I’ve had more chance to play with the building system since my last assessment of it, this time because I was actually trying to design something rather than just exploring the new UI quickly, and I came to the sad conclusion that I’m in the minority that will dislike the new system forever.
As I already said, the good thing about the new system is that it makes it easier to build in bulk because you don’t have to craft all your pieces beforehand. However, there’s a reason why I said I’m in a minority: I got really used to mapping building pieces to the hotbar and I just can’t get over the loss of that.
I tried, I swear, but it’s an ingrained habit I’ve formed over literally years of playing this game, and it’s really confounding that I have to either open the catalog or point-and-click at an already placed piece, instead of just trusting my muscle memory that 4 is a triangular foundation, 5 is a square foundation, 6 is a wall, etc.
And yeah, I know that there are only 8 spots on the hotbar and that even someone who uses my building method has to keep swapping certain pieces in and out of the hotbar, but there really is method to my madness and it’s more “ergonomic” in the long run.
The new system is especially painful when you’re trying to build a circular floor plan. This requires constant switching from triangles to squares and back, and having to aim at an existing piece to “acquire” it instead of just pressing a hotbar shortcut takes me out of my flow all the damn time.
I’m probably going to write a separate suggestion post for Funcom, but this is the gist of my idea: when entering the build mode with construction hammer, replace the regular hotbar with a “construction hotbar” where we can assign recipes from the catalog to hotbar shortcuts. To go back to the normal hotbar, just exit building mode and everything is back to where it was. And vice versa, entering the construction mode should “remember” the construction hotbar configuration.
EDIT: If anyone feels the same, you can click here to go to the suggestion post I made.