Alternate Advancement: Good or Bad?

[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.