Introductory Detailed Review of Kensei

[Chai]

You're looking at it from the metagame and the "I want the good stuff NOW" mentality. In-game and in reality, a swordmaster must train for YEARS to get to be a legend, and that's what a Kensei is, even if only in his region of the land. Tales are told of these men for generations, of the dedication and effort they put into mastering their craft, and here you are metagaming it all saying "let's skip the boring stuff and get to the good parts!". Yeah, it sucks to have to take feats that only give +1 to hit but it also sucks to have to bring Master water from the well or wash Mr. Miyagi's car or whatever. It's what it takes to become a legend.

Im looking at it from a comparison of what we can do now versus what we can do with the new system. The new system taxes alot more heavily by putting pre-reqs on stuff that doesnt normally have pre-reqs right now. The pre-reqs in many cases are things players would not take in the first place, but must if they want the item that pre-req qualifies their toon for. The end result of this is a more limiting system than we currently have, due to the fact that many of the same abilities now do not have pre-reqs like they will in the future if they move forward with this plan. All these easily accessible enhancements we have now will not be all accessible on the same build when this goes live, due to being overly taxed just to get to the good stuff people can get to today, sans taxation.

[Antiguo]

Well, if we have to trust developers, they have put very tight requeriments on purpose, and want feedback to remove some of those constrains. I actually like that approach because, if well done (and here is the key), it helps to avoid the power creep.

Altho i dont really get why the hell they didnt improve the weapon focus lines whit u14 like they did whit some of the other "useless but mandatory" feats, like dodge.

[Cetus]

Well, if we have to trust developers, they have put very tight requeriments on purpose, and want feedback to remove some of those constrains. I actually like that approach because, if well done (and here is the key), it helps to avoid the power creep..

Agreed

But, the only way that I can be confident in the notion that it can be done well, is if the devs pay extra careful attention to our feedback.

I take my fighter's build very seriously, I don't want to see him get shafted because of these useless restrictions or suffer from a hard to use, stuttering system with hotbars full of clickies.

As it is now, kensei does nothing unique. Nothing about it attracts attention because most of the abilities are very vanilla, and every kensei will be built identically because there are only a select few abilities that are "good" and those will be the obvious choices.

[Taojeff]

Agreed

But, the only way that I can be confident in the notion that it can be done well, is if the devs pay extra careful attention to our feedback.

I take my fighter's build very seriously, I don't want to see him get shafted because of these useless restrictions or suffer from a hard to use, stuttering system with hotbars full of clickies.

As it is now, kensei does nothing unique. Nothing about it attracts attention because most of the abilities are very vanilla, and every kensei will be built identically because there are only a select few abilities that are "good" and those will be the obvious choices.

There does need to be more good abilities and some of the other ones need to tweaked, the trees do need to be wider. However, even as the current system is not everyone will choose the same tree. Not every Kensai will go all the way to to KI weapons, some will splash tempest, some will splash healing. I made probably 10 different Kensai variants already. There are plenty of variations there, what we lost in easy access to abilities within our own class we have gained in ability to splash things of other classes more easily.

What the trees lines do is make two deep Kensai's very similar (but really this was often the case before because people just took the best abilities anyway). You can get just about everything good from Kensai in about 46 points, that still leaves a lot of leeway for class/racial trees.

I am getting +8 damage on some builds from enhancements alone (not count feats etc). I got +7 damage on a build that had radiant aura, a healing build!! Stuff is there, you just gotta look for it. I think once people try out and see some of the stuff f you can do, people will be pleased.

I mean, huh archers were **** for the longest time, now there are tons of rangers and monchers....

[Cetus]

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What the trees lines do is make two deep Kensai's very similar (but really this was often the case before because people just took the best abilities anyway). You can get just about everything good from Kensai in about 46 points, that still leaves a lot of leeway for class/racial trees.

I am getting +8 damage on some builds from enhancements alone (not count feats etc). I got +7 damage on a build that had radiant aura, a healing build!! Stuff is there, you just gotta look for it. I think once people try out and see some of the stuff f you can do, people will be pleased.

I mean, huh archers were **** for the longest time, now there are tons of rangers and monchers....

Mostly agree, which is why this enhancement pass is severely lacking.

Most deep kensei's are very similar because there's a lack of abilities that generally fit under the the "DPS and tactics" description, but that differ slightly in execution and flavor that would add a little personality to every individual kensei right now.

This enhancement pass had me hoping that this condition would get rectified by virtue of a lot more interesting abilities available for us to shop around.

The central limitation is 80 action points. If they throw 1000 AP's worth of enhancements in our face - we can still only pick up 80 points worth of stuff. But, in this process you would have radically different builds that are each "kensei's".

Obviously thats an extreme example, I'm not expecting a 1000 AP's worth of enhancements to be thrown at me. But, my point is that we need a lot more abilities to promote variation throughout the kensei population.