RPG element vs Min maxing

Community General Discussion
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I’ve seen the word RPG getting thrown around a lot lately, and people are acting like min maxing is the complete opposite of RPG, so I’m wondering what exactly does RPG means for you?

Granted I didn’t play a lot of RPG games, but for me it was mostly about the journey from your beginner’s village to defeating the big bad and saving the day, which you’ll need to strategize and plan how to approach each situation, what’s the boss’s weakness and strength, what strategy should you use to counter them etc etc.

Refusing to use better weapons and armor because you like to roleplay as a farmer in your beginner’s village will be the reason why you’ll stuck in the starting zone forever.

If you’re fighting a boss that are immune to crowd control spells, throwing Sleep/Dark/Hold/Confuse/Warp at them will never work.

If a boss is more vulnerable of lightning damage and immune to fire, stubbornly throwing Firaga at them will only make the fight unnecessarily harder than it should.

If you’re really fond of Dragoons and you like to bring four Dragoons in every fight, you’re most certainly never going to kill most of the bosses except that one who’s weak against wind damage.

If you’re using job level one Onion Knight in a boss fight you’re going to struggle for a very long time because level one Onion Knight is so weak they literally can’t do anything properly.

If you don’t have a balance comp with a healing/defensive/buff + physical dps + caster role, you’re never going to defeat Cloud of Darkness.

So min maxing and strategizing has always been a part of RPG, unless you can prove me wrong and show me if there’s any RPG game that lets you kill the final boss with beginner’s equipment.

this is my attempt at creating a quality topic, it’s not bad right?

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I don’t think either one needs to determine the other

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I’m playing agility paladin and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

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Wait you can choose agility or strength in WoW? Isn’t it fixed for your class?

I’ve been wishing to play a cat tank for a long time now, please teach me how to do it.

I also need STR to complete the silver tank Proving Ground challenge for my rogue.

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RPG is a game genre. Min maxing is how you go about things. They are not mutually exclusive nor are they mutually inclusive, it’s a playstyle.

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Explained in previous thread

If your personal fun casual build is above that theoretical 5k, you are good, the try hards will cry but nobody cares about them, even the devs admitted you shouldn’t brainlessly min max by removing the abillity to change gear in m+ and now by covenants remaining a hard choice

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I’m responding to those people who said min-maxing culture took away the RPG element from this game.

And I’m not sure about others but I’ll always use that higher damage weapon I get in a RPG game, there’s no such thing as “it’s just 5 damage increase it doesn’t matter”.

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Min/maxing is always an option in RPGs, by the nature of their design heavily favouring specific counters to specific enemies. However, it doesn’t have to be enforced.

Some RPGs focus more on customization, options, and acting out a specific role. Others place a heavier emphasis on storytelling and have the game mechanics act as a way to flesh-out and reinforce the narrative. In fact, MOST RPGs focus on one or both of the above details – custom “make your own adventure”, or telling a specific story.

You can actually argue that min/maxing is a bastardization of RPG mechanics for something other than their intended purpose. They’re a tool used to assist the grander scheme, not the overall purpose. Sure, you can build an overpowered character… but to what end? With very few exceptions, such a level of optimization is unnecessary if not asinine.

If anything, it has a tendency to suck the fun out of the game if min/maxing (and optimization in general) becomes too dominant. It drives away absolutely EVERYONE… except those who want to min/max on a constant basis.

To be perfectly honest, “RPG” is more of a framework than a genre of game. They’re a tool first and foremost, used to build something. They’re there to add a little bit of depth and complexity, encouraging you to consider other tools and approaches rather than constantly relying on the same strategy all the time.

Min/maxing only manifests itself when one particular strategy works too well and it starts overwhelming every other approach.

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I am aware. All I’m saying is that min maxing is just a playstyle, it doesn’t take away from RPG at all. It’s all got to do how they want to play the game, you can still play however you like.
Also I’ve been min maxing since I was playing tabletop D&D, so I don’t think it’s a recent culture issue either.

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In Wrath that was a legitimate strategy due to the way that Agility bumped our Crit when mixed with Holy and playing as a melee healer.

You could do middle of the road DPS and every other GCD was an insta-cast FoL guaranteed crit thanks to it.

Was a fun build until the talent re-work mid Ulduar killed it.

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It is the same idea as your can’t tolerate the intolerant’

If you allow such people in the community they will drive the others away and ruin it by turning it into a trash show

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min maxing is irrelevant in non competitive content. If you don’t want to compete to the higher skills, then min maxing won’t have an impact on you. It’s not that bad of a problem.

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If the only way to play is one cookie-cutter method, that’s not a role-playing game because there aren’t many choices.

Look at something like pillars of eternity - how many “right” ways to play are there? And before folks complain about difficulty, ironman permadeath path of the damned is an option. Tons of ways to do it on the crunchy game-mechanics side, and a game like that also has lots of story-related choices.

Because blizzard has such a hard time balancing things in WoW, they tend to strip away abilities or make bosses immune to a variety of them. So there isn’t really the option for much in the way of decision making - and again, that’s only the crunchy mechanics side of things.

There’s very little in-world roleplaying of any sort that’s part of the game. Almost all the NPCs react to you the same way, with little more than a $class name or $race name variable tossed into the text of the quest or dialogue.

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Can people stop pretending that min maxing is ruining the game when none of these people partake in the content that actually requires said min max? it makes you look like a fool.

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Yeah, that will make them stop. You really told them.

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Na they wont stop, just wanted to throw them some reason, but being a fool is cool nowadays, just join some pugs and you will see.

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complaining about minmaxing will solve all the game’s issues, you really told us.

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Wait, that’s not my point, I didn’t say that I support following that “one and only” best build. I mean min maxing for your own playstyle if that make any sense for you, like if you want to play a AGI paladin build (for example), then you’ll need to stack as many AGI as possible, you can’t put 1/3 of AGI, 1/3 of STR and 1/3 of INT on your gears and call yourself a AGI paladin, right? Does that make any sense?

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Where in this thread did I do that?

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The level where min/maxing really has a significant benefit, and isn’t dwarfed by player skill, is a place 95% of the player base never touches.

Yet the mentality runs deep.

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