One of the things I always enjoyed connected to CoX was Mids'. I spent hours and hours creating builds, then working to improved them or make them focused in some particular fashion or helping others with their build problems or questions.
There were two things I often wished I could do while fiddling in Mids' and hope might find a way into whatever character builder City of Titans ends up employing.
First I would have loved an area into which I could have free typed text about any of a number of things. Mostly I would have used it for small notes to myself about things to look into about concerning changes to the build, notes about what I was hoping to do (since sometimes I would come back to a build months later and be wondering "What was I thinking?!") or even just note to note what 'Werner' did with the slotting in Siphon Life if it was a build downloaded from the forums. Others might use it as a space for adding a bit of backstory for the character or well it's free type so it could be almost anything within the word limits.
Second I would have loved some way to replicate having the build under some particular buff or buffs (or debuffs) from a teammate or foe. What would my scrapper's numbers have looked like if under the effects of Speed Boost or Accelerate Metabolism (or both), for example?
ahh yes (+1 to your 2nd suggestion)
I often wanted to know what my stats looked like with certain buffs applied, speed boost, accelerated metabolism, adrenaline boost.... all that stuff
I too have spent much time playing with various character builders but personally I think that's a bad thing.
I find I lose interest in MMOs much faster if I spend more time outside of them in builders or researching obscure but vital game info on the internet than actually playing and enjoying the game.
Some like number-crunching and theory-crafting and I'm perfectly happy for them to enjoy that. But why does it need to be outside the game? Make it a part of the game. Give us a danger-room / holodeck where we can artificially alter our level, try out different powersets etc. etc. Let us save those 'builds' as programs within the game. Let the danger-room / holodeck give us numeric feedback on how each build performs.
Agreed with your main points here. I got *bored* stiff trying to build a toon/respec an existing character in City of Heroes.
Maybe it was due to the huge number of choices/slotting/enhancements that you could use that overwhelmed me, or that if I messed up with a respec in game, I had blown one of a limited resource that made me *very* wary of doing it.
Sure, I used ship fitting tools in Eve Online, but that is because you could also *import* the ship fits into the game as well, so that they were available for you *immediately*. Also if you messed up, it wasn't a permanent design mess up, you could at least undo the mistake (even if you had to destroy your rigs to fit new ones).
And in Wildstar, I have no problem fiddling with my build, because for my skills, it is *expected* for you to tinker/replace skills according to the situation (having up to 4 builds available supports this theory, and respeccing your AMP's is just a fixed ingame currency cost (changes according to level). Hell, AMPs are *useful* but you can easily get up to level cap (at least on spellslingers) with just 1/3 of your AMP points spent.
But then again, because the choices in Eve Online/Wildstar were not as *permanent* as they were in City of Heroes, it made it far less daunting to tinker with your build *whenever* you wanted.
I can understand and think a danger room type environment would be great or even given how we may be able to set up our own private servers at some point in the future using them as a "test environment" for builds/build changes. Doubly so if you could then take a respec build and load it into the live server without the going through the steps (and potential misteps/mishaps) of leaving off a power or messing up the order or other "oops" that could happen while doing a respec on a beloved level 50 in CoX.
But for some of what I often used Mid's for it wouldn't work. I can't take another person's build/character into the danger room or an entirely hypothetical character who doesn't exist in game, particularly at a point near the endgame (i.e. the equivalent of a level 50 with Incarnate powers) and test them out.
And neither suggestion really has much to do with the actual existence of a builder or the desirability per se but rather presupposes one exists and wanting to see a couple of options added to the builder that did not exist with Mids'.