For people who like the hotbar, what is it about the hotbar that you like? I'm not looking for reasons why it is adequate - I'm looking for things that the hotbar does exceptionally well and that you really wish was present in
all video games. Why is this better than the alternative?
My thoughts in the spoiler, but I'd like to know what other people like about the hotbar rather than jabs at my opinions.
In my eyes, the biggest thing that a hotbar like this creates is a highly customizable interface (for at least one part of the UI), but I'm not convinced that this is a positive thing. I have experienced several drawbacks:
1) Customizability means that you need to take the time to customize it. The things that can go into this hotbar can change frequently, which means that you may need to reorganize it again and again. I find this to be a headache.
2) A benefit of customizing is that you can put the things you use the most up front. The drawback of this is that you are hiding away (out of the UI completely or pushed back to a later page) the things that you haven't yet realized the value of, so you never use them. I like having constant reminders that under-used skills exist so I'm more tempted to try them out from time to time. If I'm just using a small subset of skills over and over again, the game tends to start feeling samey.
3) Mixing lots of different kinds of things (i.e. skills, spells, class/race features, consumables, item activations) into once space makes it more difficult to find the thing I want. Generally, when I am actually thinking about what I want to do on my turn (rather than spamming one or two preferred actions), I approach it from one of two directions:
A) I'm looking for an action that does X. Usually I'll have some idea of what type of action that is (e.g. I have some spells that have good single-target debuffs or I want a grenade that deals AOE damage), so I have a category I'd like to search through. Having actions organized by category is useful for this.
B) I have a resource available to spend (usually a bonus action, but maybe a spell slot of a particular level) and want to see what my options are. Having actions organized by their resource cost is useful for this.
The hotbar does neither of these things, and just mushes everything together into one space, which makes it more difficult to find what I want. I can try to organize it to match one of those two systems, but it doesn't do either one particularly well and definitely doesn't do both at once. Also, that gets back to the onerous task of having to customize and maintain the hotbar.
