ArenaNet have broken my Thief/Deadeye

[Jumpel.3972]

40 minutes ago, OrangeHedgehog.6310 said:

The original post was about how ArenaNet's incompetence has broken solo harvesting in PvE.  Arguments claiming the changes are actually good, but which don't acknowledge that those perspectives are not relevant to the original point are weak.  That's not to say the points raised are entirely invalid, they just need to be stated with the right context, i.e. that of PvP play.

Yea yea I was respond in the context of PVP/WwW with someone else. In the way you play it, it's a nerf for sure but you can still perma stealth easely in my opinion.

Tbh the way you play is non interactive and weird in my opinion and I think a minority of people play like you. That's why anet don't care about nerfing your playstyle because in the end it's a good change for the majority 

[ASP.8093]

2 hours ago, OrangeHedgehog.6310 said:

The original post was about how ArenaNet's incompetence has broken solo harvesting in PvE. 

Again,

• Most open-world PvE builds, including thief builds, only take 5-15 seconds to clear out a small handful of basic mobs. Across all players, both casual and hardcore, "i'll just kill all the mobs real fast" build is by far the most common "solo harvesting" build.

• Silent Scope still provides an absurdly generous 3 seconds of Stealth per dodge roll in PvE.

• You can still do a whole circuit of winterberries without fighting anything, without taking Shadow Arts at all.

• Shadow Refuge and combo fields are still there for you if you need long-duration stealth to harvest rich nodes, just as they were before.

• It is not "incompetent" or "unprofessional" that the designers don't care about your one bespoke pacifist harvesting build.

 

2 hours ago, OrangeHedgehog.6310 said:

This is certainly something to be worried about.  At least after introducing Fourth Edition (4e) Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) relatively quickly saw the error of their ways and reverted back to the more traditional format when they released 5th Edition.

(For anyone reading who is not familiar with D&D, 4e made all characters extremely similar; they all had a quantity of At Will, Encounter and Daily powers.  The powers varied, of course, and once you had learnt to play one class it wasn't too hard to learn to play another (presumably intentional to make the game easy to learn).  The move was widely seen as WotC tying to entice the World of Warcraft players into D&D.  It was also seen by a significant portion of the D&D community as ultimately being 'not a good thing'.  Most D&D groups these days play either 5th edition or 3rd Edition (or a variant, such as Pathfinder (1 or 2, both of which are considerably closer in play to 3e than 4e)), with 4e being largely ignored.)

If ArenaNet continue down this path it could well be a significant element contributing to the demise of the game.

Nah. Most editions of Dungeons & Dragons only have two kinds of classes: "you cast spells — here's a big list of spells, go find all the good ones, egghead" and "you don't cast spells — just say 'i attack' every turn and if you're real nice we might give you a special ability you can invoke sometimes." That's it! Those are the two kinds of class mechanics at play! It was very easy to switch to any class once you understood (1) how to make your numbers go up, (2) the action economy, (3) all the complicated stuff involved in getting good value out of a spell (any spell).

A lot of players didn't like how D&D4 baked a lot of tactical complexity into the foundational game system itself — it's basically unplayable without a battle map because of how hard the system emphasizes positioning and movement — rather than leaving it as something the game master creates and adjust during the encounter design process. It was a lot harder for groups to play it "their way," which was a major problem for a game that trades on being everyone's game that you're supposed to kinda just hammer into the shape that appeals to you most. One consequence of that design is that the classes had very defined team roles and specific tactics you had to figure out to play them usefully. (It's a bit like GW2 PvP in the sense that it wasn't enough to just grab a "good build" for your class and go, you have to understand what a "roamer" or "duelist" or "teamfighter" is supposed to do with their build.) You had a lot of players struggling with "my fighter's abilities don't do anything!?" (because the group doesn't want to do full minis-and-battlegrid hour-long battle scenes, or because the GM is still leaning on the D&D3-style "enemies stay focused on the fighter just because" playstyle) or "my wizard doesn't do enough damage!?" (because the wizard isn't supposed to do the most damage anymore).

If you're looking at D&D4 and you don't like it, that's cool, whatever (I played a bunch of D&D and I think all of D&D sucks now, just like I think the EQ/WoW style MMOG model is fundamentally tedious and unsatisfying). But if you think the problem is that the class design is too homogenous because of the AW/E/D stat blocks, I honestly think you haven't been paying attention to how any part of D&D4 really works — or how D&D3/PF, D&D5, or OD&D/AD&D are designed.

[OrangeHedgehog.6310]

On 9/14/2022 at 3:39 PM, ASP.8093 said:

• It is not "incompetent" or "unprofessional" that the designers don't care about your one bespoke pacifist harvesting build.

It is when the game is supposed to be equally enjoyable to all play styles.  If they pick any play style and say they don't care about that style any more, whether overtly or through making changes like this, that goes against the fundamental point of all players being equally able to enjoy the game.  It's the designers behaving in a way which promotes exclusion.  Still, as it is already clear they favour three classes above the others, I guess all their decision this time has done it demonstrate that attitude further.