In your opinion it 'doesn't work'. But honestly I find the Favourites system infinitely better than Oblivion's hotkeys. It's not truly pausing the game. I spent far more time pulling the menu open and changing spells in the limited hotkey spots in oblivion. That really WAS immersion breaking.

I play the game with a 360 controller, and even with the 2 d-pad hotkeys I find magic cumbersome.
Here's how I would have changed the control scheme.

Back button - > info screen with tabs for magic, item, skill tree, quest journel, map. You cycle through them with the triggers.
B button - > Alternate ability toggle. Holding the B button then pressing RB or either trigger, performs an alternate ability.
left/right on d-pad - > Save presets for trigger/bumper.

That can give 4 spells and 2 shouts/abilities without having to swap anything out.
Then left and right on d-pad swaps those with a whole new set.

So I can have the left trigger do a ward/summon and the right trigger do a fireball/fire rune. Or whatever.
I hold left trigger to ward, and if I want to summon, I hold B and press left trigger. Then release B for the ward again.
Then I can hit left on d-pad and left trigger now does shield/heal and right trigger does axe/fireball. Or whatever!

I am old (or just weird) enough to still like turn-based, so for me, no problem whatsoever. Would have been a vast improvement imho if each hotkey equipped a pair of hands, rather than one item, though.

this

The 2 dpad hot keys are pretty useless IMO. As Oreo said, playing as a Mage means switching from destruction to conjuration to healing to a different destruction then conjure, etc, constantly. And if you dual cast for the Impact perk, then fugettaboutit.

The worst thing about it is if you press it twice, it disarms the hand. How is that even remotely useful? It's the opposite of useful. They could have coded another set so we'd have 4 hotkey slots with the L/R dpad, but instead we get bare handed. Facepalm.

What would be a simple improvement is if the hotokeys would record BOTH hands, so I could set up dual ice spike in 1 and conjure + heal in the other. Also, we only need to access the Favorites menu with UP, so it would be great to have Down as a 3rd hotkey (recording both hands of course).

This is an ill conceived statement. We shoud have 8 hotkeys AND the favorites list for pausing and choosing other stuff.

2 hotkeys is absolutely pathetic.

I'm way quicker at it than you are and it's still an abomination of game design. 8 hotkeys is much better than 2. Having 8 hotkeys would not negate the availability of the favorites menu.

For the people who get easily confused and can't make use of more than 4 just double up on your placements so no matter if you hit up left diagonal or up you get the same selection. Problem solved. You take your 8 hotkeys and use them for 2 - 4 selections and keep pausing all the time. I would be able to take my 8 hotkeys and use them for 8 selections, never have any probelms selecting them because I know how to press buttons and we all more fun.

And exactly how do you propose to map 100 spells to 8 buttons and a d-pad? That's 12 possible inputs, two of which are already used for casting. How would you change spells using a console controller?

Hi Mr Smart Guy!

Nobody is asking to map 100 spells. Not to mention there aren't even 100 spells in the game.

Here's how it should work:
8 Hotkeys on the D-Pad
Hold any direction to bring up the favorites menu. Favorites menu should be sortable not just an alphabetical list.
Every hotkey should be settable to LEFT HAND, RIGHT HAND, or, DUAL WIELD

--With just 8 hotkeys you could have 16 different spells hotkeyed or 8 dual wield setups or any combination in between.

The current setup is grade school level game design made by people who didn't want to actually make something functional because they know most players today just play GENERIC NORD WARRIOR and so don't even need hotkeys.

And what about having a wheel choice for the different spells (like in other games) activated by a RB or LB and then using the left joystick to select the spell ?? I think it could have been great, no ?

Exactly, also lol at 100 spells

There are so many other choices they could have made... But decided not to spend any more money on it/cut corners, either that, or the developers for the UI decided they hadent been 'paid enough'... Yet modders have completely changed the UI, and are now working on the fav system... =/ modders put Bethesda to shame some times........

For those who are interested, and play on the PC: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3863
They will be tampering with Fav's menu soon~

To all the "I prefer the X over the Y" guys... you do realize they could easily have given us both?

I prefer the favorites over hotkeys btw...

I play with the http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Text-Messaging-Kit/dp/B000UN3UDQ/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1326553547&sr=8-5 -- haven't tried it yet (away from home), but on the longshot chance that it's possible, I'll ask if anyone has assigned a hotkey to the chatpad's keys?

Me too. The wheel was hard to control

I'm on PC, but use a 360 controller.

If I could have the option of having Oblivion's D-Pad and needing to deal with the main inventory for everything else, I would take that over what I have now. I wish there was the choice of configurations. Stuff like this can't be that hard.

Since skyrim has about 1/4 the number of spells and equipment as oblivion, they figured they only needed 1/4 the hotkeys.

And to the person that said pressing the hotkey a second time disarms the same hand, that's not true at all. If I map fireball to left and summon dremora lord to right, my first press of left puts fireball in left hand, second press puts a second fireball in the right. Same for every other spell in the game.

I wonder how modders are going to "fix" this exactly? If you don't want to pause, you would have to mod in a permanent icon band across the bottom of the screen with about ten icons. Can't see it happening.

You have quick access to three things usually, left, right and the cursor position on the favorites (which the game remembers). The main thing is just to not have too much junk on favorites. If you have what you usually need, you get used to the position and you don't need to stop and read the spell names any more, so you can fast scroll to it. For more unusual stuff you use the magic menu. My memory of the previous games was that they were way more clunky.