Game Rants 3: Neverwinter: Part 3: Endgame

Endgame is when you hit 60, right after all the leveling content becomes extremely hard to solo with the stock level 15 companions (yay). I put in the majority of my time here before running out of things to do and quitting.

Part 3: The End Game
Pros:

• Lots of dungeons to do via the inclusion of epic difficulty.
• PVP gear is easy to obtain, so it doesn't devolve into "full pvp geared player crushes noob" for too long.
• Zone events become very much worth doing as soon as you aren't farming mobs to get enchantments. This gives you some modicum of reason to go back to the last 3 zones.
• Astral diamond acquisition becomes solely a game of playing the auction house (also a con).
• Combat is dynamic, if limited. PVP engagements can be skillful, but they can also be painfully RNG (so also a con).
• Professions and worshiping are long run, low commit engagements to keep people logging in.
• Gearscore requirements on epics mean you won't get undergeared players ruining runs.

Cons:

• Weapon / Armor enchants are purely pay to win. With 1% success rates, but a Greater Tenebrous enchant adding upwards of thousands of DPS to your output, more than any blue -> epic upgrade, and the extreme rarity of any weapon or armor slot enchantment, you end up with absurd AD prices on the AH that normal players can't realistically obtain. 
• In PVE, there are only 5 mans. The queue system still doesn't insist on a healer (even though they are mandatory) so you pretty much have to make premades or take a hella long time queuing, getting borked group compositions, and requeueing again. Gauntlgrym should be out this month, and fix this, so it isn't that bad.
• What is bad is that every single PVE encounter with a number of exceptions I could count on my fingers is exactly the same, even at epic difficulty. Don't stand in red areas,  constant add spawns, with boatloads of adds at 75 / 50 / 25%. Repeat. That is it almost every single boss fight. The PVE is very flat in that it mechanically is rote.
• Like in every other freaking MMO ever, health does not scale on gear relative to raw damage increases from weapon upgrades. This means unlike the pvp at any other level, max level pvp in epics is very zergy with opportunities to one shot players. This never happens while leveling because the ratio of base health to damage on weapons that were green or blue was in check, but at max level this will get even worse since only select gear gives minute max health increases, but weapon damage (and the raw bulk of other dps stats combined) increases burst and dps significantly each tier.
• Mounts completely break PVP. This is really bad at 60, where you end up doing a lot of bgs, and keep cursing at the pay to win nonsense that is 110% speed mounts. They give you a tremendous competitive advantage when you can backcap over and over all game and nobody can keep up with you because you spent real money on a mount to win bgs.
• Players by max level obtain absurd amounts of CC, and there is no DR on any of it. As a consequence, almost any 2 v 1 engagement is always going to be one player being unable to move while dying in seconds. The existance of latency makes it completely random if someones dodge ability is making them immune to some spell now, or making them immune 5 seconds from now. People get so many evade rolls they can just spam it until they get away. The lack of any choice paradigm in ability usage means you just unload your encounters, maybe a daily, run away, recharge, repeat. You have no reason to stay engaged in a fight, especially if you unloaded on someone who hasn't been able to retaliate yet.
• Gearscore requirements on epics are very stringent and I feel excessive - most of these dungeons have no enrage timers, and the only requirement is people not get killed by avoiding damage. And avoiding damage doesn't come quicker with more gear. The gearscore requirements in effect artificially gate content by making you run lower level dungeons for gear not because you need it to defeat bosses but because the game says you have to do attempt those bosses.
• Converting astral diamond from zen isn't that bad. I'd prefer Cryptic to make the money off a "gold" selling industry (since in effect, astral diamond is the gold of NW). The problem that is bad is that every single pve dungeon drop is BOE, which means you can pay to win buy a full set of the best anything for real life money. This breaks the morale of any competitive PVE scene possible and makes progression pointless. 
• Astral diamond prices in-game do not reflect the reality of AD acquisition rates. Nightmare lockbox horses, that are a tiny chance to get and $1.50 a key to unlock, sell for as much as 80% mount speed training and half of 110% speed training, and give you both, plus the mount. The combined cost of both mount skills purely through AD and not considering the real economy valuation of zen to AD puts just getting mount training at almost 3 times more expensive than buying a 110% mount that gives you the skill. This is pervasive of anything that costs diamond - respecs, scrolls, etc - all cost an order of magnitude more than they should, at least. This disconnect cheapens the experience and dissuades players.
• Likewise, zen prices are absurd, and completely out of hand. $40 companions, $50 mounts, $10 single bags on one character. Outrageous, and if Cryptic doesn't make fistfulls of money on NW, it is because they priced the item shop so poorly it alienated a huge portion of the playerbase from buying anything. Not only did they give away all the work (the leveling content) for free, and make it fun, the end game doesn't keep you engaged for long and you can walk away, just like in SWTOR, taking the bulk of their effort with no incentive to pay for anything. That is a recipe for disaster.
• Aggro is still broken for clerics, who will instantly pull aggro doing anything and then never lose it. Tanks are optional, but healers are not.

