My concern w/ prestige classes & capstones

[frugal_gourmet]

Don't get me wrong. A lot of these ideas are thematically very cool and could be fun.

It just seems like it's increasingly easier with each passing day to make serious build mistakes when developing a character. It almost feels like characters are being tunneled down fewer and fewer valid paths. There are hundreds of choices, but only a few seem worthwhile with prestige classes representing far superior versions of so many potential playstyles and archetypes. It's a dangerous and scary task to build a DDO character.

Remember what it says in the Dungeon Master's Guide about prestige classes? When designing one, make sure that each level of a prestige class represents a difficult choice for the player considering taking it.

Wouldn't it better serve the game if the choices players were given were mostly valid, rather than an ample portion of them being disastrous traps?

[Auran82]

For the bonus XP weekend, I was thinking of rolling a new character to take advantage of it. I had a look around the class forums, even went into the character generator in the game and I just could not decide what to make, what stats, race, class etc.

I love the diversity of builds in this game, and the plethora of options we have, but at the same time I wish there was less opportunity to make mistakes when making a character, less choices that were set in stone at character creation and unable to be corrected later if you put a stat in the wrong place, or allocated skills wrong or something.

Capstones are something I would really like to see sooner rather than later so people are informed whether it is worthwhile splashing or staying pure class.

[Impaqt]

Unfotunatly, since the devs decided to link PrE's to Classes, rather than Prereq's, this is how it turns out.