More skill slots is not power creep.
In theory we could have unlimited skill slots, without it being a problem (well, outside of the game running out of memory at some point).
That is a strawman argument anyway.
We also should not have 6 skills since someone will just ask for 5, 4 or zero skills then?
There is an argument that if you give people too much that they end up having everything.
There are ways to counteract this though as itâs proportional to the amount of choices in the pool that you get to choose from.
If you have 6 hotkeys and 12 choices then you end up having 50% of whatâs available.
If you have 8 hotkeys and 32 choices available then you can only end up picking 25% of whatâs available.
So the argument of being able to choose everything is based on how many skills we get to choose from in the first place.
Then thereâs the argument of balance between it being too simplistic and having too much choice.
What people are saying here is itâs way too far in the direction of simplicity and itâs more than possible to give players enough difficult decisions to make if you give them enough skills to choose from.
Having 6 skills gives us less choice, likely less abilities to choose from and most certainly more cookie cutter builds that essentially have to take the core kit that includes everything.
I can pretty much garuntee every class will have this kit and pretty much feel the same. Without having a decent size toolkit for all of these different situations the game would be boring anyway and it would be obvious mobs werenât designed to give any intesting challenge if theyâre not requiring to be escaped from, repostitioned on, single target dmg and aoe dmg moments being important to use the right thing and saving important cooldowns like dmg buffs/shields and ultimates for really tough moments.
D4 will not be fun if you can take everything down just by spamming the same abilities over and over.
Builds will actually be interesting once we start being able to choose abilities beyond our core kit. Choosing an extra single target dmg ability so Iâm a single target dmg monster. Choosing an extra aoe to be a aoe master. Choosing an extra mobility skill to be super mobile and repostion. Choosing extra dmg mitigation to go for a tanky build or dmg buff for dmg.
Not having more than 6 abilities pigeon holes every class into a cookie cutter build that will all essentially be the same, the opposite of what they think it will do.
We need more hotkeys to really experiment and actually build fun builds that are larger than just our core abilities.
Did you have your coffee today? 
Did you miss this part? 
Indeed.
Thankfully not!
No, but you still decided to make a silly slippery slope argument against more buttons.
Whatever have a good day. 
I will put in a word with Bobby to see if you can have 20 skills, but I do not think he will listen. He is counting all of his money right now.
Would be even worse. Much worse. Then we are just left with a bad UI for no reason.
Should only be possible to put points into the amount of skills we can fit on our skill bar, no matter what that number is.
(or rather, put points into as many skills as you want for all I care, but it should be impossible to swap skills in and out of the skill bar - which however means there would be zero reason to put points into more skills - obviously assuming we hopefully arenât ever returning to a D2 style skill tree where you had to spend points on unwanted pre-requisite skills)
Seems like he will listen to anyone willing to buy him another yacht.
Maybe a half yacht will give us the 10 slots then. That is a good amount.
It stops when the devs make the decision.
Now there is time to influence D3 devs.
If they stay on the path so far shown and go for 6 I for one will work with that. All I am saying is that more skills can open for more strategic gameplay, some skills will be there for certain specific moments.
As an example the barbarian, the shouts were a huge buff, and is, in D2 and D3. In the former we could access them to buff up and go on, other spells that could be accessed was leap to be used in specific situations in order to overcome obstacles and/or reach enemies and then we had damadealers and the rest. In D3 we will have to limit ourselfs and leap is mainly to a specific set.
My point is that I donât perceive this as a hard choice rather it feels like a constriction.
Now even if the choice would be there to have 20 spell most people would not be able to handle them, myself included, for an ARPG 20 is probably too much and for some of us 6 feels too little. Question is were the middle ground is.
Thank you, I believe you covered my thoughts and more.
Why stop at 20 skills? Letâs ask for all the buttons you can find on the keyboard to press. More buttons - more skills, at least according to some people here. 
Honestly this topic has been beaten to death already. The arguments are just repeating while pretending they arenât repeating themselves.
Iâll sit here comfortably, with my gamepad in hand, knowing that the game will only have 6 skills because thatâs how many buttons there is in a gamepad.