So overall, the pve is predictable and dull, without any raid content yet. The dracolich fight in Castle Never is, surprisingly, killing adds again. Go figure. PVP is the only real challenge, and that is entirely pay to win between the buying of Tenebrous + armor / weapon enchants, and the mounts. Damage outscaled hp and control abilities became too abundant, so you get two shot without being able to play. Clerics have limited pvp utility - they can use their blue shields to prevent you from taking almost any damage, but require pay to win levels of itemization to keep someone alive through healing.

The real problem is that there is no carrot. Tier 2 gear might take a long time to get farming epics (heroics) but you don't even need it to clear anything. If not for the gearscore requirements, you could do every instance in blues (unless your dps is so low you can't keep the add waves down) because there are no enrage mechanics, nothing that has to be tanked, and clerics pull all the aggro anyway.

You can get full pvp gear in a day, realize it requires absurd pay to win nonsense to get the epic enchants, and quit.

There was a lot of potential ruined by the pay to win aspects and an excessive focus on the leveling process. But once you see the zones once, you are pretty much done - there is no alternative progression path, the story and zones are linear. So you play to max, play a few days, do the dungeons and pvp, and you are completely finished. Which is never a good thing for an MMO.

I'm hoping added content and balancing make Neverwinter good again, but some very fundamental mechanics - spammable immunity dodges, 8 buttons max, aggro mechanics that don't focus on tanks holding threat, the ability to just dodge spam avoid almost all damage, the lack of CC DR, and an excess of CC at that, contribute to some pretty big flaws to keep the game from reaching its potential.

Because the setting is great. The atmosphere is ok (it doesn't come close to Baldur's Gate quality atmosphere, but that had a lot more work put into characterization - with the lack of NPC persistence in NW, and your companions just being dumb meat bricks, you have no overarching engagement besides this distant threat of Valindra).

I'd like to see a refactoring of player abilities to prompt more choice paradigm behavior - making in combat decisions on what to do besides "hit the button and get rooted or not" and beyond picking a daily to use. The best MMO mechanics evolve from players have to chose between offense and defense, burst or sustained, etc, in combat - not just outside it when you pick your spells. The cooldown based usage and obvious situations to use encounter powers cheapen the gameplay. The ability for everyone to avoid so much damage and go immune to effects so often cheapen role specialization. Every dpser gets some aoe (even if rogues aoe sucks), they get some control, they get some utility, etc - it makes them jacks of all trades where you should have aggressive specialization and dependence on other players to form bonds of engagement. Especially in D&D, where you classically needed a bunch of different roles to realistically combat a wide array of threats.

It was the most fun MMO I've played since SWTOR, so props. But it is still full of holes I can't wait to see filled (I'd love to become a lead developer on an MMO some day to put my ideas to the test).

Magma Rants 1: Introduction to the Language

I've been doing a bit of a thought experiment recently, around the idea of programming languages. I imagine the vast majority of programmers do this, so I don't think I'm special here, and while I would love for this idea to go somewhere, the pressing need for a sustainable consistent influx of cash is more important than solving big problems and fixing the world.

I have a manifesto writeup going on on a Google Doc, found here. I regularly add sections over time, the real pain is when I redo parts of the spec because I don't like the way something is petering out. Here are some examples of that:

• Initially, I liked the idea of using colons as assignment, such that in constructors you would use foo : 5, in variables you would use float bar : 3.5, etc. I gave up on this, for two reasons - one, even though the precedent of using an equals sign for assignment isn't really mathematically accurate (and I really liked the idea of not needing the terrible == for equality) some operations like +: and -: just look ugly with colons attached. Blame my great aesthetic design mindset. This also opens up the colon to be another dedicated glyph, and let me separate property access (.) from scope (:) which I prefer.

