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Predator9657 -> Passive/Active - Honest assessment (6/10/2014 13:38:45)
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This is my evaluation of the passive/active change (with as little bias as possible).
First of all, why?
(Dev's said that) passive skill's were taking up too many skill points and had become necessary for almost every build so getting rid of them will increase strategy/diversity (or something along those lines).
(Just a thought, why couldn't they just give everybody an extra 10-20 skill points if they didn't like passives taking 10-20 skill points in every build :P )
From a balance perspective
Balance problems which existed before the change were pretty much unaffected and it is arguable that more balance problems have been caused by too much strain put on EP (since not only ex-passives but now also cores require energy).
The best that can be said about the change in this aspect is that balance hasn't really improved due to it.
From a strategy perspective
The removal of the passives and the strain on energy seem to have reduced a lot of build diversity. I very rarely see builds other than Str/HP or dext spam - I'll admit I almost always play 1v1 (every time I click 2v2 I end up wishing I hadn't) - but I'm pretty sure that the variety isn't much greater in 2v2.
Again, the best that I can say about this aspect is that build diversity hasn't totally been annihilated by it.
Plus, most active replacements are maxed out just as the passives used to be, so it's not really much different now than before.
At this point, I think I should mention that almost everyone will agree that balance and strategy have been good enough before the removal of passives (if not significantly better).
Last but definitely not the least - FUN
We can all unanimously agree that ED is a game and the whole purpose of it is to have fun. Who decides if a game is fun? The dev's or the player-base? (To make it even clearer, who play's the game?)
It's very rare to find someone who will claim that ED without passives is even half as fun as ED with passives.
One thing I (and many others) really liked was the fact that each class had a "unique identity" based on it's passives. Furthermore, each class had quite a few playable builds as opposed to now - it's hard to tell if each class even has 1 playable build each.
To conclude, the removal of passives had very little positive impact on the game (compared with if they had been left) but they took away (diversity/strategy and) a lot of fun.
My honest opinion is that the time spent on that update would have been more wisely invested in giving each class a unique skill tree (i.e removing the repeated skills for balanced equivalents).
But having said that, what's done is done - time cannot be reversed - and I know that dev's don't really "rollback" updates, but I sincerely hope that they find a way to give classes unique "passive" traits - not necessarily linked to the skill tree's but something which has the essence of the passives that we lost (maybe without the bits that dev's didn't like about them) to bring back some more fun and variety into the game.
Hope that didn't end up as a rant :D
But this is how I feel and I found many others who feel similar so I thought that it would be good to post this because - (maybe by some miracle) a dev might end up reading it - or at least we can have a healthy discussion. All I honestly want is this game to be fun enough to continue playing (to make sure all the $'s we invested into it don't end up wasted!)
Anything you agree/disagree with, feel free to post with sufficient explanations and anything I might have missed or overlooked, feel free to add.
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