Alienation of Dedicated and Skilled players

[HeavenlyArmed]

Hi. No, you haven't. Your only proposal a few pages back was killing a specific mob in Deep Dungeon or Diadem will offer a slight boost you, yourself acknowledged was essentially negligible. How does that make stats interesting? 35 to 37 is utterly meaningless. As for granting some sort of benefit, you still run aground with people inevitably finding the most optimal approach and expecting it from you. Say Dragoons can customize their Anima to apply a 5% boost to any of their oGCDs. Cool. When people calculate which of Battle Litany, Blood for Blood or Blood of the Dragon offers the best overall DPS increase, that's what you'll be told to pick. Your mention of the Mastery stat from WoW falls into the same problem. While it's a nice idea, it doesn't change the paradigm all that much. You just have another stat that boosts one of your traits now. If it only applies to Gierskogul, then it's a static buff no one will pay direct attention to because you'll just pick it up along the way. If you can find multiple weapons, each with a unique effect... people will determine which is best and tell you to farm that particularly version of the weapon.

Nice of you to completely ignore the part of what you said that I actually replied to. You know, where you claim that players will only take people who do the mathematically best thing in all cases into content? Remember that part? The bit I quoted? You wanna try responding to the thing I'm talking about? No? Okay. But if you did, you'd understand that the rest of your post here fails for the same reason the last one did. Yes, there will always be a mathematically best thing. But as long as things are even slightly well balanced, you will not be discriminated against for being slightly below optimal. And just so you can see that, yes, my original post on page seven did have this, here it is again.

Okay, so what does Wildstar actually teach us about people's claims in here? Oh right, that the "if you're not 100% optimal no one will do anything with you" idea is completely false. Not that we even have to look that far, as I'm sure most of us who've raided can say we've run with some less-than-perfect players in our time but kept running with them because they were fun to have around and didn't hold us back to the level where replacement was necessary. But even in terms of having multiple possible builds for a class. In Wildstar, I ran a suboptimal build for many months. Even when new builds became possible that made my own more and more outdated, I kept using this build. How many complaint did I get? Zero. Why? Because the difference wasn't anywhere near the difference you'd see in, say, taking a BLM who uses their full level 60 rotation vs one who role plays an ice mage. And that's the key thing to having some horizontal progression in the game, as long as it's balanced even slightly well, the issues people keep suggesting as inevitable will not actually exist outside of applying for a group trying for server/world firsts. The fact that the dev team in XIV keeps claiming otherwise is infuriating, and frankly, an insult to the amazing community this game has built around it.

You also misunderstand the potential of a Mastery-like stat. It's not just a direct buff, because something like that can change how you play. If I manage to get my Gierskogul penalty below 8 seconds or something maybe I can do an extra one per minute or something. Or with the Fire IV suggestion it may not be enough to be worth stacking early in the expansion, but then with values available later on take a very big lead over other options if you stack it. These are interesting gear options. That is my point. And if it's a standard stat on gear, it will be treated like any other standard stat on gear as long as it's properly balanced. No one will be discriminated against, and an interesting stat will exist.