The purpose of Magma is to solve a problem - which I hope most languages aim to accomplish - by accepting a reality of native language design. You want a kitchen sink that you can write firmware or a kernel in, but want to actually build a working project with it. I think my approach is a step towards solving this problem, in that the Magma specification outlines multiple effective compiler specifications, with different error conditions and warnings depending on the chosen context. Contexts are compiler flags specifying what kind of binary you are constructing, and the compiler builds each library and executable in its own context, which is an optional header in its metadata specification (depending of course on if you want to compile this to say, LLVM, or some newer binary format for a new architecture). The default context is the application context, but the language specification has multiple contexts:

• system - allows raw bitwise, raw shifts, raw pointer manipulation, jumps, and pointer assignment to integers and casting between the various integers (pointers, ints, fixed width chars) won't produce compiler warnings or errors. You can also use asm: blocks to write inline assembly. This state also outright disables exception handling and any bounds safety checks in standard library classes. This context is meant for kernels and firmware, and should be used sparingly. Even a kernel proper should have most of its libraries written in another context. It is also a good idea to isolate system context code in its own libraries or binaries independent of the bulk of a main application, as a sort of "danger zone".
• lib - compiles libraries instead of executable binaries, with no main function. By default, uses the app context, and aliases applib. You can create libraries in other contexts by just suffixing the name with lib, such as systemlib.
• app - The full standard library is available, but you can't use raw shifts, jumps, pointers (use refs) or std:bit (bool and std:flags will still use bitwise internally just fine). 
• web - Targets the Fissure intermediary language, enabling binary web applications. The full ramifications of this context need to be ironed out through trial and error - it has no file system access, no access to the networking stack besides the convenience http send receive layer, etc.

Besides compiling binaries in various contexts, for security purposes Magma apps need ot specify (in their metadata, or embedded) the various std parts they use and what system resources they access (files, network, contacts, accounts, 3d video, audio, etc) so they can request permissions in a mandatory access control environment seamlessly.

The broad objective is to recognize 5 things:

1. Programmers like familiar syntax. If you can get one syntax up an entire stack of languages for various purposes, (which Magma / Fissure / Stratos are intended to be) you can significantly streamline the time investment for new developers to pick up the entire technology paradigm.
2. People like readable code. Magma is not only tries to achieve minimal glyphic overhead and readable code, it can be written whitespace significant or not (using traditional curly braces and semicolons) to enable choice.
3. People like choice. Choice of paradigm, choice of library, and contexts enable a choice of warning states.
4. Times are changing. Heterogeneous computing is going to be huge and massively important, and no modern language is going to have an easy time tacking on easy to use SIMD functionality the way Magma will with std:simd functions, parallel profiling in the compilation stage, etc.
5. Build files suck. Qmake, CMake etc - Scons is really neat, but Python (lacking contexts) is hard to get into a nice syntax for compilation instructions. Enter the stratos build context, which is the dialect of Stratos used to write .stob files to build magma binaries. I mean, build systems collectively blow, and none of the modern languages (Go, Rust, etc all have no immediate solution). Make syntax is completely alien to imperative languages (just like shell is completely alien too) and the raw effort to learn them all is absurd and unacceptable for new developers in the coming years, at least to me.

I think we can do better than what we have, and go beyond C++, D, and even Go and Rust, and really recognize the need for a native language you can write anything in and make it simple. Contexts I like to think make this a lot easier than trying to kitchen sink everything into one compiler state and hoping people don't break stuff with preemptive optimizations into inline assembler.

The point of this blog series isn't to write the manfiesto, but to brainstorm aspects of the langauge ideas I have by writing them down.

Game Rants 3: Neverwinter: Part 2: The Mid Game

The mid game starts in Blacklake and ends in the Northdark. It spans from level 5 to 60, which means it is the super-majority of leveling content. Ends up, that is most of what it is, and that is what I'm touching on here.


