Support queues won't be much better than DPS. Every calling is capable of queuing it, so you can bet everyone does.
Rift: Planes of Telara
- Thread starter Zantox_sl
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Sinzar
Trakanon Raider
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The support role in dungeons is mostly a wasted slot, at least in my experience up until level 56 (where I've made it so far). It may change at max level for current content experts, but I always groan a little when getting into a dungeon and the expert role is filled by someone trying to assist-heal or use crowd control or whatever. 1 tank, 1 heal, 3 dps is the optimal group for leveling. I wish they would just remove the support checkbox until level 60.
It's even more pointless at 60, at least at this point in the game. When people were first breaking in to experts at 60, groups would run two healers to make it through. Now that everyone's geared, not so much.
DPS waits ages. Heals and support really reduce the queue. Tank presumably the same. That's if you can even log in though. Last night I had a 1 hour 40 minute queue to log in to the game. So much for no Tricks no Traps etc. Fuck faces.
Instant Adventures are only good XP if the group size is very big, and everyone pulls their weight. If you end up in one with just 5 people or so, and some of them are slacking or stupid, then just leave and do traditional quest grinding instead. But if you get in one with 10+ people and they are all rushing around to complete the quests asap, then it is good XP and better than solo questing.
At 50+ it changes because there aren't as many people doing it. So probably better to do other stuff. Although I play on a PVP server so it's still worth doing for the safety in numbers aspect, especially seeing as the new world is both factions questing along side each other which leads to almost constant ganking.
Constant Warfronts are not very good XP, constant dungeons are ok. Personally I get bored of everything if I do it too much so I just do a bit of everything, literally quarter of my time IA's, quarter solo questing, quarter in WF's, and quarter in dungeons. I love that the game lets me do all those things, but it really highlights an issue with Rift which is that all of those aspects are weak individually. WF's are mostly just zerg vs zerg which is pretty boring and doesn't play well for some roles. As a glass cannon dps for example, you can literally die in about 2 seconds if more than one person targets you. So it's more about hiding at the back of the group and doing damage to lots of people without drawing much attention to yourself. But that gets boring.
The dungeon runs have gone quite shitty. Originally, they were very hard, and they went on longer, both of which I liked. Now, every mob dies in 2 seconds, it's totally noobish, dumbed down, spammy and crappy, and it's also shortened in length. The remaining content you can only do at Elite level or whatever, which I think now is 50+, and sadly, at 51 they are all grey to me so there is only one dungeon that is green and it's boring as fuck to do that over and over, and nobody seems to do the others.
I also hate the people who play Rift. There are occasional nice ones, but this entire new generation of MMO players can suck my fucking cock, deep DEEP down their throats until they choke and die. I want to murder them all, and their parents, and everyone they ever played MMO's with in their entire lives, and everyone who works at Blizzard for creating this new species. I first saw them in WoW but I didn't play that long. Then I saw them in TSW and realized they were here to stay, and I fucking hated it. Now in Rift, it seems that everyone is the same. Basically what I'm talking about, is cuntish players who join the group and don't talk, even when someone says, "Hello" they don't reply. The groups silently zerg from encounter to encounter, boring, dull, shit. On occasions, you will find some boss somewhere in some dungeon, that causes some trouble, either because he is tough, someone doesn't know the strategy, or someone is not very good. On these occasions, one failed attempt and this new scumbag generation rage quits. It's literally night and day comparing these types of games to Vanguard, because that game still promotes proper dungeon crawls with people talking and working together. I really can't stand it. If people these days are so anti social, with zero social skills, and zero patience, then GET THE FUCK OUT OF MMO's. Just play Skyrim or Witcher or whatever hack 'N' fucking Slash dumbass shit you usually play. For this reason alone, I kinda hate doing dungeons, but the fact that they are all identical every time you do it, and all very easy and boring because there is one strategy someone needs to explain and then that's it, it all makes me not like them very much. But there does seem to be a lot more of them now so at least there is some variety unlike early Rift. If I can actually get in some of the new ones before I quit the game, that would be nice.
