First login of 2014Follow

The one annoyance with the autogrant is that while it does speed things up to 85, it really slows them down after that level because it autogrants a ton of stuff that doesn't actually help you, but still takes up AA count for purposes of time required to gain new ones. So all those higher levels AAs that you're trying to get take longer to get.

In the long run, it's going to save you time, but that is a factor to consider.

That's true if you are way behind on AAs. But if you had previously kept up on the "must have" AAs, then the increase in kill rate during an exp grind from the autogrant was more or less zero, but the decrease in future AA gain rate was not. Gaining a couple thousand AAs that mostly increase stats that are already maxed doesn't actually help you (unless, I suppose you decide to do naked hunting or something).

It's not a huge deal, but it is something to think about.

This is true. But really, how many people were in that position as opposed to folks who were way behind and seemingly had no hope of ever "catching up" (even on just the "must haves")? Autogrant gave me several AA skills that I wouldn't have bought otherwise (Salvage, New Tanaan Crafting Mastery, Act of Valor on my Paladins, etc) but I can see that this is mainly for those who want to find their way to a baseline of sorts, so they can function like they think they're supposed to.

I do see the price paid going forward though.



I think this is the case with many, many, many people.

Sure, but those are things which don't really affect your day to day exp grind kill rate at all. I also never took Act of Valor. Why? Cause it's unlikely I'll ever use it. Also never spent the AAs on all the LoH enhancements. For something you use rarely anyway, spending that many AAs to make it slightly more powerful isn't that important. There's dozens of AAs like that. Is it handy to have more bandolier slots? Sure. Does it affect my kill rate at all? Nope.

Even in the class specific AAs, there's a ton of "abandoned lines" of AAs. Basically, they had this idea for a direction to go with a class ability, but then decided it was too powerful and phased it out over time (basically didn't improve the lines at higher levels), or it was so craptastic that players said "don't bother with this, give us something else", and the line never gets any upgrades. The paladin AA stun line is a great example of this. Was originally intended to be a short duration stun that could be added to the end of a stun chain, but wasn't long enough to continue one. Most people didn't find the stun element of it terrifically useful (cause a 1 second stun really isn't that significant), and wanted the Devs to focus on the spell interruption aspect of it. Over time, the devs actually implemented code for "spell interrupts" separate from "stunning interrupts spell casting". The line of AAs went in that direction, focusing on the spell interruption aspect (and an alternate damage but less agro sub line), and abandoned the idea of actually using it to stun things for a second. Of course, there's still like 150 or so AA points you can spend increasing the level of mob that the stun will affect. More or less completely unnecessary, but it's still there.

I can also buy an AA that hastens the reuse time on the HolyForge Discipline. Which itself is completely replaced by the Pureforge Discipline. And it's not really just that there's an upgrade (cause it's not so much an upgrade as a shorter duration), but that the duration of HolyForge is so long that using it actually reduces your effectiveness because you can't activate the vastly superior Armor of the Champion disc. But hey! You can spend AAs reducing the reuse time on it. Yay!

Lots of stuff like that in the game. Not that there's any really good ways around this (aside from say making people manually select each AA they want granted to them, which would probably result in a few complaints), so that's just the way it is.

Edited, May 14th 2014 4:41pm by gbaji