Has TR's cloning system become obsolete?

by Shawn Schuster on Mar 30th 2008 4:00PM

Sci-fi, Forums, Game mechanics, Patches, Tabula Rasa

The clone credits in TR were originally created in lieu of an easy way to freely change your character's skill and attribute points. This pertains both to the storyline, and a more hardcore approach to skill point changes. We tend to think NCSoft had the right idea with this, as do most game developers in their MMO's infant stages. Does anyone remember the attribute point system in Guild Wars when it first launched? Now skills and attribute points can be reallocated repeatedly with no penalty or cost at all. This seems to be the lay of the land with most current games, but we wonder if Tabula Rasa will soon follow that trend.

So now the question is, what's easier: completing a Target of Opportunity for the clone credit, or gathering 600 control point tokens for the respec? The opinions seem to sway for either side, but there are certainly pros and cons for both. With cloning, you can remake your character completely, while keeping the same class and points. This can also be a con though if you've grown rather attached to your character. In that case, a respec would be the appropriate course of action. Whichever you decide, it is nice to know we have a choice to use either now, depending on the situation.

Source

Tags: clone, destination-games, ncsoft, planet-tr, respec, tabula-rasa, tokens

Reader Comments (2)

I thought the purpose of the TR cloning system was to allow alts to skip low level content? Be it reputation, LOTRO's Deeds, or Warhammer's Lorebook, MMO's are increasingly including grinds of one sort or another in lower level content, and adding incentives to complete ALL the content, not just the minimum you need to level. That's good if it gets you to try more stuff on your main, but having run the old content into the ground can be a real deterrent if it comes time to make an alt and you'd have to do all of the same stuff over again.

Green has hit the nail on the head. (I'd reply to him but there doesn't seem to be a Reply button.)

It was always my understanding that the clone system was about letting players explore alts without grinding as much of the old content again. You clone before a major career choice (the one kind of choice that CANNOT be re-specced or changed through cloning) and then when you want to go back and try the other branch of the class tree, you can start at the moment of choosing instead of re-grinding all the levels up to that point and THEN choosing.

Using this as a poor-man's respec was just a band-aid for TR's lack of a proper respec system. (Which has now been rectified, of course.) Also, having a clone credit at top level is still useful if you want to reinvent yourself as a hybrid of some kind once you have earned access to those races.