I'm going off track a bit now. The game was almost amazing, but it falls short in almost every regard. The classes used to be my favourite aspect, but Trion butchered the fuck out of them to the point now where the souls aren't very different. Yeah Chloro is very different from the damage ones, but what I mean is that the pyro one, the storm one, and the water one, are all pretty much the same and all got made dull. But they are still 'ok' as far as classes go, where it pisses me off is that every single mob in the whole fucking game dies in 2 seconds. So from 1-50, no matter what you do, I can kill the mobs before they hit me. I get max range, I type 1,2,3,4 and the mob dies. It maybe gets one hit on me, taking me down to 99% health, but usually not even that. It's as dumbed down as it gets, and again, fuck this entire generation of gamer for being so fucking helpless that they needed to make games like this to cater to them. I really feel very strongly about it in case you haven't noticed, to the point that I want to resurrect hitler and talk him in to just killing everyone under the age of about 29 or something. It really needs to happen.
One last thing, 50-60 seems kind of pointless. I originally quit Rift when it was new, because I reached 50 and got bored that there was nothing left to do. There is a lot more content now, so they answered my prayers, and yet I don't really want to do what they made. 50 levels of tedious collect rat anuses was enough for me, I don't really need 10 more, especially hell level versions of it. But the dungeon loot just becomes a token grind, and the Warfronts which I kind of enjoy in small doses, I grinded them enough to reach rank 48, but I really don't feel compelled to grind another 90 of them to reach rank 50, then grind my level to 60 so I can then grind my rank further, then buy all the same gear I already have, just with +10 to everything on it. Fuck that. These modern games made loot so boring. I don't know anything I have. I have some red gloves that look quite cool cause they are red, and I have a staff that has a spinny ball on the end which glows. But I don't know the names, because I don't care, they are boring, they get upgraded every 2 seconds, and if I grind my ass off for the next few weeks, I'll be level 60 and I'll have some slightly better staff with a slightly flashier spinny ball on the end of it. People really shouldn't play MMO's, they are stupid. Making ourselves feel like we have achieved something when really it's just art_asset_07. But at least they can be entertaining while you are building up your character and seeing where it goes and how the combat pans out. Once I reach this point though, it's time to find something else.
Instant Adventures are only good XP if the group size is very big, and everyone pulls their weight. If you end up in one with just 5 people or so, and some of them are slacking or stupid, then just leave and do traditional quest grinding instead. But if you get in one with 10+ people and they are all rushing around to complete the quests asap, then it is good XP and better than solo questing.
At 50+ it changes because there aren't as many people doing it. So probably better to do other stuff. Although I play on a PVP server so it's still worth doing for the safety in numbers aspect, especially seeing as the new world is both factions questing along side each other which leads to almost constant ganking.
Constant Warfronts are not very good XP, constant dungeons are ok. Personally I get bored of everything if I do it too much so I just do a bit of everything, literally quarter of my time IA's, quarter solo questing, quarter in WF's, and quarter in dungeons. I love that the game lets me do all those things, but it really highlights an issue with Rift which is that all of those aspects are weak individually. WF's are mostly just zerg vs zerg which is pretty boring and doesn't play well for some roles. As a glass cannon dps for example, you can literally die in about 2 seconds if more than one person targets you. So it's more about hiding at the back of the group and doing damage to lots of people without drawing much attention to yourself. But that gets boring.
The dungeon runs have gone quite shitty. Originally, they were very hard, and they went on longer, both of which I liked. Now, every mob dies in 2 seconds, it's totally noobish, dumbed down, spammy and crappy, and it's also shortened in length. The remaining content you can only do at Elite level or whatever, which I think now is 50+, and sadly, at 51 they are all grey to me so there is only one dungeon that is green and it's boring as fuck to do that over and over, and nobody seems to do the others.
I also hate the people who play Rift. There are occasional nice ones, but this entire new generation of MMO players can suck my fucking cock, deep DEEP down their throats until they choke and die. I want to murder them all, and their parents, and everyone they ever played MMO's with in their entire lives, and everyone who works at Blizzard for creating this new species. I first saw them in WoW but I didn't play that long. Then I saw them in TSW and realized they were here to stay, and I fucking hated it. Now in Rift, it seems that everyone is the same. Basically what I'm talking about, is cuntish players who join the group and don't talk, even when someone says, "Hello" they don't reply. The groups silently zerg from encounter to encounter, boring, dull, shit. On occasions, you will find some boss somewhere in some dungeon, that causes some trouble, either because he is tough, someone doesn't know the strategy, or someone is not very good. On these occasions, one failed attempt and this new scumbag generation rage quits. It's literally night and day comparing these types of games to Vanguard, because that game still promotes proper dungeon crawls with people talking and working together. I really can't stand it. If people these days are so anti social, with zero social skills, and zero patience, then GET THE FUCK OUT OF MMO's. Just play Skyrim or Witcher or whatever hack 'N' fucking Slash dumbass shit you usually play. For this reason alone, I kinda hate doing dungeons, but the fact that they are all identical every time you do it, and all very easy and boring because there is one strategy someone needs to explain and then that's it, it all makes me not like them very much. But there does seem to be a lot more of them now so at least there is some variety unlike early Rift. If I can actually get in some of the new ones before I quit the game, that would be nice.
