Marrt wrote:Siosilvar wrote:2. as for notarmory privacy? the only thing that gives me fuzzier feelings than people showing off their insecurity by complaining about notarmory is the cries of those banned for RMT. the game is *not* healthier when new players don't have any idea what their goals look like, get over it.
Casual this, casual that. If someone can be just as good as you are by copying your build, you're not as good as you think you are.
I don't agree with this. The game difficulty has been decreasing over the time and the skill factor only plays a role for very few late-game ubers and even there, your build plays a more important role. You cannot kill 100% deimoss with a shit build. You can kill samael with non-optimized build if you are skillful and can dodge well for a long time, but if you have bis gear, this factor is very limited. Ofc if you copy someone else's build that melts ubers, you will be able to make that too. So in my opinion, being able to create a build should play an important role in the game.
There's plenty of guides out there that can be used as a way to start and learn the game and ubers up to lvl 125-130 should be achievable by the most people. But endgame is where you should be expected to start thinking by yourself.. and notarmory is used as a way to copy lvl 150 chars. Whether it's havoc sorc or some other OP build next season, it does not really matter - if these builds melt bosses, then everyone with copied items will be able to do the same thing.
...absolutely all of which stems from balance issues and the dev team lacking clearly communicated direction. 2.0 stepped up the minimum bar for builds to be viable because most of it was balanced around the busted state of clawsin during beta, and every build has risen up to around that point because it turns out the vast majority of people just want to play the damn game, not be arbitrarily walled 20 hours in because they don't know how to improve from there.
Hiding shit from people accomplishes diddly squat to resolve it, and in fact just makes the issue worse because it provides us with no information about what to change. If everyone's copying the same build, the issue becomes obvious - like the fact that only zon and sin have any real variety in labbing builds, with over 50% of other classes on throwbarb, fire bear, crossbow, UHM, or Havoc (and Havoc alone is played twice as much as any other *class*).
I think I speak for the entire team, for once, when I say we have no interest in making anti-competitive changes just to appease some people's egos. Balance at the top end is definitely in a sorry state, but we'll address it by changing the balance, not by privileging some players over others.