Veccon's page

An important point. Beard and moustache combos are great, and a must, but at the same time we need some truly magnificent, stand-alone moustaches. Teddy Roosevelt quality or better please.

Veccon wrote:

You're looking at this a little narrowly. Just because a 2 handed build starts big and then tapers off, doesn't mean the taper has to be permanent.

Ah, then absolutely. You mentioned "alpha" damage, and that typically means start-of-combat, when all your cooldowns are available (as opposed to mid-combat cycles, where cooldowns typically don't line up). If you're simply referring to heavy burst classes versus steady DPS classes, then I agree.

Precisely. The burst builds would still be cool-down based, but short, re-usable cool-downs, no FFXI style 2-hour monsters, or even WoW-style 5-10 minuters. Obviously these would exist, but as Oh Shoot! buttons, not part of your regular doings.

So, this is a pretty good example of something that requires a bit more consideration than you're giving it.

If PFO, like most MMORPGs, is going to feature anything resembling substantial "boss" fights (and I hope it does), then you're going to have to account for the fact that the length of a fight can be much longer than you might be used to in solo play. If a typical boss fight takes 10 minutes, you need to make all of the potential builds roughly equally effective over the course of those 10 minutes.

This means that you can't do the whole "two-handers start big and drop off" and "two-weaponers start slow and build big," because over the course of a 10-minute long fight, the two-handed weapon fighter is going to end up with a very low DPS compared to the two-weapon fighter. If the difference is significant enough to matter, two-handed weapon fighters will find themselves marginalized. You don't want to create a seemingly valid character development path that ends with that character being marginalized.

You're looking at this a little narrowly. Just because a 2 handed build starts big and then tapers off, doesn't mean the taper has to be permanent. It could go through cycles of near excessively high burst, followed by lows, that repeated over a time.

Another skill allows me to hit multiple targets with my otherwise single target skills for a short time, say by increasing the damage of the skills, then making the damage be distributed evenly amongst viable targets. If there's only one viable target, then the skills simply hit much harder.
This skill would have something like a 5 second duration, but provide a very large increase to damage during the time, and would not be stackable with the attack speed buff, to prevent too much burst. This allows for another period of burst while your attack speed is cooling down, and manages to do a similar thing in a different way, AND provide some utility at the same time.

Again these are just some simple examples, but just because a build plays off of burst damage doesn't mean they can't sustain during a long fight, it just means sometimes they don't do as much as a sustained DPS build, but at the same time can offer their full power on-demand with proper planning.