Make retconning easy

canadascott

This is going to be a bit of a rant.

This game is nearly seven years old, and retconning continues to be a source of eternal, time-consuming, painfully unfun suck. It does to character creation what the crafting missions did to the original crafting system. If you’re trying to make it painful to discourage retcons, fine. But there are enough forced retcons that the system is a deeply unwanted pain.

Change the interface.

Let us go into our powers, and instead of undoing every single damn power until you go ten levels deep. Just click on the damn power you want to replace and only the damn power we want to replace, treat it as a slot, empty it and replace it. Don’t make us do ten bloody and unnecessary iterations. You can still keep the same cost for replacing a power that is that far down the list. But for pity’s sake, stop making us take hours to revamp an old character just for one or two powers. How many players might have returned, except for the nightmare of having to redo their characters when they only needed a minor tweak?

FOR PITY’S SAKE, MAKE THIS EASY, DAMMIT! NOT EVERYONE VIEWS CHARCTER CREATION AS THE WHOLE DAMN GAME! IT'S BAROQUE, SO FIX IT!

Ahem.

Thank you.

soulforger

The reason they do it the way its done is because of the power tier system. For them to fix the system, they'd have to remove the tiers from powers. Otherwise, you could invalidate your entire build just by selecting the wrong power to remove.

markhawkman

Even then they could have the list filter by what is available to remove and what is not.

pantagruel01

soulforger said:

The reason they do it the way its done is because of the power tier system. For them to fix the system, they'd have to remove the tiers from powers. Otherwise, you could invalidate your entire build just by selecting the wrong power to remove.

There are methods around that, though they're somewhat complicated (basically, rather than it being a two stage process of removing old powers then adding new powers, you'd just go into an editor panel and hit commit when you're done; commit would be disabled for invalid builds).

However, a simpler QOL thing would be separating power and advantage retcons. Removing an advantage from a power will never produce an illegal build (other than forbidding removing rank 2 before removing rank 3).

sterga

This would be amazing. It sucks spending as much or more time planning what ORDER my powers need to go in so that trying to respec later is cheaper and doesn't take 1000 clicks. I also get tired of unspecing and respecing my travel powers in while leveling just so they can stay at the top of the pile. It would also be nice for experimenting with build to just swap out that one power that ended up near the bottom of the list.

For all I care, they can just remove all tier requirements. Low tier powers tend to have debuffs that make them appealing to use with higher tier powers anyway. Even better, every power can just cost the same to spec out no matter what one you pick. At level 40, a single power can cost 30g or something. A full respec is still expensive, but "only" 30g at a time is a lot easier to spend. And for people that don't want to spend 500g, they can still buy the cash shop token.

riverocean

pantagruel01 said:

However, a simpler QOL thing would be separating power and advantage retcons. Removing an advantage from a power will never produce an illegal build (other than forbidding removing rank 2 before removing rank 3).

I like this idea. Throw in a seperate travel power retcon and we're all set!!

soulforger

gradii said:

Power tiers are a major impediment to balance anyway.

So true. I personally wish they would get rid of them. All true free form!

pantagruel01 said:

There are methods around that, though they're somewhat complicated (basically, rather than it being a two stage process of removing old powers then adding new powers, you'd just go into an editor panel and hit commit when you're done; commit would be disabled for invalid builds).

However, a simpler QOL thing would be separating power and advantage retcons. Removing an advantage from a power will never produce an illegal build (other than forbidding removing rank 2 before removing rank 3).

Interesting ideas, would be nice to see these happen.

thekrazzee

gradii said:

Power tiers are a major impediment to balance anyway.

Another way to make power tiers less intrusive method of balancing is to give powers a level requirement instead of a required number of powers within its framework or overall. It's already implemented for ultimate powers, so there's little reason why it can't be implemented for powers across the board.

pantagruel01 said:

However, a simpler QOL thing would be separating power and advantage retcons. Removing an advantage from a power will never produce an illegal build (other than forbidding removing rank 2 before removing rank 3).

Second this.