Player guides with new content?

Hey there!

Does anyone else think the guides should have the sticky removed encouraging people to make new ones that are relevant to the current state of the game? Are comments, and guides from issue 4, and 10 really relevant to current game play?

I am just curious.

-Akia

I believe making sure every guide is labeled with the Issue number that was current when the guide was last updated is sufficient. Legacy information should be retained for the sake of legacy/archive itself, if nothing else.

That said, I am disappointed with how few new guides have been written lately. Yeah, there's a few great ones regarding the new Alignment system and what-not, but there's not nearly enough build guides for the newer or more recently proliferated power sets.

There was a time when the only way to get information about a powerset was to either play it, or hear from someone who had. Guides were very useful. Now that we have so much more information available (real numbers, etc.) there's much less need for guides. You can just fire up the game, go into character creation, and find out most of what you'd want to know about a powerset.

If you look back over the older guides, you realize how much misinformation they had in them. Many were heavily colored by the author's personal preferences, playstyle, etc. They were still useful, but I know I've had the experience of rolling a toon based on information I'd read in a guide only to find out it was not at all what I was lead to believe.

Aside from there being (IMO) less need for guides, they are also more difficult to write I think. I'd guess most people looking for guides are those who don't want to be bothered to learn the details of the game mechanics and just want to play the game. They don't want to know about the numbers, they just want to know how it feels to play the set. Those people are also going to want help with IO slotting, so these days a comprehensive guide needs to cover not just the powers themselves along with how they interact with available pool and epic powersets, but also IO suggestions with possibly a few sample builds. Now it might be worthwhile to consider incarnate abilities as well. I'd guess a lot of potential guide authors find the prospect daunting.

For me, many of those older guides are still useful. Sure some of the numbers may be off, but the concept behind the powersets are still the same. An Ice Blaster today still plays like an Ice Blaster from Issue 4, with the only real changes being Defiance and BFR animation time. Slotting is also, for the most part, still the same for non-L50 characters. Acc/Dam/Dam/Dam/End/Rech is still a good slotting for an attack while leveling, even using basic IOs.

However, once IOs hit people were able to build to their personal preferences and get a variety of set bonuses. This made making a guide quite difficult, as the writer would need to go into all sorts of details with any number of set bonuses. For me, this was the primary reason I never updated my Ice/Ice guide. SOs and HOs were fairly straightforward. IO Sets and Bonuses contained too many variables. Now we have Purple sets, PvP sets and Alpha Slots. By the time someone is able to make a full guide on all of this, the Rare Alpha Slots would become available and possibly even the next Incarnate Slot, requiring even more work on the guide.

So, while the guides may be dated, the basics of the powersets, builds and slotting are still quite relevant for characters who are leveling. It's when you hit L50 and start looking at Rares, Purples, PvP Sets and Incarnate Slotting that things get crazy. However, if you are L50 and still need a guide on how to play the class, well...