Xhieron

Well, thief! I smell you and I feel your air. I hear your breath. Come along! Help yourself again, there is plenty and to spare!

The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can’t be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.

Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. “Being unkillable” or “controlling this space” can’t be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you’re now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that’s a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.

Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you’d interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can’t punish a playstyle because playstyles aren’t that well defined, and you can’t create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There’s also no energy denial in GW2, and you can’t give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1’s mesmer–like a lot of things that were better in GW1.

If you ask me, we don’t need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs–stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have–and we need the elites to be “de-elited” so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they’ve taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.

Say more about this? Why is it a worse profession? Anywhere I can get a layperson-friendly deep dive on this (that doesn’t require a graduate degree in mathematics)? I’m fascinated by the nuance between niche academic disciplines and the “politics” of academia.

These are all really excellent questions. My son skipped a grade early in gradeschool, and I am fortunate enough to have a friend who had a similar experience as this young lady (albeit not to the same extent) being hyper-accelerated through school, so we were able to interview him about his experience when making decisions about how to handle our exceptional kiddo’s education.

It was not a fun conversation, and as a result we elected to just let our son take advanced classes when possible and not really push to have him skip additional grades or do any of the wacky stuff with enrolling in college as a child or what have you. Of course we’re going to push him to take stuff that is challenging whenever possible, and I’d love for him to graduate high school with as much college credit as possible–but I’m not about to steal his youth in pursuit of putting a PhD on his wall before he’s old enough to vote.

The short version is that our friend was a very miserable child. His advancement essentially meant he had no peers, and especially among teenagers, the acceleration just put a bullseye on his back, since the people who surrounded him either resented him or saw him as a target for bullying. Even professional educators at times resented him. He was adamant that it was a thing he would never put his own children through.

Is that a typical experience? I have no idea; after all, being a child in higher education is already well outside ordinary experience. But the story was enough to make me worry for the child whenever I read a headline like this.

Thank you for this. That was a fantastic survey of some non-materialistic perspectives on consciousness. I have no idea what future research might reveal, but it’s refreshing to see that there are people who are both very interested in the questions and also committed to the scientific method.

I mean–it’s your game. Your table are the only ones who have to be happy, and you certainly know them better than a bunch of internet strangers, so take all this stuff with a grain of salt.

For what it’s worth, I’ve personally made the mistake of trying to rein in the insanity for high level characters or just broken splats, and the result was just discovering a new suite of toys for the PCs to abuse–or worse, outright resentment. Take care that you don’t mistake for assent or consensus what is in reality just player unwillingness to openly voice their unhappiness. After all, most folks will rather play watered down D&D than no D&D. And if nothing else, developing the ability to write plot hooks that can survive Plane Shift, threats that overcome Permanent Contingency (no longer a thing in 5e), and Wish outcomes that feel both amazing and terrible is how excellent DMs are made. Do what’s best for your group, but you’re also part of that group.

The PCs won D&D. Let them enjoy it. PCs who cast 9th level spells break reality, and breaking reality is okay. This is the thing they played to win, so let them enjoy the fruits of their effort. They’re going to tear apart your prep, and you need to get comfortable with that. Expect to improvize.

There are still challenges you can throw at them, but they have many tools at their disposal. Your job is to give them opportunities to use those tools–not remove them. Anything they can do, an NPC can do back.

Combat speed and pace is a different animal, and the best advice I can give is to forbid bookkeeping on turn, at least for level 17 experienced players: if you have to look something up when it’s your turn, you get skipped. Know what your stuff does if you’re going to do it, and use the other turns to decide on your action. If you need to read something from the PHB on your turn, you need to already be on that page ready to go when you come up.

Ultimately, you’re the DM, so you can say what is or isn’t allowed and what’s a reasonable turn length. But you still have to honor the social contract. If a player made a wizard and played it for 17 levels because he wanted Wish, the time to adjust Wish for your table was 17 levels ago–not the session he’s finally got it.

This was my first thought as well. I hate that being so cynical is my reaction now, but this is just DDOS by another method. The point is to make the platform unusable so people will go somewhere else. CSAM is just the weapon. It’s doubly vile because it’s just going to become ammunition in the war against federation altogether. The stakes are high enough that the institutional players have plenty of cash, no ethics, and no accountability, and I wouldn’t at all put it past any social media alternative to employ these kinds of tactics to kill the fediverse before it can gain a foothold. And (at the risk of getting too conspiratorial) that’s not even considering governments and ordinary black hats.