Crowfall

I loved the elementalist in GW2 that had 4 different elements you could switch to which changed your five primary skills. And those skills were also modified by which weapon you were using. You couldn't change it in change that weapon in combat, but I frequently changed between staff (massive AE dmg) and dagger (mobility, PBAE damage). This mean that I crammed 5 * 4 * 2 or 40 abilities in five buttons.

This also caused a pretty high skill cap because you had cooldowns on element changing and had to be smart about entering combat with the right weapon. There were real strategic choices as well with builds because if you specced for quicker element changing or benefits from changing elements a lot you could run powerful and long rotations in combat.


On the flip side, the elementalist was the only class that got this. Other classes could freely switch between two weapons and had 5 skills per weapon. This meant that they had ten primary abilities + an extra 5 utility/special abilities. I mostly played the elementalist and never got good at other classes, but I generally got bored of them because of how few options you had.

ESO was another example of a game that was hurt by too few and too simply skills. They were also hindered by the incredibly stupid decision to not have any cooldowns on all abilities. This meant the optimal rotations for a given situation were rarely longer than one ability...

There's no perfect number of abilities you want in a character in an MMO, and they relate in stance changing, combos, multiple effects etc but I think it's higher than 10 and less than 30.