**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
Every so often the idea of mastery presets comes up. The idea being, instead of having to manually change your masteries, you could save different configurations of mastery set up, and then apply them to your current mastery set up on demand. So let's say you have a specific mastery configuration you always use when placing defenders for war. Right now you have to go into your mastery set up, change it to what you want, place your defenders, and then change your masteries back. With mastery presets, you could save your AWD mastery setup, and then whenever you need to place defenders you could just ask the game to change your masteries to the AWD configuration with one button, place your defenders, then change them back to the normal configuration with another push of a button, simplifying the work.
This idea has a couple of issues, the most important of which is what to charge for preset swaps. If it is free and unlimited, you'd literally be able to swap masteries in between each and every fight. I know there are people that think that would be fine, but none of them are game developers. This makes the notion that players should make tradeoffs when deciding their mastery configuration go completely out the window. So this would need to be limited in some way. But if you limit it, like say with cooldowns, how do you deal with the AWD situation where you need to swap twice in rapid succession, before and after placing? And what should that cost?
In my opinion the better option is mode-specific mastery profiles. If alliance war defenders basically had their own separate mastery setup, then while a player would need to configure it and pay for it once, once that was done they could use that same mastery configuration for their defenders without any further cost or swapping. It would just be the masteries that the defenders used. The player would only need to pay for changes if they actually wanted to change their defender mastery setup. But otherwise, a player could place their defenders whenever that was necessary without having to think about masteries.
Battlegrounds *seems* to be implementing something like that, based on the video. Apparently each deck will have its own mastery profile. Players will be able to configure that mastery profile by setting their main mastery setup to whatever is needed and then "apply it" to that deck. That deck would then "remember" that profile and use it without the player needing to do anything beyond that point. Players decide *once* what the mastery setup for that deck will be, and then that's it unless they decide to change something.
Back during the February closed beta I suggested something like this for Battlegrounds. I believed that if Kabam wanted players to be able to just jump in and do a round casually, players couldn't be forced to think about and shuffle masteries. Players needed a way to set their BG mastery configuration once, no different than setting up their deck once. I thought modal mastery profiles was an idea long overdue, and I hoped that the resources being committed to making Battlegrounds could be used to implement this technology, and that eventually we could see it propagate to other parts of the game. In particular, AWD and Arena.
Dr. Zola