I'm going off track a bit now. The game was almost amazing, but it falls short in almost every regard. The classes used to be my favourite aspect, but Trion butchered the fuck out of them to the point now where the souls aren't very different. Yeah Chloro is very different from the damage ones, but what I mean is that the pyro one, the storm one, and the water one, are all pretty much the same and all got made dull. But they are still 'ok' as far as classes go, where it pisses me off is that every single mob in the whole fucking game dies in 2 seconds. So from 1-50, no matter what you do, I can kill the mobs before they hit me. I get max range, I type 1,2,3,4 and the mob dies. It maybe gets one hit on me, taking me down to 99% health, but usually not even that. It's as dumbed down as it gets, and again, fuck this entire generation of gamer for being so fucking helpless that they needed to make games like this to cater to them. I really feel very strongly about it in case you haven't noticed, to the point that I want to resurrect hitler and talk him in to just killing everyone under the age of about 29 or something. It really needs to happen.
One last thing, 50-60 seems kind of pointless. I originally quit Rift when it was new, because I reached 50 and got bored that there was nothing left to do. There is a lot more content now, so they answered my prayers, and yet I don't really want to do what they made. 50 levels of tedious collect rat anuses was enough for me, I don't really need 10 more, especially hell level versions of it. But the dungeon loot just becomes a token grind, and the Warfronts which I kind of enjoy in small doses, I grinded them enough to reach rank 48, but I really don't feel compelled to grind another 90 of them to reach rank 50, then grind my level to 60 so I can then grind my rank further, then buy all the same gear I already have, just with +10 to everything on it. Fuck that. These modern games made loot so boring. I don't know anything I have. I have some red gloves that look quite cool cause they are red, and I have a staff that has a spinny ball on the end which glows. But I don't know the names, because I don't care, they are boring, they get upgraded every 2 seconds, and if I grind my ass off for the next few weeks, I'll be level 60 and I'll have some slightly better staff with a slightly flashier spinny ball on the end of it. People really shouldn't play MMO's, they are stupid. Making ourselves feel like we have achieved something when really it's just art_asset_07. But at least they can be entertaining while you are building up your character and seeing where it goes and how the combat pans out. Once I reach this point though, it's time to find something else.
Probably cause it was fresh in my mind, it's all I've played for the past month. I wanted to be playing something else but I had a hardware issue.
More or less the same. Everyone says Rogues are the ultimate tank, but everyone is a fucking retard in this game. Nobody even plays these games for themselves anymore. They log in and the first thing they do is spam in chat to find out what is the best class. Then they find out what is the best set of souls. And then they get the actual build from the web. You might think that this is the most elite cookie cutter perfect build, but often it's not - it's actually just the build that some dick head spent a few hours tinkering with and parsing and then couldn't wait to rush off to youtube to show the world how his build is the best one. It certainly helps to understand the basics of how making a good build works in the game, but I found that just making my own builds ended up making me better than everyone else around me, leaving me top in WF's, wiping the floor with dungeon mobs, and in Instant Adventures other people would ask me what my build was and I had to bite my lip or pretend to be foreign.
I heard from the start that rogues are teh bestest evah tanks. But I made a cleric tank and did some dungeon runs and I barely even went below 95% health the entire time. I tanked like a warrior but could heal myself... fucking ez mode. But you also have 2 dedicated healers helping you too, because this dumbed down game doesn't have weird and wonderful groups make ups, it has fixed roles that everyone chooses, so you always have a pure healer, and a support role which usually has heals too. It's so easy, that dungeon runs tend to be more about how many mobs can the tank aggro at once - so they aggro a few groups of mobs at once, and tank all 10 mobs together so they can all be AoE'd to death. A really good tank and this ends up being more about them aggroing half the dungeon to kill in one go.
I also played as a healer a lot, both as Cleric and Mage, and it's very easy. You have unlimited mana, and unlimited healing. It's very easy to keep everyone alive.
It may be different at the absolute top end raids, but I can tell you that even in level 50+ on the Elite dungeons, it still is dumbed down and easy. So pick anything you want. They are all balanced to be more or less the same now anyway.
