06-02-2009, 12:52 AM
Diggles Wrote:if you are allowing immediate skill backs, wouldnt there still be a grind to make sure you had everything unlocked, which only feeds/encourages flavor of the months
Ie i skilled up polearms one week, but got bored and dropped it and took dark magic instead. however some overpowered polearm is discovered or it has a great drop rate, so now I get it and put my points back into polearm.
As long as weopons and armor have different melee types of damage/resist you can avoid the flavors of the month. If everyone runs around with a polearm everyone can just spec in the armor that is most effective against polearms. If everyone is defensed for polearms the guy that wins will be the guy wielding a pick. Flavors of the month quickly turn into flavors of the week.
That is why RPG's never get the combined arms portion correct. You can't ever pull off the Planetside combined arms effects because Melee damage is always lumped into one sum in RPG's. If you seperate the types of melee damage/resist as well as magic damage/resist you can always bring a defense that will beat any offense.
Therefore it encourages combined arms with multi player fights.
This also accomplishes two things other things that are a must.
1. It encourages people to find unique builds and are always out there looking for an edge. It may not actually exist but players like Hoof would dig the shit out of this. The optimizing is endless with out equipment mudflation.
2. It creates the Rambo scenario's that people like Slamz like. If you don't run around with a combined arms group and with this many layers it would be possible for a group of 3 people all specced the same and wearing the same armor to run into the wrong guy who they just don't match up against and get wasted.
If those three guys go respec they may beat that one guy easily but end up running into another bad match who they would have beaten easily before. Therefore respecing won't always be the answer. Just bring along the guy who does match up. In other words diversity should rule the day in general.
If you throw in the faction prereq's then you could be really looking at guild vs guild match up's as well. Some guilds with FactionX just get a good match up with another guild that is with FactionY.
While I have no doubt that their will be certain builds that are favorites at least with a tiered skill system any build can have a counter build to beat it. It is the only way to make a balanced game. Class games end up with these imbalances and can't correct them. Every Warrior in WoW has the same build because it is quit frankly the best and they still can't beat a Warlock no matter how they spec.
Ideally you have shit loads of skills to chose from but just enough points to spend on them to give you just a taste of the depth at any one time.
Vllad