I am super bored so I’ll try to beat my dead horse with another stick. Choice is what makes us human… one of the things, anyway. Often gamers will mention how much they value choice in game design. Choice takes on different forms. You can have choice in a narrative that alters the course of your experience, choice in character customization that lets you be different things, and lastly there is choice in action that lets you do different things. In ARPGs we can largely discount the choice in narrative as the hardcore ADHD geniuses who play a number of different real time types of games don’t actually care for story and even skip dialogue. That’s ok, Diablo dies in the end anyway no matter what any demon says. ARPGs are all about choice in character customization - being a special little snowflake, in essence. And in fairness there is a considerable degree of it, albeit debatable. Choice in action, however, is a totally foreign concept to this genre.
For whatever depth or complexity that may or may not exist in the various character customization systems - items included - the irony is that gameplay in ARPGs is stunningly flat. Even the most hardcore ARPG - Path of Exile - is known for one-button mashing gameplay. You spend hundreds of hours playing and theorycrafting over constellations of modifications only to have ended up mashing a button that does the same thing like a monkey with a first-gen brain implant. There is hardly any notable skill in it, you just keep doing it to chase the next upgrade, beat the next math level, and watch stuff die as the Good Lord intended. Now, this is perfectly fine for aging dads of many children of multiple mothers who work several jobs and who would rather hit a button than the bottle or their close relatives - as well as for gaming enthusiasts of autumn temperature IQs who lose themselves inside run-on sentences - but it is not perfectly fine for all the people with unrealized potential meant for something greater.
Choice in action - or in combat - is the undiscovered daunting frontier of ARPGs that no one has an interest in. This is not the World of Warcraft choice with fixed rotations, long cooldowns, and piano fingers. I call it dynamic action. TL;DR you create a bunch of groups of 3-4 actions remapped onto the same 3-4 buttons you cycle through by executing an action within each group. At the expense of using your noggin you can do a number of different things while you actually play the game without being a concert pianist. This sounds outlandish and unnecessary, but in practice it may turn out people are not as stupid as they are being treated by ARPG game design, which has somehow brainwashed some of them into believing they are indeed that stupid. Repeat after me, “I am meant for something more than mashing one action for hundreds of hours.” All you HOTA barbarians (that’s a barbarian that slams the ground, right?), lightning balls sorcerers, pulverize druids, etc. (yes, even you twisting blades rogues, think figuratively; btw, what the hell does a summoning necromancer do?) I have watched you. I have judged you. And I believe in you. Demand to be treated like a human, not a monkey. Cue ‘I am monkey.’