Worried about free respecs in group content causing bullying.

coop500 · January 18

I know they're debating about removing it from leaderboard content, which is good. But another issue I've yet to see someone bring up is general toxic mentality about the meta.

Something I'm really worried about with these free respecs is guildies and groups demanding players to change their skill setup right then and there, or get booted if it's not the exact meta flavor of the month. That, or players being expected to constantly respec between boss encounters or something. It's just a lot of drama for what used to be a simple 'this is my build, we'll see how it goes' kind of approach that we generally have now. Yes, we have the armory that lets us change builds, but it's not quite as simple as what the devs are presenting now.

I hope the devs consider blocking respecs in instanced content entirely. I know that might seem drastic, but I really do think letting this lie would create a huge new layer of toxic behavior among players.

Soarora · January 18

They’ve already removed it from trials. IA and dungeons (the instanced content that still has free respecs) don’t have the build pressure that trials do (or well, the people who are intense about builds are easily avoidable).

YandereGirlfriend · January 18

This is not an issue.

If people are bullying then that is a problem with those specific players and players should take measures accordingly (e.g. report them, etc.).

Free respecing is a huge quality of life triumph for the overwhelming majority of players and that should absolutely not be nerfed due to hypothetical edge cases involving a tiny number of potential bad actors. We already have mechanisms in place for punishing bullying and bad player behavior.

MashmalloMan · January 18

Seeing as this doesn't apply to trials anymore, I'll skip over that.

I've done probably thousands of dungeons between vet and normal, I can't think of a single time someone forced me to change an ability or set as a damage dealer in a toxic way. There have been instances where as a group, we brain stormed different idea's to potentially get us through the harder content, or decided to call it quits because the pug just clearly wasn't going to work.

Fact of the matter is, if you're doing your role properly as a Damage Dealer, Healer, or Tank, no one cares what you use. Stand out of red, survive, revive your team, listen to your group, parse well, not necessarily perfectly, complete mechanics, heal, taunt, debuff, etc.

As a damage dealer, I have 13 toons, all of them have complete builds, but pretty much none of them use meta defining sets or skill line combinations. I generally go for thematic builds like an Ilambris Sorc + DK, or a summoner using Maw as Sorc + Necro.

The DPS ceiling and floor has raised so much that you can pretty much use whatever you want for dungeon based content, normal or vet, as long as you're competent and your rotation makes sense.

HM, you want to make it as easy as possible for everyone involved, it wouldn't be worth using thematic builds so if I'm taking the content seriously, I'd swap no questions asked. I wouldn't want to put people in a frustrating position and if it did come to it, I wouldn't be upset if they asked me to change something to complete the content.

On the off chance you run into a toxic player, ignore them or leave the group, but it's not going to happen frequently, because it's already not happening on live. Skill respecs won't change that.

If you run into a lot of players asking you to change x, y, or z, then I'd honestly have to question if you're the problem. I'm not saying you are, but if I started to notice people complaining to me frequently, I couldn't write them off as toxic, I'd have to acknowledge that there may be truth's behind their statements. Maybe I need practice, maybe I did a mechanic wrong, maybe I didn't pay attention, or maybe my setup performs much worse than I thought.

Cooperharley · January 18

The only place it'd be even remotely an issue would be in leaderboard content, which is where it was removed from (outside of IA). It's a non-problem now. You have the odd raid lead/dungeon lead that thinks every run of a veteran crag trial is a world first, but that's rare.