Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General The skill bar is flat out horrible

The UI right now is the main thing that really mars this game for me. Which is a big disappointment as it's a charming and enjoyable game in so many other ways.

Even in the first town, I end up with around 20 different skills on a single character. Combine that with weapon swapping, potions, various trinkets I like to swap out for non-combat stuff, etc. and the current 10 slot bar simply doesn't cut it.

Yes, there are 3 bars I can cycle through, but with a tiny little button I have to click to cycle through them. It's getting to me at this point. It's archaic and in a bad way.

I have a large 23.6" 1920 x 1200 screen. Let me use it. I could easily fit 2 or 3 bars of 20 slots with a customizable skill bar to work with, and it'd be so much less headache to deal with. I shouldn't have to cycle through them like this, it's a royal PITA. At the very least there should be keybind options for switching between them.


This is just not an acceptable UI for this kind of game in 2014. It's over sized, clunky, inefficient, and rigid. It's also bizarrely out of place, because the game otherwise seems fairly well polished. I have plenty of pet peeves, but the skill bar is the only major problem I'm having right now.

There seems to be an unfortunate tendency on the forums to make title and content super-dramatic when essentially you're making a reasonable UI enhancement suggestion. The point is fair enough, deserves to be modded in or even patched in, I'm sure it's doable.

It's your tone which is so over-the-top. You make it sound like it causes you physical pain to look at. If that's so, make sure there's no peas under your matress, princess!

I wholeheartedly agree. The little tiny arrow is even worse at 2560 X 1440. I would be happy if they gave us a couple more quick-button bars (e.g., 5 instead of 3) AND they assigned hot keys for "next bar"/"previous bar".

Please Larian, be compassionate for those of us who are aging and lack the dexterity/vision to repeatedly click that damn little arrow!

It doesn't cause physical pain but it is causing me a lot of irritation. It's a lot of excess UI management I shouldn't need to be doing.

I used a dramatic title just because that tends to get more responses on forums - that is why people do it. Maybe I've been spending too much time on forums.

This is definitely a game where I find like I'm frequently fighting against the UI... not as bad as darkfall but still pretty bad.

I am fairly happy with the skill bar. Usually, I arrange the same kind of skills (for example arrows) to one and the same skill bar as soon as one skill bar is filled up.
My only suggestion would be to hide the spikes which are separating the action points from another when you're out of fight. I got used to that already though.

This should definitely be improved.

I'd like the option to make all three bars available simultaneously, with configurable hotkey combos for all slots, like in most MMOs or RPGs like Neverwinter Nights 2, etc.

I'd like all 3 at once for sure. I'd also like another one or two, being a master mage has a lot of skills on hand.

It boggles the mind that they didn't add the standard SHIFT+UP/DOWN ARROW to cycle through the action bars.

Kind of a shame it's not dynamic depending on the players screen resolution and choice of a scheme in the visual options panel.

For example, on my 24" widescreen, it looks like it could easily fit 3 times as wide of a bar, thus displaying up to 30 icons in one row. My guess is that they wanted to use an easier one size fits all instead of using a more dynamic type of system that could expand depending on screen resolution if the user permitted it to do so.

The saving grace however is that since combat is turn based, it's not like we are under extreme pressure to move between the 3 hotbars rows in any great speed. It would just be more convenient to be able to do so with configurable hot keys.

Good point, the legitimate point gets lost over the drama queening.

You know, in beta they had a radial icon system for sending items to another player. I wonder how hard it would be for them to implement such a system that could be used for casting spells and abilities, kind of like Temple of Elemental Evil.

An hotkey for switching through the three hotbars (which are by the way not enough, one of my mages has more than 30 skills/abilities/consumables) was demanded several times now. I hope Larian will deliver on that request ASAP. It shouldn't be a really hard task to implement such an hotkey.

Hmm has anyone considered that this was done by design?
Simply to force you to make choices on skills you can use during combat?
Many other games do the same, offer you lots of skills but then make you chose which ones you want to be able to use.
Now if that is the case then still it's not an optimal implementation since you can use scroll's potions etc from your backpack. So either it's a broken feature or a broken UI

No, I can't imagine that. If it was meant a a design decision there wouldn't be three bars but just one. It's also not a "broken" feature, it's just a tedious one without an hotkey.

No, I doubt this is by purpose design to limit us to 30 skills to use in combat. It's too standardized, if they only allowed us to have 7 or 9 skills Period on the hotbar and not have it switchable between three hotbars, then I'd tend to agree that it was either by design to try to limit how many skills we could take into combat or purely lazy on the part of the UI designer. No, I think they probably just felt this was "good enough" and didn't likely think that people might want more than 30 spaces or to show more than 10 at a time, and or want a hotkey to cycle through them.

I have a ultra wide 29 inch monitor... can someone make a mod to fit all 30 spaces in one row please :P

Also thank you for allowing that kinda of res support (thought it is pretty easy seeing as its mostly floating windows), I mean not even TES: Skyrim supports 2560x 1080

It's the internet, whatever people say it drowns in the masses. So everyone gets highpitched and dramatic in an attempt to be heard.

I completely agree. I LOVE this game, brings me back to the old days of Baldur's Gate but the skill/spell toolbar is awful! The minimum they should do (which should take a tiny amount of dev time) is let us change toolbars (#2 and 3) with a key bind (EG. Alt 1, Alt 2 etc).

But ideally we should have the option to set multiple toolbars on screen.

Come one Larian, this is a top game (deserving the 'classic' status) but you need to sort out the toolbar.

PS. My only other gripe is leveling needs a bit more depth but I'll leave that for another thread and is a much more complex topic.

That's still in the game.

Personally I have yet to fill a single hotbar (for any character, including my mages) so I don't see the need. Will see if I do once I progress *much* further through the game.