Pantheon adds four saved hotbar loadouts, locked during combat

Visionary Realms published a March 2 dev diary walking through Ability Loadouts, a feature arriving in the next update to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen that lets players save and swap between preconfigured hotbars.

The feature exists because of the game's limited action set, which prevents a character from having every known ability available at once. The studio said that design serves two purposes: it forces some planning before a fight, and it lets the team hand classes a wider spread of situational abilities without burying players under hotbars. The team said it would rather difficulty come from the content than from memorizing a rotation or hunting for the right button across five bars.

The cost is hotbar micromanagement. Reconfiguring bars between situations, the studio said, is tedious work — particularly when players are rebuilding the same handful of combinations every time. A management layer had always been on the roadmap, but the Summoner rework made it urgent: reworked Summoners need different abilities on their bars depending on which pet is active, and are expected to switch pets often. Loadouts were prioritized so the two would ship together, with every other class benefiting as a side effect.

How the system works

Each character gets four loadout slots, a number the team said it may raise later but settled on to keep the interface manageable. An icon beside the hotbar opens the loadout list. The bar a player is already using is saved into the first slot on the first login after the feature goes live, and any later edits made through the codex save automatically. Selecting an unused slot produces an empty bar to fill in the same way. Slots ship named Loadout 1 through Loadout 4 and can be renamed by right-clicking an entry.

Switching is handled either through the selector menu or by hotkey, with Ctrl-F9 through Ctrl-F12 as defaults that can be reassigned in the settings keymaps.

Restrictions, and an unresolved buff problem

Two limits keep the limited action set intact. Loadouts cannot be swapped in combat, so a player who wants a different set has to break away from the fight first. And swapping puts every ability on the incoming loadout on a short cooldown, which the studio said is meant to keep loadout choice a pre-fight decision rather than an in-fight tactic. The team also said it built the system to be as free-form as possible while guarding against abuse.

The diary closed on a related problem the team has not yet solved. Pantheon currently strips a buff when the casting ability is removed from the caster's hotbar, a rule added to stop players stacking every available buff before every fight. The studio said the rule has instead frustrated and confused players whose buffs did not behave as expected, and has produced a string of issues where buffs need recasting after zoning. The team said it has recognized for some time that buffs need better handling — useful and worth casting, without the studio having to balance content around groups holding every buff in the game — and is building a replacement it hopes to ship alongside the Combat and Progression update.