What is wrong with fixing broken skills? Making the class feel fluid and fun to play is going to be more important than it’s performance in a game mode. Once everything is working properly, then they can focus on looking at our changes, but for now I think they have the right priorities. Besides, there is nothing “simple” about fixing animations and functionality. That stuff is so much more than just a number that needs tweaking.
Well, the problem I’m feeling is that they basically said “Here’s the Daredevil, and here’s all the stuff that’s cool with it.” And the response was like “. . . ok, but you’re going to need to spice that up a bit.”
And then we had a beta, and everyone played with it a bit, and said “well, the staff needs some work, the animations are bad, and the dodges don’t work quite right, and you still need to add quite a bit on top of what is currently here for it to compete with the other Elite specs. This is a ‘4,’ we need like a ‘7,’ minimum.”
Then they tweaked around behind the scenes, and so far their response is “we got the dodges working almost as good as they are in the vanilla class! They are less of a hindrance than they were before, but in exchange we removed anything particularly fun or special about them too!”
No, unacceptable. Now it’s down to a “3,” or at best held even as a “4.” They should fix those dodges, yes, but they should also either leave in all the cool effects they had, OR replace them with something better. The Daredevil is incredibly boring in its current design, almost indistinguishable from the vanilla build, and is doubly painful because they Crippled the Acrobatics tree to make room for it, and it still doesn’t even properly replace the original Acrobatics.
If HoT came out with an elite spec that was “Thieves from Three Years ago,” one with full range Shortbow, Ricochet on Pistols, proper Feline Grace and fall damage trait on Acrobatics, etc., and we could choose between that or Daredevil, I would choose the “Original Thief” spec on BOTH my Thieves, no hesitation. And yes, “Thief from Three Years Ago” would make for a better spec name.
And keep in mind, this is from a Dodge-spec Thief, currently slotted with Runes of Evasion, who has been wanting a melee staff option for ages (although ideally on the Warrior), so everything about the idea of the Daredevil should have been right up my alley, were the execution not so very lacking.
I don’t blame any one designer for this, it’s a team effort, but they should have had their ducks in a row on this months ago. They should not be roughly a month away from launch and going “you know those unique dodges we were trying to do and that were the unique mechanic of the class, taking up THREE trait slots? Apparently they don’t actually work at all, so we’re reverting them to just be the original dodges with some boons added on. Revenant is getting their own dodge though.”
I might still end up making my main a Daredevil. I already have all the points I need to unlock it, and it does add a few things to the hacked up mess that is the current Thief, but it’s just such a tortured road to get here, and it’s more out of exhaustion than enthusiasm. I’m actually seriously considering waiting until my Revenant is able to enter the jungle to start on that content, becaue the Revenant is super fun, or maybe pull my Necro out of mothballs to play as a Reaper, or perhaps my Engi who I haven’t yet bothered fully kitting out, because my two mains, my Thief and Guardian, have just been so thoroughly ignored by this elite spec process.
How does this happen, when you’ve had three years to work on the idea of an elite spec?
“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”
I have renewed hope for the class.
