Is how Masteries are nothing more than “FREE STATS HERE”. This is wrong in many aspects. It makes dual builds MANDATORY(how’s that for your “options”). It causes stat inflation. A lot of bad consequences to this one. It also doesn’t make sense how a 3 Cun, 2 Phys and 2 Spt make Demo(for example) more “masterful”. Here’s how I’d make it:
Mastery gives a true, tactile mastery-feel: +% Fire / Burn damage, + OA, +Armor , -mspeed(heavily armoured Fire based platform)
If you want just take a look at how Paths did it. I’d also consider giving 2(or 3, not sure) Attribute Points / level, so if you want some stats, GO FOR THEM. This’d only make all the options MORE VIABLE. Which is a selling point of GD when I last checked. It’d also have more logic than 3 Cun, 2 Phys, 2 Spt(masterful my ass-if you were to do such a spread with APs, you’d get: 250 Spt / Phys and 350 Cun -> “Mastery” gives up to 150 Cun and 100 Phys / Spt). Not to mention it’d carry the spirit of a given class. So I can’t, but really can’t see the downside to these…paths. You know?
That’s just more elaborate stat inflation and bounds more power creep. Trust me, I’m doing it in Zenith.
You’d still want to max out the masteries to
a) Get access to more/useful skills.
b) Get more of that statistical goodness.
Really all your suggestion is is a lot of work which results in a nightmare to balance and leading to no actual gameplay variety. Great, you get some more +% Fire/Burn Damage…yippee. Spirit does that, too. Cunning gives you OA. I’d in fact argue that your suggestion only narrows down build variety, in part due to the negative attribute of your suggestion. Negatives are all relative to one another, and as far as they go, -% Movespeed is pretty significant. The meta would shift to favor masteries with less punishing drawbacks, and character variety would funnel to those few remaining masteries.
I trust you because you are doing just such a mod(Zenith).
I mean, this’d need to get further refined yes(say -10% mspeed at start, normal at max, perhaps even +10% at max). What I want is true(or semi-true really) freedom of building. If I want a single class build, I should be able to do it. Currently, the +stats kinda prohibit you from that.
I mean, when Crate / ILE said “play as you want” / “look at the possibilities”, I guess they forgot the single mastery options. Because, no way in hell can you play Ult Vet with a single mastery without resorting to cheese.
Your suggestion would narrow the build diversity instead of expanding it. In your Demo example it will make only fire class combos optimal. What if you are planning a phys-bleed commando? Then fire bonuses will make no sense, and you will tend to pair masteries that have viable bonuses for your build idea.
Crate provides build diversity through skills and skill modifiers, and mastery bar is designed so that it will not benefit any possible options.
Yes, I happen to think that a well thought out classes with a lot of “fluff” to it are better than mix + match approach. I guess you could say that my understanding is that Demo is this, Soldier that and it looks…odd when a Soldier just fires a Magic Missile. Ok, this is excused here because it’s no longer a Soldier, but a Battlemage(anyhow, you shouldn’t be using that as a Battlemage, Olexra and Callidor are more suited to a BM playstyle(as well as obligatory Mirror and Nullification ofc). Something like this, perhaps: http://grimcalc.com/build/1006-6LjyYg (that’s at least how I perceive a BM…ok maybe with a weapon enchant too, but no points! )
Also, I guess that you could say I think convergently and Crate thinks divergently. Two various approaches to the same problem heh.
(plus Ult Vet difficulty is convergent enough as is-hence I see no reason to be divergent when the difficulty itself almost forces you to converge your build to a point. So why not embrace it fully?)
This suggestion would be terrible for already somewhat limited class diversity. Lets take your example of having fire/burn damage being a major theme in the mastery bar of Demo - suddenly those points are worth far less than current if I wanted to do a lightning elementalist or a chaos pyromancer (both viable demo options atm). Keeping the bonuses as physique/spirit/cunning and some health/energy lets each mastery have some degree of difference, makes the points to unlock skills feel useful, and still keeps the bonuses generic enough to be useful to most any mastery combo you can devise.
As for the single mastery ‘idea’ this really wouldn’t aid in such a thing unless you made each mastery bar so specific that a given character would only ever want one mastery bar - ie a phys build would always max soldier and not worry about the rest. Which of course renders the dual mastery system less useful…which I would argue is a bad thing rather than a good thing.
2 points - One there is no such thing as ‘ultimate vet’ veteran mode is a normal only thing. Two…if that is your idea of a battle mage I recommend staying away from battle mage, it won’t go well for you.
they do not stop you, you simply will always be inferior when it comes to stats, so your build needs to compensate for that elsewhere. There are some pure builds out there, but they are rare (for a reason).
On the other hand you will always have more skillpoints invested in skills, so there are potential upsides
Complaining about you having fewer stat points with one mastery makes about as much sense as complaining that you have access to fewer skills
GD does not say all builds are created equal and can beat the game easily, that is true whether you go with 1 or 2 masteries, but it does not force you into something (like eg D3 does) to prevent you from screwing up
What you could do is pick two masteries but only pick skills from one and use the other for stat points only. That is as close to being single mastery as you can easily get now and is as balanced as fully investing in both is.
