction not just one off effects. You can have one direct damage ability build stacked "combo" points then another direct damage ability clears those stacked points for more burst damage or another that applies a massive debuff. I like to see more channeled damaging abilities available to everyone or ones that work like the Bow's ultimate Rapid Fire, launching multiple projectiles or a series of different attacks with each strike.

My two favorite games to play are WoW and ESO, WoW really has it where every class has their own unique playstyle while there are similarities between them it stands out different enough to be on its own, but that also makes balancing them actually a lot more difficult. ESO everyone and every class can play pretty much the same, but it can also create a rut where every build regardless of class can end up exactly the same. That's how most of my magicka build characters are with one bar with all single target dots and one direct damage attack, and the other bar filled with various ground targeting effects. Stamina build characters are more or less the same with multiple dot abilities, one direct damage attack, and an execute. It's not that I don't want to do anything different, you just don't have the available attraction to play it any other way. Create true synergy between using different abilities together, make a reason to play something other than a dot em up then spam the same direct damage attack over and over.

The game doesn't have to be to the point where every class has its own unique playstyle, but at the very least make other abilities attractive by adding more bonuses to using them, create other playstyles by giving us the option of doing something other than half a dozen dots then spam 1 ability between light attacks until the others fall off, refresh, repeat.

Aggrovious

This game needs to allow abilities to one shot. Let's get that right. The combat becomes dull when you have to light attack everything for quick kills. This will raise the floor

mocap

i think you have some already. Delayed skills like Purifying light, Subterranean, Haunting curse. This should also be considered in relation to PvP. And for more bar slots - console gamepad restriction.

Currently, when you have any ideas, you must realise how this will affect:
- PvP
- console
- disabled players
- casual players with low APM

You may not agree, but this is what the community is strenuously pushing as the only true direction of the game - accessibility for everyone. Like it or not.

dmnqwk

Right now the kinds of damage abilities ESO uses are:

1. Spammables
2. Executes (spammables for below X health)
3. Damage over Time (both ground based and target based)
4. Channeled
5. Cooldown
6. Combo Spenders (it doesn't use combo generators, it has light attack function there).

It does use a decent number of options, except... when you dig into it you notice some of these are very limited in how they function.
For instance, Combo Spenders are limited to 2 abilities (NB Focus and Sorc Armaments). Cooldown powers are Warden Scorch (although ZOS seem to mistakenly lump this in as a DoT with u35) and Necro Blastbones. Channeled is pretty much limited to Templar's Radiant Destruction.

So pretty much everybody ends up having a build of 1 spammable, 1 execute, 1 Heavy Hitter (cooldown or combo spender), 1 AoE and then some dots to fill up the space (excluding passives/buffs of course which can take anywhere up to 6 spots if you want).

If you want diversity, it's rough when you consider how few skills are available for builds. When you look at the original Guild Wars, it had somewhere in the region of 300k skills available to make an 8 skill build (max 1 elite). That was an insane number for balance, of course, but it certainly made for some fun builds.
In larger MMOs, like WoW FFXIV or SWTOR, you have more abilities per class to create and design your builds (I believe I had 34-42 keybinds for SWTOR in 6.0) but that's other games. In ESO, they keep it simple and only give you limited choices.

To do anything else would stop it being ESO - a game where they aim to keep things simple (the irony, of course, being they change things every 3 months because they forgot they designed a simple system).