I heard from the start that rogues are teh bestest evah tanks. But I made a cleric tank and did some dungeon runs and I barely even went below 95% health the entire time. I tanked like a warrior but could heal myself... fucking ez mode. But you also have 2 dedicated healers helping you too, because this dumbed down game doesn't have weird and wonderful groups make ups, it has fixed roles that everyone chooses, so you always have a pure healer, and a support role which usually has heals too. It's so easy, that dungeon runs tend to be more about how many mobs can the tank aggro at once - so they aggro a few groups of mobs at once, and tank all 10 mobs together so they can all be AoE'd to death. A really good tank and this ends up being more about them aggroing half the dungeon to kill in one go.
I also played as a healer a lot, both as Cleric and Mage, and it's very easy. You have unlimited mana, and unlimited healing. It's very easy to keep everyone alive.
It may be different at the absolute top end raids, but I can tell you that even in level 50+ on the Elite dungeons, it still is dumbed down and easy. So pick anything you want. They are all balanced to be more or less the same now anyway.
It's not too bad, it just looks horrible and intimidating when you first look at it. There's 4 classes to choose, then each one has like several souls to choose from, and then you end up with three big soul trees full of stuff. I'd say it's not very nice for new players because it just seems so complex and overwhelming.
But you can break it down in your mind eventually. Like with the mage, one soul is basically the healing soul, one is the buffing soul, one is the control soul, and then there's just a few left and they are all damage. So you pick the ones that do what you want to do, and then I just got my geek glasses on and stared at it for half an hour and worked out the best stuff to do what I wanted.
And it's nothing too complex. For example with my mage, I just decided that percentages were a good idea, because when it says it will add +5% to my INT or Spellpower or something, I realized that my INT is like 600 or something, so 5% of that is a lot... So I pick one main soul that does all the stuff I want to do, and then pick two others that just have a few nice boosts like that in the low parts of it, so I can focus on the main one and just put about 5 to 10 points in the others to boost my main soul.
And the souls are mostly foolproof too. The majority of it just does the one main job, so you can just basically spend your points with your eyes closed and still have a good build. As a dps at least, the game is mostly about pressing your hotkeys fast enough, and in the right order, and then making sure you target the right stuff. The build does half the work, but you have to play how that build is supposed to be played. The Pyro for example is good for fast damage with quite big numbers, good to finish off an injured player in PVP, etc. Warlock soul, it's all damage over time and quite slow, so focusing on one person is pointless because someone will just heal them. But the spells are very fast to cast, so if you just take one or two long lasting damage over time spells and quickly spam tab and cast it on everyone nearby, you can end up doing huge amounts of damage overall on the scoreboard.
In PVE it works more or less the same way. Although the storm type spells seems the obvious choice to me because it does such nice AoE damage and that seems to be what dungeons are mostly about - killing large groups of mobs.
I think most people think the soul tree is boring, but personally I'm an old RPG geek and I thought it was kind of like the only bit of actual "RPG" in the game
I also hate the people who play Rift. There are occasional nice ones, but this entire new generation of MMO players can suck my fucking cock, deep DEEP down their throats until they choke and die. I want to murder them all, and their parents, and everyone they ever played MMO's with in their entire lives, and everyone who works at Blizzard for creating this new species. I first saw them in WoW but I didn't play that long. Then I saw them in TSW and realized they were here to stay, and I fucking hated it. Now in Rift, it seems that everyone is the same. Basically what I'm talking about, is cuntish players who join the group and don't talk, even when someone says, "Hello" they don't reply. The groups silently zerg from encounter to encounter, boring, dull, shit. On occasions, you will find some boss somewhere in some dungeon, that causes some trouble, either because he is tough, someone doesn't know the strategy, or someone is not very good. On these occasions, one failed attempt and this new scumbag generation rage quits. It's literally night and day comparing these types of games to Vanguard, because that game still promotes proper dungeon crawls with people talking and working together. I really can't stand it. If people these days are so anti social, with zero social skills, and zero patience, then GET THE FUCK OUT OF MMO's. Just play Skyrim or Witcher or whatever hack 'N' fucking Slash dumbass shit you usually play. For this reason alone, I kinda hate doing dungeons, but the fact that they are all identical every time you do it, and all very easy and boring because there is one strategy someone needs to explain and then that's it, it all makes me not like them very much. But there does seem to be a lot more of them now so at least there is some variety unlike early Rift. If I can actually get in some of the new ones before I quit the game, that would be nice
Best part of the rant from Q that sums up pretty fucking much the current gen of players for the most part, I agree 1000% not 100% but 1000%.