Staying with one mastery does not provide any more diversity than this, it only results in a different class name.
Personally I see no point in staying on a single mastery. If you want to, do so, but then suffer the consequences.
I also do not see your proposal changing this. You still get bonuses from investing in the mastery, they just are not attributes any longer, but the fact that investing in two masteries results in you having higher stats stays…
Well that wasn’t something that was supposed to be effective. That was just an example of how I see a term “battlemage” playing. Of course, Crate can disagree with this and make such things useless. Insta casts, radial PBAoES, single target physical finishers, heavy armor with a hood…you’ve to agree it sounds like a “battlemage” alright. Whether that is effective…tyvm for pointing out about Veteran mode. Now I completely don’t see a point in it.
Yeah, you could say I don’t like the dual class thing. To me a Soldier is a Soldier and a Shaman is a Shaman. If you want a Warder, make another (sub)class. It’s simply how I think.
It’s just, picking a class and taking only stat points is so boring, you know? Even those passive effects I gave as an example would be more interesting.
but that simply is not true, there are different builds for Soldier and Shaman already, and with two masteries that diversity multiplies, so there definitly is not ‘the’ Warder… so to me that is simply a flawed train of thought
A build is not defined by its class name, but by the skills it uses. There are Warders that are Soldier heavy, Shaman heavy or an equal mix, and each of those probably has 2 - 5 ways to combine skills, some of which have little overlap. Going from Soldier-heavy to Soldier-only is a tiny step in comparison.
What I wrote imo still holds true
“What you could do is pick two masteries but only pick skills from one and use the other for stat points only. That is as close to being single mastery as you can easily get now and is as balanced as fully investing in both is.
Staying with one mastery does not provide any more diversity than this, it only results in a different class name.”
you can get everything you ask for today, the result simply will not be called a Soldier.
It’s just, picking a class and taking only stat points is so boring, you know? Even those passive effects I gave as an example would be more interesting.
I do not see yours as being more interesting. Most of the bonuses you mentioned get buffed by stats anyway, so you are basically doing the exact same thing.
The downside in yours, as was pointed out, is that the bonuses you give are more restrictive, eg Demo would buff Fire and Lightning while Occultist buffs Vitality and Chaos, today Spirit buffs all of them, so the two masteries do not ‘clash’ and the result is more build variance
It’s how the entire game is balanced and changing into what you want will be too much of an undertaking.
Either accept it or play something else. This is not something as simple as changing a few skills or something similar. Heck, changing into what you want would make me consider not play anymore.
I am fully aware of its nature and what the predicaments of changing its nature would be. Which is why I’m always for options. I can’t explain it better without mentioning Pillars of Eternity. It had a lot of gameplay options to enable / disable but some pretty heavily disputed systems(spell casts per encounter etc) remained unchangeable. Then along came a mod(IEMod if you must know) that allowed you pretty ultimate editing of game’s rules. So each player can happily play a game how he wants.
I guess I just want to play a single class(ok, I could take a secondary class whose name I like) without a constant nag that you’re about to fail.
as mentioned, just ignore the class name and you can do so today. You are way too focused on the name instead of on the mechanics. If for all intents and purposes you have a Soldier with higher stats, then it is a Soldier even when you call it a Warder or Commando.
To be fair I recently saw a build posted by… I think it was Jov. He showed a 100% pure soldier class destroying ultimate. The main point is soldier on its own is Op class, where as some other pure classes wouldn’t survive. Found the thread:
The system in place is fine, if anything more fine tuning of individual classes might need some attention, but who knows what the expansion will bring with more masteries.
When a lot of names don’t sound that good to me. Commando and such…don’t really belong in a victorian era setting, steampunk or not lol. I’ll give you that Witchblade, Witch Hunter, Spell Breaker and such sound awesome.
The term Commando goes back even before the Victorian era. Seem to be appropiate to me. And GD’s setting is not steampunk.
I guess what we all want to say is: Take the game for what it is and play to its strengths. I appreciate that you prefer things to be more like what you are used to, but if all games were the same …
fine, then go by a name that sounds good to you, if you are so focused on one minor detail and ignore the big picture over it. It’s not like you have to choose Commando here, you seem to miss the point on that too
Also, what expansion?
I did not mention one, but references have been provided by now
Another “I don’t want to play the game the way it was designed” thread. Yawn. I really wish I knew what the impetus behind these threads is. You want to ignore a game mechanic entirely, but you don’t want to be punished for ignoring it? Why? Do you go on WoW and whinge at Blizzard for “forcing you” to specialize? Do you get mad that you can’t be a pacifist in Halo?
I understand getting salty about things that need to be changed/improved/fixed, I imagine we’ve all made at least one post in the Ideas forum about X devotion being over/underpowered or some aspect of the UI needing improvement and the like. But saying shit like “I want to play half a character but be as strong as a full character!” is ridiculous.
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