Next thing you know you'll want them remove toughness enhancements, since toughness is a mandatory feat as it is now.

LIAFF, fanboi

I've played long enough to have watched the pendulum swing wildly back and forth in failed attempts to provide some mythical and unattainable "balance"*. I've experienced nerfs, have seen core mechanic changes, and watched devs pet projects get hated by the players**, yet linger on like zombies, unloved, but existing.

Instead of just the normal damage to enhancements (resettable with plat), feats (resettable with lots of plat and dragonshards), DDO-NGE will finally allow the devs to break skill points. In doing so, they will eliminate classes that have fewer skill points available - clerics and sorcs. Better stock up on those lesser hearts during the next sale, for when the pendulum inevitably swings the other way. Changing a system so that only a TR or LR can fix a build is the stupidest game mechanic change I have yet seen in DDO. This game is already difficult enough for newbies, why make it harder, and make early mistakes expensive to fix - or more realistically, make it costly to fix a character when the devs go and break stuff.

Imagine if melee got a new skill - melee alacrity. Every skill point to this new skill would mean 0.5% more attack speed. That would pretty much be a big cup of "Fuck you" to every barb or paladin in the game, wouldn't it? Rogues, rangers, and monks could make it work, but barbs and pallies would pretty much be screwed. Say goodbye to intiminate or UMD, suckers. It would kill classes that are feat-poor, skill-point-poor, and especially the heavily MAD classes, like pallies.

I see the new spellcraft (and changes to heal and repair) as doing the exact same thing to casters as I proposed in the above paragraph for melee. Unless you're a wizard, arty, or a druid, you don't have skill points to play with to be able to add two near-mandatory skills that have never been relevant in DDO since the game was started.

So seriously, Asheras, gfy. I TR'd both of my cleric mains out of the class because I saw the hjealbot writing on the wall over a year ago.  I had hoped that one day I'd be able to return to the class I loved to play, but I don't see it happening.

On the plus side, since the first enhancement preview, I started and finished a Coursera course, spent more time with the family, and got a ton of work done around the house and yard. Being mostly driven away is not all bad, but the game is still being killed for me, which makes me sad.


*  one cleric-specific example would be the switch to the aura from level 6 to 12 an update or two after RadServ was released. Every other class could point to things, from Crit Rage to Tempest. Oh, and who can forget how spellpower was already nerfed for divines compared to other casters, so that it doesn't have as much of an effect?

** let's make loot "random"!!!! When was the last time you saw Cormyrian anything on the auction house? And how about that challenge XP nerf - they sure get run a lot now, don't they? And those BtC ingredients in Eveningstar? Still wildly popular, right?

If you had built any toons on Lamannia, you wouldn't have posted this.

Fuck you for being lazy.

It's because the "ubber-power-gamer" crowd understands the game mechanics best.  They can see what's feather_of_sun'ed before the common mooks catch on.

make it easier to maintain and add on in the future

Maybe I don't go on Lamannia because IT DOES NO GOOD

Those who are most butthurt about the changes seem to be the uber power game crowd. So maybe Maj was right when he said 99% of the people like the enhancement pass. Cause those are the non power gamers who don't need to tweak every ounce of ability x, y, or z out of a every character.

I'm probably being too optimistic, but now at least the framework exists to add more stuff more easily that it was before.

I will admit I don't run much EE content b