Ecumenical has always been much more of a support and pvp focused school. Maybe with the AI becoming better it'll be much easier to balance in magic's use against npcs.
In mo1 a hybrid build was always sort of an option to be more self sufficient for hunting npcs but keep most of the support and pvp fire/staying power.
If things keep going as they do now with skills and schools being similar then this will probably still be the case. Also seeing as most of the taming related skills will probably be crafting skill points hybrid hunting with pets could be a very good way to go about it.
At the cost of losing out on the crafting/processing obviously. But group play has always been the best way to play mo1. If having a good time is also important. There is also safety in numbers...
Something needs to change with it, which was my point in bringing it up in this one character per account thread, SV can't rely on copy/paste of old systems into the new game because the reality of having only 1 character effects a lot of systems. We used a multitude of characters per account, and multiple accounts to work around a lot of pain points and sometimes just bad design in the old game.
If most of those design decisions get simply ported over into the new game, having only 1 character just greatly exacerbates those same old issues, and we're left with something even worse and more frustrating for vets but especially new players.
I might be out of touch, I thought what I suggested about magic and it's usefulness in the most basic gameplay loop possible was self-evident, but it seems a number of people disagree apparently, and that's fine, but I still don't understand why it isn't worth trying to make it better than it was for like 12 years or whatever.
If ecumenical is the school a new player starts with, and it's designed for utility, support, and pvp, then why is that the only school available to a starting player if you can't use it right away to actually play the most basic feature and gameplay loop?
We've been stuck with this system for so long I think we sometimes forget just how jarring an experience trying to play a basic mage is for a new player. Why is it so jarring? Because you can't do basic stuff with it, because apparently the starting school isn't meant to be used to hunt mobs? Is Spurting a pig to death a lot of fun when you could just kill the same thing in 2 hits or so on a brand new character naked with a worn short sword? You start out and your spells do half damage for twice the mana cost....how do we solve this problem...spurt macro for a couple nights until mental focus and mental offense or whatever are maxed...do all that and you still can't kill mobs as efficiently as you could with a worn shortsword with no skill.
it's just sub-optimal design and should be improved. Even if you have no interest in the playstyle yourself you should want the system to be fun and functional because it brings more people to the table to play, we should give people reasons to stick around instead of frustrating them until they just play a fighter, or worse, leave the game. Hardcore should not equate to not fun.
If ecumenical isn't the school for basic fun PvE, or the basic gameplay loop, then it shouldn't be the only option to start with! UE4 has basic scripts for projectiles ya? well then fiddle with some of that and let us play with some little nukes that aren't hitscan and let us see how it feels. We all know that instead of doing this in the alpha, they're just going to copy paste the old system here, and I think that's a mistake, and a missed opportunity.
This isn't rocket science, you should be able to start the game, choose the path you want to take, and it should be fun to play from the start...so you keep playing.
To bring this back around to the point of the thread, because we will have only 1 character, the systems that make it into the new game have to evolve into something better than what we had before or they will inevitably be much worse.