Feedback:User/Raine Valen/Expertise and Primary Attribute Compensation

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Expertise and Primary Attribute Compensation[edit]

Expertise is a poorly designed Primary Attribute, and has been a continuous source of problems. It's not apparent when a ranger uses ranger skills because, to compensate for how Expertise affects the costs of skills, the costs of ranger skills are abnormally high. 15 Energy for Apply Poison on a class with three pips? Yeah, okay. This makes Expertise a requirement to play the class instead of a bonus, as it is meant to be.

However, because secondary professions are allowed, Rangers can bypass their "requirement" and negate the higher energy cost of skills on their bar by not using them! Rangers who use non-ranger attack skills and touch skills can still bring the benefits of those skills' original class into play with the added brokenness of not needing energy; Shard calls this dilemma "Primary Attribute Compensation."

How to fix this problem: Change primary attributes so that they are a bonus, instead of a requirement, to play that profession. For expertise, I suggest (1) decreasing the maximum energy reduction (at 15 expertise) to 30% and (2) reducing the costs of many high-energy ranger skills to compensate. This does two things: it (1) makes Expertise + X Mastery less ridiculously overpowered and (2) makes /R a viable secondary. As it is now, good skills like Apply Poison and Savage Shot are really too expensive for anything other than Rangers to use.