free threat toggles

[peng]

Give every character a free pair of toggles. Activating one of them will turn the other off:

• Extra threat: While this feat is active, you generate 10% more threat from all sources. This suppresses any sources of threat reduction you might have.
• Reduced threat: While this feat is active, you generate 10% less threat from all sources. This suppresses any sources of increased threat you might have.

There are several enhancements, destiny abilities, and items that increase or decrease threat, but you might not always want them active. This way you can turn them off without having to change your loadout.

Alternately, make every source of increased or reduced threat from enhancements and destinies into toggles.

[Xgya]

Want the defensive bonuses of the Druid, Fighter or Paladin's Defensive Stance? Yup, that comes with extra threat.
Don't want the extra threat? Turn the stance off.

The point to ability swaps having a cost is to make removing or alternating certain abilities hard to do.
People whose builds rely on swaps soon realize the costs get prohibitive, even if it's just plat, and start re-thinking their builds.
That's a GOOD thing. People thinking and building smart, limiting the amount of times they have to swap, or making sure that the swaps can be done through gear alone so the rest of the build can work both ways.

Smart character building. It's an art. Want to make a character that can be both good at generating threat AND avoiding generating it at times? Do it. You have the tools, you're a smart person, you can certainly figure this one out!

I know certain MMOs have the benefit of literally letting you save loadouts and load them as they're needed, but the builds in those games are NOWHERE near as varied as they could be in DDO.
Given servers had to be cleansed of something as simple as mail to help them cope, I don't think attaching more data to every character would help on that front either.

[peng]

The example you give of a stance that can be turned off is one of many ED or enhancement abilities that give increased or reduced threat. Most are always on. What if you are playing a build that is meant to tank, but you have a better tank in party? Or you *can* tank if needed, but not really built for it? Should I change my EDs every quest depending on the needs of the party? If you think the defender stances are too OP if you aren't the tank (they aren't), you can make those specific stances exclusive with the threat reducer stance. But there are many other sources of threat reduction/increase that cannot be switched on and off so easily.

Saying that you've learned to deal with the status quo and everyone else should too is not a good argument against quality of life improvements.

[Firepants]

Packaging a universally favorable property with a secondary property that might not be desired is an age-old game system mechanic that you'll find in just about every game ever. In games like DDO, fiddly games with tremendous amounts of potential ability combinations, this "feature/flaw" approach forces the player to think through their choices. YES! I want that +25% to hit points, but if I take that particular ability that's cheap to get, I'm also picking up a secondary trait. If that secondary trait is detrimental to my build/playstyle then I need to either find a way to cancel out the undesirable trait or look for another option to provide the trait that I do want. Or learn to live with it and adapt my gameplay to compensate. Challenges like this are what makes a game like DDO interesting and effectively infinite. Otherwise, it's just a fancy implementation of Gauntlet, pick your archetype and go. Everything you do is only ever going to improve your very specific set of abilities. And while that kind of game can be great fun, that's not what DDO is. Half the game is dorking around with different skill/class/race/gear combinations just to see what happens.