Age of Conan

The gem problem (stacking) reminds me very much of the problem CoH had back in the day.

**For those who don't know, each power may be assigned up to six slots as you level. Each slot holds an Enhancement (equal to a gem). Players used to stack 6 DMG 'hancers to a power (relying on others for +Acc).**

This became a problem with perma haste, perma PA, etc.

Along came diminishing returns, called "Enhancement Diversification".

Anything over three of any 'hancer was useless. Think AoC needs that?

CoH was in a way better place than AoC is with it's player base. It turned out for the best with the invention system later, AoC needs a similar "sledgehammer" type fix. Earlier the better.

Yes I remeber when that happened. Really messed up my spines, dark armor crapper. Would go through endurance like mad after that, as if the build was not an endurance hog already.

I was not playing CoH when ED happened but I have played it since before Inventions were added.

ED was the right call.  And was actually correctly named even.  The old system did actually make more "cookie cutter" choices.  In general the stacking of bonuses is extremely powerful gets out of hand very fast.  I  and others have gotten races and classes nerfed in MUDs utilizing this principle years before EQ or UO was released.    Its not really new or all that hidden.  Min/max and its power is widespread knowledge

I don't hold ED against the CoH devs and I do not think anyone really should.  However they do have a right to have been pissed that they didn't think of it before release.

The debates that go on in CoH that are tengential to ED about the "superness" of your character and just how powerful people who are playing super heroes should be are interesting.  But hopefully people realize that min/max gone crazy and every single person 6 slotting hasten was not good.

IO's are a much better thing.  The adds tons, just tons, more customization and also give very many pros and cons to various builds.  Yet at the same, within decent limits, they do still allow quite "super" things.  You can build a domintor for perma domination, but you do give up a lot of other stuff.

You do still see somewhat of the same problem in that EVERY dominator builds for perma-dom, but for the most part it still much better.  And other classes that do not completely center around one ability often wind up seeing a lot of different variation with interesting tradeoffs.  well in the case of typed defense the tradeoff sucks but that can be fixed with some "itemization".

So I think when you consider both ED and IO you see two sides of the issue done right.  Both allowing for "superness" with limits but also not letting things get completely out hand and everyone taking the same power and slotting exactly the same because its just too good.

And yeah for the most part AoC will need to do a similar thing.  But while ED was necessary and a good idea, IO took quite a number of issues to come out and without IO's ED was not a 100% solution to all concerns even if it was necessary.