Attribute Saving System

First of all, is it possible to shift your attributes around even after you reach level 20 and ascend? I haven't reached level 20 and haven't bothered to find out if you lose the ability to reassign your attributes, so this idea works on the assumption that you can.

I wouldn't mind seeing a system for saving attribute specs. With all of the skills that will be available at release and the hundreds more that will be added over time, people are almost definately going to want to change their attributes from time to time, in order to create different character builds. Why not implement a system that would allow a player to save their current attribute arrangement so that if they ever wanted to change back to it later, they could do so quickly and easily? Saving an attribute spec would place it in a spec list and allow the player to name it. The entry would show the attribute point arrangement, and the experience cost to switch from your current spec to the one in the list.

You could even take this a step further and allow people to save an entire build. Place your attributes and 8 skills, click "save build", name the build, and from then on, you can quickly and easily switch to it with a single click. Perhaps allow the player to save them in groups, so that all skill sets that use a certain attribute arrangement could be grouped together. Then, even if you're not switching out your attributes, you can quickly switch between your favorite skill sets without having to take the time to place them one by one.

being Level 20 does not prevent you from switching attributes around... I've always thought that it would make more sense if once you reached level 20, you no longer were bound by the Attribute refund thing... but there's probably reasons for it to be in place.

The danger of being able to infinitly swap your attribtes is, well, being able to infinitely swap your attributes. Imagine there were no Refund Points and all you had to do to change attributes was just slide them up and down. Now imagine someone wants to cast a skill linked to a certain attribute. Say it does 5 damage per rank in, say Fire. Well, at the moment that skill is being cast you don't need your attributes anywherre else so you could, if there were no RP, set another attribute down and raise Fire all the way up to 12 in order to do 70 damage and to get the most out of it. If the next skill you cast was linked to Water you could do the same with that skill. Then again with your Fire skill again. People with quick fingers could shift their attributes on the fly and reap a significant advantage. Worse yet, someone could but together a program or bot to do that for you. If you could have a program that would set your base linked attribute to 12 each and every time you cast a skill, well, that's a pretty big advantage. Refund Points mean that while you can shift your attributes however you like there's a limit on just how much you can do it at once. It's an actual choice that you'll have to live with until you can get some more Refund Points.

There are ways around that, of course. You could take out RP and make it so that you couldn't shift attributes during a mission, only in a lobby. But that means that you can't raise your attributes when you level nor could you enter a mission and test out various attribute levels to see how they affect your skills in actual play, you'd have to exit and enter each time you wanted to try a new level.

Where did you get the idea that I'm talking about taking out Refund Points? I'm not talking about changing the requirements for swapping attributes at all. It would still cost you to change them and it could easily be made so that you could only quick-swap in town. I'm simply talking about being able to save builds and attribute settings so that when you are in town and want to swap them out, you can do it quickly and easily.

If implemented correctly, it would be NO different from how it is now, except that it would be much easier to keep track of your various character settings and switch them around when you're in town. That's the only reason for this. It's not meant to be a powergaming tool.

Another way to do it even better than having people just do it in towns would be to have an NPC that does it for you, but for them to charge you x amount of money depending on what you're swapping and how much of it. That'd prevent people from wildly changing ther attributes depending on their prior knowledge of what they would be fighting and whatnot.

That could work too, although paying with both RP and gold might be a little harsh.

I still think that it would be nice to have the option of saving skill sets and swapping them quickly in town, regardless. There's no huge power shift, as there is with swapping attributes, and it's almost inevitable that people will develop favorite skill sets that they'll want to be able to access quickly. It would certainly help groups get going faster. If you're a monk main, and someone is looking for a monk main with a particular skill, just click the saved skill set that you know has the one they're looking for.