I get a little sad just thinking of this game. So much wasted potential. I remember getting so hyped back when souls had no restrictions, until I guess like most mmo devs these days they got lazy and didn't feel like even trying to balance it. So at release you had a bunch of cookie cutter classes that played no different from any other mmo. My dps warrior was so exciting, I got the choice between a bunch of souls that are just generic warrior talent trees, and generic warrior talent tree that have lightning effects for attacks. Well that's not fair, warrior had a semi ranged soul until trion realized they didn't feel like trying to balance something unique so they got rid of flame spear.
And I will never understand why they nerfed events and rifts right before release. Beta was some of the most fun I've had in a mmo and I made more friends then the last few mmos combined. Went from taking quest camps back with roaming groups to generic questing in terrible zones because someone thought it was a good idea for a 85% chance to be dismounted the second you aggroed some grey mob. Hell I barely even did any rifts past the starting zone because after then people realized there was no reason to do rifts.
And I will never understand why they nerfed events and rifts right before release. Beta was some of the most fun I've had in a mmo and I made more friends then the last few mmos combined. Went from taking quest camps back with roaming groups to generic questing in terrible zones because someone thought it was a good idea for a 85% chance to be dismounted the second you aggroed some grey mob. Hell I barely even did any rifts past the starting zone because after then people realized there was no reason to do rifts.
Sorry, but the sort of game you want never actually existed in the first place. Nostalgia is a bitch.
Most of what you said regarding community is spot on, but you've really mixed up the discussion when it comes to character builds in these games.
Is there a community problem when people make no effort to learn how to build an optimized character? Yes, for sure.
Is there a game design problem when there are only a handful of viable builds and the rest are mediocre at best? Yes, for sure.
For some players, tinkering with builds is its own game. I think WoW's attempt to make talent choices less meaningful was largely regarded as a failure. On the other hand, no one was happy during the times in RIFT when there was basically one viable build per calling and the rest were utterly terrible. Or when cleric tanks were an exercise in futility because their threat generation was impotent. Or when the power of the RW build combined with certain fight mechanics meant non-warrior DPS need not apply. The list goes on.
So yes, there are issues with the soul build system in RIFT.
But to claim that the actual builds out there are the result of a few minutes of tinkering and a race to Youtube? You're positively deluded.
Typically, when a relevant patch hit (class changes, boss mechanic changes, or a new dungeon), every guild worth a damn would spend days collectively parsing, experimenting, and tweaking on the PTR. We would test and retest. Get people to log on buff alts and test some more. Over and over in configurations designed for 20 man raids with all buffs and 10 man raids with likely buffs.
Some of the builds made it to the forums. Many did not. My first truly good build came from Draegan mentioning a partial soul combination and perhaps a main ability name, and then my spending a few hours figuring out what the build might have been, and another couple of days tweaking it until I was sure I hadn't missed anything.
But to suggest that you get a good build or even a competitive build by picking a specific focus like % bonuses and stacking that is just not in line with how these games work. And to suggest that you know better than people who say that rogue tanks are superior (I don't know currently, as I haven't played since halfway through ID) because you played a cleric through a couple dungeons and it was easy? The people who make those outrageous claims then get very rude awakenings when they get into raids and find that their survival build doesn't provide enough threat, or their utility build gets 2-shot by bosses, or that they can't keep up because the raid design doesn't allow for the 4 tank healers their inefficient build soaks up.
With regards to your comments about DPS, I'll be the first to say that I'm not a big fan of 1s GCDs and ability spamming. But you're once again wrong when you claim that DPS comes from "pressing your hotkeys fast enough, and in the right order." At this point in MMO design, your DPS comes from making the right build and choosing the correct abilities and rotations. Beyond basic things like "don't stand around doing nothing with your GCD," and a little bit of muscle memory, DPS is entirely an exercise in planning. These are strategy elements, not action gameplay.
If you're asking for build advice in general chat, then yes, it is probably terrible. But homebrew builds are simply not as good as you say they are, and I dedicate this post to the starry-eyed person who posted below you, believing that you were describing some miraculous character building talent the MMO community has just lost along the way. 99% of players could never build a half-decent character, even 10 years ago, and you haven't described anything that would put you in the 1%. Without knowing you, it sounds like you're more in the group who throws the word "cookie cutter" around a lot and then refuses to run a parser and then stubbornly complains that there's no way those fancy accepted builds are actually 8x better than what you threw together.
