Alternate Advancement: Good or Bad?

[guineapig]

I like the concept of AA's after a couple expansions and a level cap increase. It seems like natural progression in a game without having to keep increasing the level cap, but still being able to make new content more difficult (thereby requiring that AA's be invested in).

What I don't like is having no limit, or an insanely high limit on AA's where by you are essentially forcing a player to spend every chance they have playing the same character for fear of falling behind the curve.

There is nothing wrong with having a reachable goal for an expansion like say (15-20 AA max per expansion.) Not only would this allow players to spend time playing other classes instead of mindlessly grinding exp. But it would also promote versatility within the classes. If you can only choose 15 out of 50 possibly AA points then your enchanter might end up much different from another enchanter.

Specialization is a great feature in any game.

[Kender]

problem with aa's is they were introduced in luclin

if you brought them in any earlier they would trivialise the velious content. (the velious expansaion trivialised kunark content). prime example is in the halls of testing in ToV. monks had to really work hard to pull deep in that wing. with run 3 and reduced FD cooldown it would be too easy.

[Reiker]

Originally Posted by guineapig [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Specialization is a great feature in any game.

I posted about this in another AA thread, but I'll reiterate how specialization is a really bad idea in any MMO. Unless you offer like 3-4 classes at creation, any sort of "specialization" should end at character creation once you choose a class. Take a look at EverQuest, 15 classes when AAs were introduced. How could AAs possibly have offered specialization at this point in the game?

Warrior - Specializations would basically be for tanking or dps. Why would anyone choose the dps specialization over the tanking? Those people would have clicked something like Rogue or Monk at character creation.

Cleric - Who would spec in anything other than healing? What else could you spec in, uh, nuking? Anyone who wanted to spec in nuking were already "specced" when they clicked Wizard.

And so on.

The ONLY MMO that really did this correctly was DAOC, and was designed with class specializations from the ground up. This still had issues since one-dimensional classes such as Skald, Paladin, etc basically used the same cookie-cutter spec since there wasn't a lot of wiggle room. To make this successful Mythic basically made a list of abilities and randomly distributed them to classes. For example the main healers all had a heal and a buff line among all three realms. But Druids could spec in a pet, Clerics could spec in Smite (nuking), and Healers could spec in Pacification (CC). There were very specific circumstances that actually made this work, one being the PvP focus of the game and the three realm and large amount of classes between all three. And it still had issues (people creating buff bots since no one wanted to actually main a char specced in buffs for example).

WoW's talent system is so fucked. You have classes like Rogues that can spec in DPS, DPS, or DPS and then a class like Druid that can spec in Melee DPS/Tanking, Healing, and Nuking. Their entire class system is fucked pretty much beyond repair because of the spec trees.

AAs are pretty awesome in execution. The large amount of time required to max AAs really reinforced EQ's hardcore spend more time to become more powerful philosophy. And technically there's a specialization element depending on which AAs you prioritize over others, but you never actually are forced to permanently change the functionality of your class, which is essential.

Hopefully this is legible I'm pretty hung over and can't really concentrate anymore.

[guineapig]

Originally Posted by Reiker [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I posted about this in another AA thread, but I'll reiterate how specialization is a really bad idea in any MMO. Unless you offer like 3-4 classes at creation, any sort of "specialization" should end at character creation once you choose a class. Take a look at EverQuest, 15 classes when AAs were introduced. How could AAs possibly have offered specialization at this point in the game?

Warrior and cleric, sure. You wouldn't want to mess with them too much but:

How about a druid that wants to specialize in healing and buffs for raiding purposes, versus an alt druid that wants to specialize in nuking and dots.
Or a shaman that wants to specialize in melee and general soloing survivability.
Hell even a cleric could specialize in being more deadly versus undead.
I can totally see the charm in being able to make a battle wizard to play around with versus just haveing a raid wizard that stands up, nukes and sits back down.
Lets not forget tradeskill alts or alts that are just made to farm shit. The option to specialize these characters for the purposes they were made for is a boon.

Not every person playing the game plays to raid. And even those that do make alts for fun. The option for variety is not a bad thing. Nobody is forcing a warrior to specialize in DPS versus tanking skills.

It's a hypothetical conversation anyway since we won't ever see AA's on this server. If I were playing on live today and had 7+ years worth of characters however, I would be bummed if every class I rolled up would simply end up like a carbon copy of every other character of that class ever made.

[Reiker]

Originally Posted by guineapig [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Or a shaman that wants to specialize in melee and general soloing survivability.

A shaman who specialized in melee over anything else would be gimping the fuck out of themselves. If there was say a Tanking/HP type path, and say a DoT path, then EJ-ist threads would pop up parsing which was the better way to go and everyone would just spec the same. Now you have a balancing nightmare on your hands. Certain AAs are just way better than the rest, no one would ever spec in whatever paths did not have the Cannibalization AA.

Hell even a cleric could specialize in being more deadly versus undead.

Lol yeah, Clerics are going to give up the one thing that makes their class awesome so they can offer a little bit more DPS on like 15% of the content in EQ. Sure. And I bet Paladins would have an undead path also and be 10x better than an undead specced cleric.

Everyone knows that in MMOs classes that can do 50% of one thing and 50% of another completely blow compared to classes that focus on only a few main jobs. Look at Druids and Rangers for a good example.

To the AA cap people: All this would do is ensure that x% of the available AAs were never purchased by anyone, ever. X depending on how large the AA cap was.

People seem to think that the original AA system is hardcore gamer-centric, but an "AA specialization system" would cater even more to the spreadsheet parsing minmaxers. At least the current way avoids people choosing a path that seems "fun" and totally fucking their toon up without the player knowing.