Possible Movement on Betrayal?

With now 16 neutral character classes, available in both good and evil alignments, and with recent expansions rarely distinguishing between good and evil when handing out quests, it’s not a surprise that the question of Alignment and the painful (and costly) process of Class Betrayal gets revisited on the forums frequently.

However thus far, the official response as been “We have no intention to make it easier, or take away any of the consequences. Betrayal is supposed to have a cost.”

Why Betray?

A particular point of interest in Betrayal has been lack of access to the shared bank while in Exile. And upon completing Betrayal, characters have always lost all their spells, even if they were keeping to the same class, but merely changing alignment.

A primary motivation for Betrayal has been the poor choices of Good-aligned Deities (most seem healing and protection aligned) compared to Evil-aligned Deities (most seem DPS based, with Anashti Sul, the former prime healer, confusingly being an excellent deity choice for Coercers).

Another reason players choose to betray is the array of low-level quests available in the opposing city/alignment. Completing all of the Freeport/Commonlands quests, and then completing all of the Qeynos/Antonica quests gives one a noticeable AA advantage.

So with that said, before anyone panics, there are no changes to Betrayal happening in the immediate future. *exhale*

What Rich Waters is doing is soliciting feedback to gauge player reaction on revisiting and thinking about the Betrayal process. Thus far, he has laid out an outline of the reasons people currently change Citizenship, do an alignment/city Betrayal, or might swap sub-classes (Monk to Bruiser, Fury to Warden, etc.) which no longer result in an alignment change.

We’ve been talking about city betrayal quests on the design team recently, and it’s likely we’ll make some improvements.

There are three different things you might want to do with your character:

Citizenship:

• Change your home city from the current one to another friendly city (Qeynos to New Halas)
  • Never changes your class or alignment
  • Should be relatively easy and painless

Betrayal:

• Change your home city from the current one to an enemy city (Qeynos to Freeport)
  • Always changes your alignment
  • May change your class (offers you a change if you’re neutral, requires a change if you’re an aligned class)
  • Should require some effort

Sub-class Change:

• Swap your neutral sub-class to its counterpart (Monk to Bruiser, Berserker to Guardian, Fury to Warden, etc)
  • Never changes your alignment
  • Never changes your home city
  • May only swap to the other sub-class in your pairing – can NOT go from Monk to Warden, for instance
  • Should require some effort
  • This is a new quest type that we may offer

As part of the update, we could see if it’s important to strip master spells or not. Right now, it adds a big cost to betraying for some players (high-level characters with many master spells) and is inconsequential for other players (low to mid-level players, or players with few master spells). I’m not sure such a big cost is critical to balancing city betrayal. Anyone have thoughts on this?

Please keep in mind that this is still under discussion, so it may change greatly before being implemented. As it’s still in the idea phase, I’m not sure when this would go live.

Nothing in here is a guaranteed or planned “change”. Only a possible alternative if player reaction is positive.

And a followup post by Waters:

In theory, you could do this today if you were okay with not having master spells and didn’t mind running the betrayal quest twice a week. That doesn’t sound like much fun though.

Not really an idea I was thinking of when this topic came up but it is a funny one. What would you like or dislike about raiding as a templar during the week and grouping or soloing as an inquisitor on weekends? I’m curious, because if we didn’t wipe your master spells during a betrayal, some players might consider betraying more often as you described in your post.

It’s good to get a sense of how people feel, so we can keep it in mind if make any adjustments to betrayal in the future. Thanks for the feedback on this everyone, interesting thread so far.