Part 2: The Mid Game
Pros:

• There are options to leveling - foundries, quests, dungeons, skirmishes, and pvp all award xp, so you can level any way you want (in theory).
• Zones have directed stories - you start near the entrance, progress through quest hubs, and eventually reach a dungeon at the end. Every zone has a corresponding big bad in a dungeon to kill, and all these dungeons have epic level 60 versions too.
• Power's are obtained quickly early on and peter out in higher levels to 2 - 3 new abilities every 10 levels with the bulk of powers early on. This means you get the majority of your ability choices quickly, and have actual skill choices early on.
• Most abilities are useful for something, at least on the TR, CR, and Cleric from my experience. There are few stand out "garbage" powers that are useless, but few and far between. In most circumstances, the powers you run are situational, which is good for the choice paradigm.
• Quest dialog and most mobs have voice overs, which help immersion.
• The graphics are great, and the game runs exceptionally well on Arch (which is where I'm running it from).
• Music is great.
• There really isn't much pressure in the pay to win direction while leveling. The level process is really fast so XP boosts are not necessary, and you can easily hit max level just doing the leveling quest content. You can't usually afford a mount as soon as you hit level 20, but you almost always can by 23, and the uselessness of gold for the most part makes it easy to justify the purchase. Bag space is the biggest offender, but you do get 2 bags (one at 10 and one at 30) that somewhat offset the bag pains, and proper inventory management lets you do entire quest hubs, visit the vendor, and repeat ad nauseam without really feeling a space crunch.
• PVP auto levels you to the X9th level in a bracket, so there is no level imbalance. Ability and gear imbalance can contribute somewhat to the experience, but each battle gives half a level and you can get max level pretty quickly through it, so it is pretty balanced leveling pvp. I feel like they learned well from both the failings of the no-balancing WoW and the everyone-to-max level TOR.
• Beyond the visuals, the environments are amazing. Being in the crater of a volcano, or climbing a massive Ice Giant's pick, or battling Gray Wolves beneath a giant flaming Wolf carved mountain all present epic landscapes. The look is great and really conveys strong atmosphere. A real standout was the Chasm, which progressively got more corrupted the deeper you went.

Cons:

• There are very few consistent characters and no overarching story arc in the leveling content. It means there is very little engagement with any zones story because you know the characters are fleeting.
• You don't change the world through your actions. You go places, kill monsters, they will still be there, Helm's Hold is still under demon control, Icespire is still covered in giants, etc - there is no real phasing, so the game doesn't change as you accomplish things, cheapening the engagement even more.
• Quests are rarely dropped, and always require running back to town. This is offset by having multiple progressive objectives in a single quest, but the need to go back to the Protector's Enclave to turn in a completion quest after each zone accentuates this issue - even though you do go back for a reason (usually when you finish a zone, there is another one to progress to).
• While the zones looked awesome, very few environments were manipulable or changed during progression. It was a very static world - besides the mobs standing around waiting to fight, the quest NPCs idling in camps, the world itself is fairly unchanging.
• There is a lot of "free" content here - the leveling process is still drug out, and these zones were all complex works of art that took a lot of effort, but they still reek of unnecessary.
• With the foundry nerf, the only ways to level now are quests and pvp. Dungeons and skirmishes give awful xp per run and for the time commitment, but the gear you get is so fleeting they often aren't worth doing outside the fun of seeing them the first time (which is really fun!). Foundries are almost never worth doing anymore, ever, which I feel hurts one of the games best aspects.
• When leveling up, powers have very nebulous descriptions, and a huge component of how viable an ability is is its animation - how long it is, where it goes, etc. You can't figure this information out yourself, and with respecs costing real money, there is no easy way besides lots of out of game research to figure out how to distribute your limited power points.
• Dungeon roles are questionable. Guardians aren't really needed because most boss mobs spawn tons of adds that a guardian can't aoe tank, barely do any direct damage, and often swing so slowly anyone else can dodge them. Clerics are absolutely mandatory for almost anything past the Crypts, but the dungeon queue system will stick 5 dps in a doomed group instead of requiring a cleric (at least).
• Aggro is very broken. For the most part, it is a combination of distance to target and damage done, but guardians can't outaggro healing aggro, which seems to apply from any distance. This means most mobs can't be pulled off a healing cleric, which makes combat a one dimensional kite rather than a coordinated utilization of classes filling roles.
• This might be a bug moreso than a hard negative, but the group travel mechanics are very annoying. You can't transport between solo player zones and dungeons in a group and it forces you to wait for your party to go almost anywhere. I feel like the entire mechanic is a pointless holdover from D&D proper, and letting people zone in places wouldn't hurt.

The biggest issue with the mid game is the needlessness of it all - the story is too static to be deeply engrossing besides a few rare characters like the lovers that show up in both the Plague Tower and deep Chasm. Because your actions don't have a lasting impact on the world, and the overarching story of catching Valindra takes a backseat after the tutorial and rarely pops up even in passing except in engagements in the city or in the Ebon Downs, the plot is all over the place and leaves players wanting.