Heallun
Lord Nagafen Raider
- 1,100
- 1,073
^^ Dis. Rift leveling experience is dogshit boring atm though. Haven't seen the SL experts / raids and I'm not even sure I'll make it that far. IAs really need to start putting me in larger groups, ugh!
Mechanics have always been reserved for endgame, unfortunately. For all of SWTORs failures, if you didn't execute a fight correctly in some of the leveling fp's you could still die. Not really the case in rift.
It did and I still play it, sort of. Like kudos said, the world is pretty nice. I especially liked Gloamwood, reminds me of the haunted house area in TSW. But also like TSW, the gameplay is the same and that ruins it. You run around collecting rat tails and a few hours later you have outlevelled the entire place and it's on to somewhere else.
There's no hook. EQ's way seems dull and old, but I still think it's the lesser of two evils. Big none linear world meant that if you don't like an area you can just go somewhere else. Once you find somewhere that you like, you stay there for ages just killing lots of mobs for XP and waiting for rare loots, preferably with a group. So you get a lot more involved in an area like Mistmoore or whatever, because you are systematically draining it of everything you need. Unlike these new games where you just blast through it collecting x amount of y item, barely even having time to look at the surroundings, and then it's on to a new quest hub. I much prefer levelling up in EQ, it's still my favourite game and I still play it (EQ Mac). For me, the only thing that has really aged badly is the classes, but everything else I prefer. It's only little things, no map and radar, no constant quest grind, no 2 second mob fights, no auction house, no on-rails linear route through the world, etc. But put them all together and it feels completely different. It's like a second life in a virtual world with massive long term goals, rather than just a character in an action game that you blitz through in a month.
But many of them are are. I saw one build where the guy didn't even know the name of one of the spells and kept referring to a spell that doesn't exist. People asked him what he meant and he said he forgot and would check in game and update it, but never did.
I'm sure there are some super pro people in the very high end who slave over this stuff, but there are also thousands of other people who are just busybodies and nose pickers who like to think they can make teh orsumest build, but really it's nothing special. And really, the game is so dumbed down, that builds don't even matter anyway. When everything dies in 2 seconds, you barely even need to be at your computer to win half the time. I'm sure that changes for the super tuned raids or whatever, but the bulk of Rift for most people is just levelling up 1-50 and beyond, questing, random dungeons and some warfronts. And for that stuff, the game is so child proofed that nothing matters anyway. You can click the button to automatically spend the soul points and you'd still do fine.
Big whoop. I was actually impressed in 1999 when guilds would master the game because they had to do everything with trial and error, and huge amounts of pain from failed raid wipes and whatnot, and some legendary necro would learn how to pull raid content by himself and everyone would just watch in awe as he did his thing. And you learned how to play through skill and experience because you had nothing to guide you, not even tooltips. You cast spells on yourself to see what it did.
Nowadays the entire thing is spelled out for you and automated. Parsers count your DPS for you and healing per second, and there are combat dummies that you can just pound away at to perfect your builds. You don't even need to leave the safety of sanctum, and there is not much skill involved besides being able to interpret your ACT results or whatever. I'm not impressed, nor interested, and for 95% of the game, none of this matters because it's all so dumbed down you can kill everything with your eyes closed. Noobs think they are gods because the game is so child proofed, you can't fail. From 1-50, I would be surprised if I died more than about 6 times.
I'm sure it does get more intense at the very top end, but the majority of people wont even see that, and I'm not interested in it anyway. There is always a super leet top 2% in these games who like to think of themselves as the heroes and legends of the server. The reality is that nobody outside of that 2% even knows who they are, or cares.
It's exactly how these games work. You can even get a good build by just hitting the "spend my points for me" button. Because you can't fail in this game. From 1-50, you can play with your eyes closed and win. And 51-59 just seems to be more of the same, just more grindy. Yeah maybe at 60 it starts getting more hardcore and maybe you and your buddies have had some victorious moments where your 10/10/50 build beat the cookie cutter 9/9/52 build, but again, it's only the top 2% that even gets to that point, everyone else - doesn't care.
It's not outrageous, it's exactly how it works for most of the game. I don't deny that it could completely change at 60 with the finely tuned raid content, but again, only a small number of people will even be bothered to stick with the game long enough to reach that point. And maybe at that point it becomes super interesting all of a sudden. I'm more inclined to believe the other people I've read who say it's just over tuned linear crap designed for trained chimp type players. If I'm wrong then I apologize and kudos to you for your hardcore l33t raid skills and soul building abilities.