User talk:Randomwordsequence

Hi, and welcome to GuildWiki! Quizzical 17:35, November 27, 2009 (UTC)

Doppelganger
I objected to adding your sneak attack build to the Doppelganger guide on two grounds. First, it's a non-assassin build, as it contains a non-assassin skill (sneak attack), and hence doesn't belong in the assassin section. If allowing skills from outside the primary profession, then any class could tack on insidious parasite or empathy for an easy victory, but there's no sense in listing that in every single section.

Second, it uses PVE-only skills. The article already notes at the top that the doppelganger can't use the various PVE-only cheats in the game that ArenaNet provided for players who want to avoid any semblance of a challenge. There's no sense in picking one particular PVE-only skill and giving it as an example of something that beats the doppelganger for a particular class, as many (most?) combinations of a class and a PVE-only skill would work here and listing them all would make the page so cluttered that it would be hard to find anything else.

I'm not denying that your approach works. But it's kind of like if someone asks how to beat a level in a particular game and gets a reply of "use the invincibility cheat code". Yes, it works, but for someone who wants to beat the level without using any cheats, it's not terribly helpful advice.

One perennial problem with the Doppelganger page is clutter. Listing full builds in mainspace is usually discouraged on this wiki in most places, as it simply isn't useful, and what people would list often isn't any better than what someone unfamiliar with the mission might guess. The big problem with this is that it would give people the impression that that they have to go get specific skills or else they can't try the mission, which is usually wrong.

A few solo missions and quests are an exception to this, of course, as they tend to be unusually build-dependent and disallow the use of generic balanced team builds. Doppleganger, the Norn fighting tournament, and the quest Cold as Ice are the main exceptions of where specific solo builds can be helpful. As a non-repeatable side quest, Cold as Ice doesn't get as much attention, but the other two pages have been cluttered with everyone and his neighbor's dog coming in to say that they used such and such particular build and it worked. That makes pages get really cluttered, to the degree that finding any particular build is a pain.

The reason for the single-class sections is not merely, "this is how you can beat the mission", but rather "this is how you can beat the mission without having to go buy skills outside of your profession". That is, how to beat the mission with what a player is likely to already have.

The Norn fighting tournament was really bad for this. If someone in Gunnar's Hold asked how to beat it, they'd usually get told, take a ritualist secondary and pay several platinum to buy ritualist skills and use those. For people who want to beat the tournament dozens of times to farm tokens, that may well be worthwhile, but for people who only want to beat the quest once, it's a waste of money, as they can do it with the skills of their own class that they already have.

The logic behind having single class sections for the Doppelganger is the same, though you could argue that the necessity of it is less, as advice to use a secondary profession is usually to only take one or two skills from outside the primary profession, not eight. Still, there is some generic advice, not specific to any class at the top, and that is enough for people just looking to beat the mission in any way that they can.

Finally, this wiki has a policy against reverting a revert without first discussing it. The basic rule is that if someone posts something and someone else reverts it, take it to the talk page to discuss it before adding it again. Without the rule, there can be situations where someone adds a comment, someone else removes it, the first person adds it again, the second person removes it again, and this can go on for dozens of cycles. Quizzical 17:35, November 27, 2009 (UTC)


 * I just want to point out that this is an assasin build, sneak attack is ment to replace a lead attack in a high damage daggerchain, so it is ment for assasins.


 * Secondly i would like to suggest maybe the doppelganger page should be cleaned up? i am willign to participate in this as some of the suggestions/remarks seem quite outdated


 * Lastly i didnt kno that it was against the rules to revert without discussion, and i do apologize for this.


 * It helps if you end your posts on talk pages with ~, as this adds your signature at the end of your post. This makes it so that someone who reads the discussion later can easily determine who said what, which makes the discussion a lot easier to follow.  Of course, it also helps if you log in before posting, so that it leaves your login name rather than broadcasting your IP address to the world.
 * It's also useful to start subsequent posts with varying amounts of colons (typically one more than the previous post), so that different posts are indented differently. This makes it clear where one post ends and another starts.  You've used semicolons, which bold your text, but don't indent like colons do.  If you change the semicolons to colons, they'll be indented properly.  If you're not sure how the wiki will read something, it is tremendously useful to click the Preview button to see before saving the page.
 * Yes, the Doppelganger page could use some improvements. But having a good page there is a tricky problem.  The basic structure of the page is to give some general advice at the top, and then builds specific to particular classes.  The point of the single-class builds section is to help players who would like to beat the mission without having to go buy skills of a secondary profession or resorting to PVE-only cheats.  If you have a particular PVE-only cheat that only works for a particular class, it's still a PVE-only cheat, and not really preferable to some other that would work for more classes, so it still doesn't belong in a section specific to a particular class.
 * Someone who only wants to beat the mission in any way possible could grab some PVE-only skills at random and win. Some players prefer to avoid using the various cheats that ArenaNet provided in order to get the proper challenge from content.  Quizzical 18:16, November 27, 2009 (UTC)