You canât even gear up to support 8-10 skills. And youâd streach yourself thin. And then you cry to buff skills, which will lead to⌠Diablo III powercreep 
Happy Birthday!!!
Well, honestly thatâs just a D3 problem because how bad itemization is. In a decently itemized game that wouldnât be a problem because gear wouldnât be that skill specific.
While items should not be skill specific, affixes should still be specific enough that it harder to gear for 10 skills than 5 skills. And it would be fine.
Spreading thin is exactly why it is nonsense to claim skill buttons is power creep.
At least you never fail to be predictable.
D4 should have âjack-of-all-tradesâ options, or is Blizzard not up to the task, who once prided themselves on game balance? All you need is a sensible resource system and itâs bound to be a hard sell for players to roll with 10+ weak cost-inefficient skills (depending on how resources work and what items are available for âresource-intensiveâ characters). Failing all else you can make a skill tree that errs on the side of expecting players to invest heavily into 6 skills in the first place, with big juicy mega-upgrades. Meanwhile the madlads daring enough to ignore these crucial upgrades in favor of having a swiss army knife, with the gear to back up the heavy cost, get to try. Best of both worlds?
Couldnât disagree more. A finite small amount of skills allows more skillful gameplay and decision making into an arpg.
Couldnât disagree more.
Having more buttons means having to think about more meaning more skill. You literally have more decisions to choose from.
With 6 skills you have less to think about. This does not equal more skill itâs the exact opposite.
METALHEAD compare playing a 4 string bass guitar to a 7 string.
Or the drummer from Coldplay with a snare and couple of hi hats compared to a huge metal kit like Soulfly or As I Lay Dying drummer.
A finite small amount of skills does allow for harder decision making in builds.
What does not follow is that 6 skills is the best amount.
10 skill slots is also a small finite amount, and so on.
As a drummer and instructor, I couldnât disagree more.
Look at the great jazz musicians of the past, or travis barker (punk rock) whom won drum off nationwide, they all used small kits, and their skill had no where to hide behind an endless amount of toys. I do love the drummer comparison though 
D3 is already a âspammyâ game, I wouldnât want to add more complication to the mix by adding too many additional skill slots into D4.
Look at how successful D1 and D2 were with way less skill slots to utilize.
I LOVE D3 because I never have to look down at my hand position on the keyboard.
A good mix of less skills with the right cooldowns should be the sweet spot, but having tons of options like an MMO would be less skillful and meaningful to the gameplay, in my opinion.
D2 has way more skill slots though. Just a very cumbersome UI.
As for D3 being a spammy game. Yeah, imo, D4 should be less spammy, more deliberate, more tactical. Having more skills (as an option) would fit well with that.
Thinking back to my time in FFXI where some mages had over 100 spells at their disposal since thatâs all they could do because mage melee was garbage and detrimental in harder content.
Probably 80-85 of those spells were never used.
Putting a giant arsenal of abilities at your disposal doesnât automatically mean more strategy. âKill the thing!â is pretty much always the goal and that distills tactics to killing whatever as quickly as possible so itâs not doing as many things as possible that would do the same to you. Your best single-target, your best AoE, then whatever (de)buffs help you do that best are pretty much it. If youâre tanky or glassy just determines how fodder are handled, with boss encounters doing their own thing. One niche spell to counter a boss mechanic doesnât really make it a good spell. Iâll also continue to argue that the very nature of skill points (and +skill mods) does not beget a many-skill arsenal.
Unfortunately, some of the common tactics to force a broader skill diversity in a build, well, suck. Part of the reason why so many of the above spells didnât get used? Resistances. Others just had garbage potency and didnât justify the MP expense or time spent casting when you could be nuking or resting for MP (and letting enmity decay a little). Could some of these things have been improved? Sure. Would it cancel niche status for some? Not really.
How things worked in D2 reflected a few broken elements of the game like +skills, runewords, and charges if you hated yourself. This enabled one-point wonders, highlighted how some skills were OP, and played its part in sacrificing class identity. Immunities did the rest in either hamstringing builds or forcing specific counters. Personally, if weâre going to push niche methods, Iâd rather them be integrated into the niche encounter where you utilize the environment or doodads found within. I canât think of many folks who like 10+ step rotations to farm, let alone play for hours on end.