Originally Posted by
Taojeff
My overall assessment has been good. I have not been able to post my feedback yet as I have been doing builds while i work. I plan to get to it this weekend. Please do not believe all the naysayers. Here are my brief general impressions from trying about 12 different builds out the first night (thats 12 lives or class combinations) x many enhancement builds each life.
1. There is no loss of freedom for multi-class, there is if anything more. You only need 1-8 levels of a class (usually toward the lower end, but max 8 with fighter so far) to take top tier abilities for a class. What is different with live is that there are more abilities that have higher tier requirement. On live you would get access to just about all the enhancements in the first couple levels but you do not go that deep into them. The new way is basically you can tier something all the way up before you get another ability. I like the new option, some things need to be out of reach and stay for those people that invest in that kind of character. I already have a feeling that much of this will be op for heroic and then quests will need readjustment. We definitely do not want to fall into the trap of making people good at everything. The same people who say that they will leave cause such and such is nerfed are generally the same people who steam roll content then leave from boredom. I think in general people are going to like the new system more as build progress.
What needs to be tweaked Some of the abilities should be shifted down a tier or 2 and some of them are just too expensive (good example is stalwart where to get most of the things I wanted i had to spend 80 points and was still missing out, where as most of the other trees 40 was more then enough).
2. Racial trees are bad or broken. I feel really pigeonholed with dwarf to wear heavy armor and use a shield. Sure the warhammer thing was cool, but I would open up more options. Why not add some kind of rune-smithing ability to add buffs for dwarves or something else. Dwarven frenzy is kind of a popular thing for some fighters in Faerun (battleragers). I mean there are more then one option. Dont be afraid to add a little of one racial prestige to another. At least you should try to target at least 3 classes that a particular race would very good at, and add things to that intent. There might even be a cool Faerun line and a Eberron line (pick one or the other) that add to the games flavor. To sum it up. Racial trees are weak and could use more options.
3. Clickies need work. Most of the cool downs for clickies are prohibit-ally to long, and become useless when compared to similar epic clickies. It would be nice to have a couple that I would actually keep in my bar in epic. Clicky space is already at a premium for some builds also due to the the abundance of good epic clickies (like mom swing etc). I would recommend cutting down the cool down, or better yet allow crits or other effects to reset the cooldown. It would be good if each tree had at least one ability that would reset the cool down. For example maybe stalwart on shield bash has a 33% change to reset cool down of all shield abilities.
4. On crit, or on attacked etc buffs are great. You should use those for defensive buffs as well. I absolutely loved kensai, the procing crit threat and enhancement bonus was cool. Something that benefits me but I dont have to worry about it all the time (by the way I also loved the finishing move attack...death something) so I can deal with my other clicky attacks. This would be a good move for dodge or prr, make it a proc (maybe stalwart on hit) of critical or something that goes off when you use another ability, but not a separate ability.
Here is a winning strategy. Pick a core number of good clickies that have multiple tiers (maybe 3 at most per line). Then add other enhancements that add effects to that. For example for Tempest, put an ability that does 1/2/3[W] at the bottom of the tree that hits with both weapons (with a small cool down, 6s). Then above it (connected by an arrow) give it buffs, maybe bleeding, maybe doublestrike etc. On the side maybe had some enhancements that give stacking type of damage to it (or another core ability like this). Finally at the top create finishers or death moves that take advantage of stacks or enemy debuffs. What this does is give me something interesting to use even at the lower level of the tree, but something I will not grow out of even in epic if i invest into it.
Well that is it for now, more when I get time this weekend.