Quality of Life Mastery

xNooBxMaster69x

I have noticed that lately kabam is implementing some nice quality of life changes, all of those were pretty welcome but imo what we need the most is a second panel so we can freely choose between two mastery set-ups. I don't think an overhaul or anything drastic that would take a lot of resources to implement is needed, we can have the exact same talents and get the new option that will come with battlegrounds on the other types of content too. All that is really needed is a second layout to switch between suicide masteries and non-suicide masteries on the mastery menu. It feels very unnecessary that we can already change masteries any time if we pay the units.

DNA3000

I have noticed that lately kabam is implementing some nice quality of life changes, all of those were pretty welcome but imo what we need the most is a second panel so we can freely choose between two mastery set-ups. I don't think an overhaul or anything drastic that would take a lot of resources to implement is needed, we can have the exact same talents and get the new option that will come with battlegrounds on the other types of content too. All that is really needed is a second layout to switch between suicide masteries and non-suicide masteries on the mastery menu. It feels very unnecessary that we can already change masteries any time if we pay the units.

There's a reason you have to pay: the cost is not incidental. You have to pay because the point is players should not be free to choose whatever mastery set up they want whenever they want without cost. That means there's no need to make choices: you can choose whatever masteries you want and use any and all of them at different times. You're supposed to choose your mastery set up, weigh pros and cons, and then live with those choices. The cost to change masteries is not going to go away.

In the early beta for Battlegrounds, I made the case that while all of the above is true, the choice of mastery set up was fundamentally different for Battlegrounds fights than for most of the rest of the game, because BG fights were fundamentally different. They were not win or lose, they were being scored on criteria that did not exist anywhere else. And the intent was for the scoring to change either in literal points or in the meta via nodes to keep the game mode fresh. The combination of wanting BG to be a game mode where players could just jump in and out at will (unlike, say, Alliance War that follows a specific and slow schedule), changing combat meta, and fundamentally different combat scoring made mastery set ups sufficiently different that players should be allowed to make an independent choice of masteries for BG itself, separate from their choice to set masteries elsewhere in the game. This preserves the need for masteries to involve real choices that the player had to live with, or pay to change, while acknowledging that the choice of masteries for BG and the choice of masteries for the rest of the game were fundamentally different choices that would benefit the game if players were allowed to make independently.

The way masteries work with decks in Battlegrounds implies the devs seem to agree with this logic, as there were two main schools of thought on multiple mastery options. The first was mastery presets, where players could simply switch their mastery set up between different pre-saved configurations. This was the main option that was discussed by players. And then there was mastery profiles, where different game modes would be assigned different masteries. I was the main proponent of that option, because it preserves the need for players to make choices with consequences (most versions of mastery presets eliminate the consequences of making one choice or the other). Battlegrounds seems to be most like mastery profiles than mastery presets, almost certainly because of this distinction.

Now that modal mastery profiles exist (or will soon exist), I think the game should consider adding additional modal mastery setups for Alliance War Defense, and Arena (that's basically where the origin of the idea comes from, long before Battlegrounds was a thing). Now that the tech exists, I'm hoping this will be an easier sell.