Eladiun wrote on Sep 14
th, 2012 at 10:10am:
I've read this a lot when people speak of the upsides of DDO and in many ways I agree with them. However, in reality even though DDO has many options only about 20 of those combinations are viable. If there was so much customization why is everyone a clonk, an exploiter, a monster, a blitz... etc etc. This selling point of DDO is way oversold.
That honestly depends on the crowd you run with. In the elite end-game world, this is pretty true. There is a lot of min-maxing going on. Max DPS builds are often heavily copied. But there is more variation in play than what you see in the small subset of the game that is end game. And even there, many end game players make min-max sacrifices to try out other concepts and or gain some utility or versatility or flavor.
I agree that if there are 8 races and 13 classes and approximately 27 PrE's available and 10 ED's and 20 Heroic levels to multiclass and anywhere from 7 - 22 feats per build and 80 enhancement points to spend and 3 twists of fate and 26 ED points that you can create literally billions of possible combinations. And literally billions of them would be total crap. But their are still thousands upon thousands of combinations that are viable and interesting.
GW2 doesn't give you the ability to make the "traditional" MMO roles of Healers, Tanks, DPS, supposedly. People say they enjoy that GW2 escapes this mold. The odd thing is that DDO has been capable of escaping that mold for years. You don't have to build a min-max DPS toon and look for a min-max healer toon. You don't have to wade in and hack and slash and take a ton of damage and hope the healer can spam heal ahead of the pace. That's just the lowest common denominator strategy that is used because it is simple and easy. But if you wanted to build versatile, multifunctional, self-sufficient toons, you are quite capable of doing so in DDO. Lots of players do it all the time.
I'm not saying that GW2 is wrong and DDO is right. I don't think it's about better or worse. Any more than chocolate ice cream is better or worse than strawberry or vanilla. But I'm not sure I'm sold on the logic that fewer options is a feature or a benefit.