Either way, it’s semantics, but he was definitely talking about builds and not roles, and was conflating the two while talking about them.
Also what about games like Valorant, or Overwatch, or League. They all have roles. AND characters you can roleplay. Are they RPGs, now, too?
(Edit) And Rainbow Six: Siege! I was trying to hard to think of that game’s name and just couldn’t remember it.
You don’t really have a build until mid- to late-game. Playing through as the same class is going to play out the same way for most of the campaign.
While 5 loadouts might be pushing it, I do agree that we should at least be able to “dual-spec” and swap between two different skill layouts. If for nothing else than a little variety in playing the game.
I dont know them, so cant really say. But I dont believe they are focused on building characters for roles. They are just premade characters for those roles? Which would seem disqualifying.
At lvl 25 in the beta you certainly had builds. You even had different builds, shallow as they were with just a few skills, below lvl 10 too.
One great change, compared to both D2 and D3 here definitely is skill unlocks showing up earlier, and not having to wait too long to get X skill.
Albeit, I think all the skills should unlock even earlier.
Valorant
→ You save up money between rounds to buy gear and choose your character-specific skills. Some are more suited to recon, some at close combat, some at point-control.
Overwatch
->Well, no. But there’s skins?
League of Legends
→ the items you buy and the order that you invest your skills on level up is your build, and there are MANY. Sure there are roles like tank, support, DPS, but you can shift around depending on the items you buy.
I was about to make a post about how a build is defined by 3 factors, 4 if you’re pedantic about class. Skills in the skill tree, points in the paragon board, and your gear. And a build is usually discussed in the sense that it’s once you reach a point where the skills are set, and everything else is variable. E.g a bleed Barbarian build requires using skills that cause bleed, but the paragon points a bleed build would use can be variable, as well as the specific aspects. You wouldn’t call a level 1 Barbarian that uses Flay a bleed build, or even a level 25 Barbarian that uses both Flay and Rend. There’s more involved that only comes into play at level 50.
Again, most people would not call that a build.
And that’s fine if that’s how you like to play. I don’t like doing the campaign more than a couple times, myself, though. And in the beginning, without aspects and paragon boards, there’s only a couple of skill combos to experience.
I’d rather define my character by what it has accomplished than what skills or equipment it has.
To me THAT is where the ‘role playing’ happens in a role playing game. Not in me putting 3 skillpoints in charged bolt instead of 4. But the things I have done.
(Edit) And really, we’re all doing the same thing… each quest has a direct route, there’s no influence you have as a player to what happens in the story. So in that sense, we’re all accomplishing the same things, and there is no difference between characters.
I guess you’ll have to be more specific about what you mean by “what it has accomplished” or “the things I have done”.
Roleplay that my character is a god and can tackle every threat that is thrown in front of him because he can change his abilities on a whim. An absolute god at gaming. Yeah that is some dog shi that no Dungeon Master would allow. Farm and respec like a good boy loser.
playing a repetitive game that I can’t play with new builds because it’s not worth changing will make me abandon the game quickly, play the story and that’s it and I believe that many will do that because it’s bad to have fun in the game’s contents always with the build of the moment because nobody wants to test anything new because of the cost
The problem here is the game they are giving us. They put in different things to do such as World Bosses and PVP and Dungeons and they give you a skill tree with different ways to build your character and even if you tried to convince me that there will always be One optimal build to rule them all that doesn’t change the fact that at any time I may find a powerful legendary that uses different skills than i have and make me want to try to build around that. I want to be able to change my build in order to play the game they have given me and they are encouraging me to do this by giving me different things to do and rare legendary powers to play with. I feel like they give me all these options and then put in a punishment for wanting to play. I would prefer then that they just take out the skill tree and make me pick a class and all i get are the skills I’m allowed to play with. Then all the loot that drops for that class will be in line with the skills I have.
Giving a bunch of options is not the same as devs wanting players to flip-flop between the options. The options still represents a lot of gameplay value, even when the player then is asked to pick one.
That is more the MOBA style of “class” design for sure. But it would no longer be an RPG imo.
I dont understand why you would prefer it though. Splitting the Sorc into 50 different classes for example would be the same as having 1 sorc class with no respecs.
Current design is way less restrictive than that.
Well, hopefully there wont be. That would be mindblowingly bad. Not even Blizzard should be able to get things so wrong.
I wouldn’t prefer to be limited to only 6 skills, I want to be able to try out new legendary powers for different skills without being punished for it.
I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if they said hey we put in this skill tree for experimentation but we noticed you have only been playing the same spec for the last 2 days so from now on if you don’t respec at least once a day you have to pay. But don’t worry you should have made plenty of gold in that day to cover for it.
It’s a game there is literally nothing wrong with people wanting to play with new drops. Are you one of the people who came up with the crazy annoying boxes that took 30 freaking minutes to get into for toys designed for 10 year olds?
So just curious but what was the account you were using to top leaderboards because it definitely wasn’t that one and some “dog crap easy game” you must have been dominating the leaderboards or at the very least been a super early clearer of inferno right?
