A plea for 3.0 and beyond: Job Customization

[Delily]

Yes, there will be FOTM builds. But you know what? Other games deal. Devs change things. Eventually a good enough balance will arise.

The issue is not whether it can be done, but why. The devs could do that, and then enter in the constant re balancing dance this would cause. At the end of the day, the vast majority of players will just play the current FoTM build. Outside of the modest experimentation that happens (that leads to FoTM builds), what value did you add to the game?

[Verlyn]

The issue is not whether it can be done, but why. The devs could do that, and then enter in the constant re balancing dance this would cause. At the end of the day, the vast majority of players will just play the current FoTM build. Outside of the modest experimentation that happens (that leads to FoTM builds), what value did you add to the game?

Depth. Flexibility. Some experimentation. As long as there's more than one way to do things, even by the boss (which a well designed set of abilities will accomplish), then mission accomplished.

People overestimate how horrible it is to have customization that results in a few optimized solutions. There is NO customization system in existence that will not result in such a thing. That doesn't make it useless to try. The same complaints, even some of the same FOTM issues, will happen with or without the system in place. That's just a system still being refined, not a huge game destroying problem.

[Delily]

Depth. Flexibility. Some experimentation. As long as there's more than one way to do things, even by the boss (which a well designed set of abilities will accomplish), then mission accomplished.

People overestimate how horrible it is to have customization that results in a few optimized solutions. There is NO customization system in existence that will not result in such a thing. That doesn't make it useless to try. The same complaints, even some of the same FOTM issues, will happen with or without the system in place. That's just a system still being refined, not a huge game destroying problem.

Fair enough, but there is a return on investment. It is really worth the amount of time and money it would take for the developers to implement this system, only to wind right back up where we currently are, and then incur the additional costs of balancing? Nothing is free. The time the developers could spend in building this out could be spent in building new content. Which would you rather have?

[Verlyn]

Fair enough, but there is a return on investment. It is really worth the amount of time and money it would take for the developers to implement this system, only to wind right back up where we currently are, and then incur the additional costs of balancing? Nothing is free. The time the developers could spend in building this out could be spent in building new content. Which would you rather have?

The system I proposed is already in place. The cost in terms of time and money would be in redesigning the skills/traits to get this dynamic together. And I guarantee they're already redesigning skills for 3.0 anyway regardless of the dev's stance on this issue.

It might even be easier in some cases than keeping the existing setup. The numbers I threw out are just placeholders. With the number of jobs in this game as it is, even if we got 2 core abilities + 2 core traits (which is a lot easier to balance, since you can distill what that job offers to its core then) that would result in an overwhelming choice. Especially as they add more jobs.