User:An Adventurer/Blog/Master of Arms, Failure of Design

Master of Arms, Failure of Design
by An Adventurer

The February 2012 update, Master of Arms, brought two huge changes to Asheron's Call: 1) The consolidation of all melee and missile skills into four new skills and the addition of five new secondary combat skills, and 2) removal of racial skills.

I'll be perfectly clear here: I don't dislike the new system that has been implemented. Categorizing weapons by general size and use rather than by type of weapon is a perfectly reasonable system. And the new secondary combat skills did sound interesting. However, Asheron's Call was 12 years old when they decided to make this change. The weapon skills were ingrained into the very core of the game and the player characters. And while I had already quit before they announced the weapon changes, it assured I won't be returning.

When the developers added Two Handed Combat they failed to fully and properly implement it. Gears of Change had a huge list of known issues, and the next few patches had adjustments and bug fixes for 2H. And later when they added Void Magic they again couldn't get it right on implementation, and the following patches contained more fixes. And in both these cases, the developers were simply adding one new skill. If the devs failed to get Void Magic and Two Handed Combat right on the patch they were released, how could anyone expect them to properly remove several skills, create several more, rebalance every weapon in the game, and update all associated content like spells, cantrips, harbinger items, titles, and so on?

Before the patch was even released, the Knowledge is Power thread confirmed my suspicions. The project was too big, and this combined with the racial skill changes meant that every character in the game was going to be affected. The way they decided to handle quest weapons was especially disastrous. No matter what weapon skill you used before, if you relied at all on quest weapons, some of them would no longer be wieldable by you. This was such a big problem, they decided to throw a free quest weapon and free rare weapon at every character.

As someone that actually cared about the lore, this change felt completely out of place in the world of Dereth. Characters we have played for years were suddenly all changing drastically. I wasn't playing spreadsheets, I was playing characters in a world, and the skills those characters chose to use was important. An Adventurer was a magicless Sho warrior that used the traditional unarmed combat of his people and powerful axes. Natalia was an item-only character trained from a young age to use swords. Rithlar was former royal guard, and a heavy magic user that fought with swords. I had mid-magic user that fought with maces. I had two Gharu'ndim characters, a brother and sister, who both used staff and were training to become Zharalim. I had an Aluvian Assassin that used daggers and crossbows. I had another Aluvian who was an Archer that had daggers as a backup. With this update, I would have instead had a heavy weapons user, a heavy weapons user, a light weapons user, a light weapons user, a light weapons user, a finesse/missile user, a finesse/missile user, etc. The patch would have taken away the identity of many of my characters, and forced me to spend tons of time retraining and reequipping them all.

But there is a bigger problem beyond my personal dislike of having this change come 12 years in. And that is identifying weapons in loot, and knowing what quest rewards you can actually use. Look at this sample corpse inventory:

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

Can you tell me, just by looking at the icons, which ones are swords, which ones are axes, and which ones are maces? Of course. Can you say which ones are Heavy, Light, and Finesse weapons? No way. In order do that, you either have to know what skill every type of weapon belongs to and hover over the icon to see what it is, or appraise every weapon on the corpse and check the skill line.

As another example, say you are a new player in Shoushi, looking for quests to do. You speak to Hiro Ishigame and he tells you about the Green Mire Warrior and his legendary Yari. You know from the one in the blacksmith that a Yari is a light weapon. Being a Light Weapon user you set out on the quest... only to complete it and find that the Green Mire Yari is a Finesse weapon. The same is True of a Katar and Hamud's Pyreal Katar. And what about a quest weapon that isn't a loot type? How are you supposed to know if you can even use the Sword of Lost Light before going on the quest? Is it going to be a Heavy, Light, or Finesse weapon? Who knows! And the rumor or quest starter isn't going to tell you. But prior to this change, you knew that as a Sword user, you could use the SoLL.

The important question in all this: Why? Why was this weapon skill change necessary? If I recall correctly, the devs stated the weapon changes were in response to player requests - mostly staff and other weapons being underpowered and shields needing to be rebalanced. But why did the melee and missile skills need to be consolidated for this to happen?

They could have just as easily made Sword, Axe, and Mace 6/6 and made the rest of the weapons 4/4, and rebalance a few of the skills. This would make all the weapon skills the same cost as Heavy/Light/Finesse. And from there they could have added the new dual wield, dirty fighting, recklessness, sneak attack, and shield skills. This would have been much less work than redoing everything related to the former skills and updating every weapon in the game. There wouldn't have been any issues of quest weapons being rendered useless. We wouldn't have had to deal with weapon mastery, a relic of the previous skills. And issues that have come up with the rebalancing of Atlans and Isparians wouldn't have happened. It still boggles my mind that the devs chose the path that would be the most work for them and potentially cause players to leave, when other options were available.

Why did racial skills need to go away? Clearly, arcane lore was deemed too powerful, since they just gave it to everyone. But why completely eliminate racial skills, instead of just giving the Empyreans and Undead another skill, or some negative attribute that would counter-balance the power of arcane? Why not give every race three racial skill sets, one of which is arcane, but the other two are still distinct to that culture? Race has been made an entirely pointless choice. In the end, everyone can get the same augs and weapon masteries as anyone else. It would not surprise me at all if in the coming months Turbine finally adds a race change, since the choice is purely cosmetic.

In the end, all the announced changes just confirmed my beliefs that Lore was dead, and radical changes were going to be made regardless of whether or not they made any sense in the universe of AC.

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