The Queue: Downtime

We’ve got a longer than usual downtime ahead of us, so I’m just going to hang out with my favorite Warchief for a spell.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions, and we answer because we’re really just looking for anything to do while we wait.

I don’t think it represents a shift, simply because that’s always the tightrope they’ve had to walk in an MMO. There will always be your average player, who just wants to feel powerful sometimes, and then there’ll be somebody who sees the game code and bends it to their will, like Neo in The Matrix. Even though Rextroy’s adventures usually require a very fiddly set of circumstances to pull off, but if he can replicate it, that means that anyone can replicate it, which makes it a factor for everyone playing the game.

That said, I’m trying to reserve a lot of my personal feelings on talent trees to this point. For me, they’re not a fun gameplay hook — they’re a chore. Especially since, in the alpha, they’re constantly being reset, and there’s no template. I’m not the sort of player who wants to Matrix my way into being a superstar. I just want to hit the ground running and be effective out of the box.

Yes. If you right click a talent, everything below that point on the branch of the tree gets wiped out.

There are also “milestones,” where you’re not allowed to invest points further down a tree until you’ve invested a total number of points in the tree. This mainly seems to serve as a way to avoid letting people rush the bottom of a tree and select all the really juicy end talents. In any case, if you right click above those milestones, and you can’t meet that requirement anymore, it’ll wipe out everything above that milestone, too. However, if you’re using more than one talent branch but still meet that milestone, the other talent branch will remain intact.

First of all, we can’t be sure how many alpha builds are left — I’d hope for a few more, because there are bugs and missing assets and such it may be important to access later on. In terms of what I’ve played, this alpha seems very well polished for an alpha cycle. The cinematics are placeholders, but not much else — I haven’t even seen a checkered box yet!

That said, I’m pretty confident we’ll see the remaining talent trees before the testing cycle is over. Shipping a complete game missing a crucial element like that won’t fly anymore. Heck, it was pretty unacceptable when they did it for Paladins back in the day, but now there’s no way they could get away with that. It would seem more likely they’d announce a release delay than ship with a core piece incomplete.

Nope!

People have been asking about a Tinker class for forever, which would closely align with this idea. The main issue has always been the Engineer profession — the two would have a considerable amount of overlap, both flavor-wise and likely function as well. I do like the idea that someone other than Hunters would have a use for ranged physical weaponry. At the same time, do I really want to fight another class for bows? Meh.

For me, personally? Meh. It’s not my aesthetic, and I’m not a huge fan of mechanical stuff in high fantasy in general. But you do you.