I’d love to see another mode, kinda like hardcore in that it is chosen at chargen and can’t be changed, where your masteries are set from level 1 (you still choose your skills and devotions and gear, but you basically roll the dice to choose your classes), and your loot tables are mildly shifted (depending on what the rates are, I’m talking at most single-digit %'s but more likely small fractions thereof, like at most shifting any given drop rate by half of whatever it currently is) to favor items that grant bonuses to skills within your masteries and away from those that don’t benefit your masteries (including if you don’t have at least one of the pet capable classes you’ll be slightly less likely to see pet bonus gear, but if you have two then you’ll be slightly more likely to see gear with pet bonuses but still nowhere near 100%, you could still get Soldier boosting gear on a Druid or pet boosting gear on a Commando for a couple hypothetical examples, they’d just be a few %'s or fractions thereof less common).
Whether you can see the masteries or class name before you hit levels 2 and 10 are up to you guys, but I think it might be more interesting if I don’t get to know in advance (I can always respec if I start a character build that doesn’t work with the 2nd mastery).
If this could be combined with Hardcore that would be nice as that would increase my interest in it but yeah it’s not required to combine all the various modes if this were implemented. A few new achievements just for this might be interesting too…
Aside from the gear % loot drop aspect, you can already play this way.
Start in HC. go classless until you hit level 10. At level 10, roll some dice with each number representing a given class. Whatever numbers you roll will be your classes. Done.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re looking for here but… you did mention choosing skills before your classes are assigned… are you talking about basically having access to the entire pool of skills, unrestricted by class?
What would be the point of having classes assigned going forward, if that’s the case?
And if that IS the case, this might be something meant for a mod of some kind. Is that possible in modding? I’m not sure, I’m no modder, but if I had to guess, maybe that’d be the most realistic direction for this idea.
I didn’t mean go without any mastery till level 10 or any kind of unlimited skills thing (how would that even work?). Seriously all I meant was you still choose where to put your points, despite the game picking your masteries; you get one mastery at level 2 as normal, the other at level 10 as normal, they’re just picked for you by the game, instead of you picking from the list or rolling dice yourself.
The idea is to have an option where the game rolls those dice you suggested for you, making it slightly easier for those of us with limited willpower to try something new. The loot table bit would just be little cherry on top IMO for those who don’t enjoy and/or are bad at planning multiple characters in advance (where you have to save stuff in the stash for future playthroughs); and since you can’t really “plan” these characters in advance too much, it would help more than a bit with gearing.
Right, well, it won’t happen unless someone makes a mod out of it, so I was just offering realistic options to enable the playstyle you expressed interest in.