This contributes to a greater sense that way too much development time and effort was put into this leveling content - from voiced over quests, to well realized zones, to all the different monster models and animations, a lot of this seems like a poor allocation of resources when launching a f2p MMO - people will level once, experience this content once, maybe twice if they level the single alt the game lets you roll without paying money, and then they expect a repeatable end game to keep them playing.

And f2p depends as much as any game on their persistent players to bring in the new players to spend money and to consistently buy new trinkets as they enter the store. Your hardcore audience is your best money sink, but you don't win them over with a lot of well designed questing zones, because they do those once and never come back.

I feel like the game would have done significantly better on a slashed budget with level 20 as the cap, with you getting 3 power and feat points per level, than having the level 60 cap, all these excessive leveling zones (and let us be honest, the Plague Tower quest chain would have been a great point to finish up at a level cap, and then just add a few levels at a time as new zones are introduced, and have early access to these zones for a few days - of course, deleveling players that go in them and get higher levels so they don't get a power advantage in PVE or PVP until after everyone can enter them). All these zones are just massive developer sinks that absolutely took lots of development time and will produce very little return on investment both in player time engaged in them and in income as a result of them. Like I said earler in this post, there is little incentive to spend money while leveling (the lockboxes I feel are a good exception, and while even the box keys are radically overpriced, a $1.50 a key is much more reasonable for most players to shill out at a whim).

This is even more pronounced at a neutered end game - and, in praise of Cryptic, the leveling content is not short but it isn't excessively long either. It might wane on some players but it won't on most, and the ~60 hours to hit max level finishing the quest content (which many players might not even touch while pvping) is acceptable. My arguments against the quantity of it is directed towards Cryptics bottom line - they spent a lot of time making these beautiful zones with forgettable one off plot threads that few people will be paying money to experience, since they gave it away for free. Kind of like how TOR gave away the best part of that game by making it f2p.

Another issue is the routes to 60 - any group content gives awful XP per run (I feel like completing a dungeon should give at least an entire level in XP, and a skirmish at least half for the time commitment and awful XP returns just killing mobs) but doesn't give enough gear per run or time to justify doing them between quests. If you follow the actual progression the devs laid out in terms of questing content, which is to run a zone, reach the end, do a dungeon, and then move on to another zone, you will outlevel zones in no time and end up being unable to queue for dungeons whose quests at the end of some zones you just reached. Nerfing XP gains isn't an effective tactic either because some people just want to get to end game and making them grind there, even with solid quest content, isn't making them happy paying customers any time sooner.

The foundries were fun and interesting apart from the normal quest content. They would mix a lot less fighting or a lot harder solo content into an otherwise monotonous zoned questing experience, and if not for the exploits around knocking mobs off platforms or farming ogres, they would have been a great complement to the leveling experience. In the next part, I'll go into why the foundries are now completely useless besides the fun they provide (and remember, games are about having fun - and I can't forget to mention I only write this much crap because Neverwinter is, at the end of the day, quite fun. Flawed, which is I what I'm getting to, but still fun).

Game Rants 3: Neverwinter: Part 1: Intro & The Early Game

This will  be a 3 part series on the new MMO by Cryptic, Neverwinter. It entered "open beta" about 2 weeks ago, and I have been playing it with friends pretty much non stop ever since, until a few days ago at max level. This blog arc will be a story of 3 parts, I will discuss the "phases" of the MMO (the early beginning game, the mid game, and the end game). I will speak of what I like, dislike, what could be fixed, and what should be learned as a lesson for future MMOs.

Part 1: The Early Game
Pros:

• Excellent character customization, including an excellent cascade of customization complexity - you could go with a wide variety of presets, or tweak everything yourself.
• Excellent race selection, and excellent monetization scheme of having paid-for race choices (at launch, drow is locked for a month except for founders).
• Excellent initial class distribution, with a few questionable choices.
• Excellent CGI intro, defining the conflict and setting well.
• The dynamic patching is excellent, enabling players to obtain game assets when needed rather than in raw bulk patches, but the game keeps it an option in the launcher to update immediately everything, which I did overnight after a few days playing and tiring of the ~3 minutes of file patching per zone that was necessary. Excellent tech.
• The opening zone (and the entire game) is voice acted, adding to the atmosphere.
• Visuals are wonderful for an MMO, animations are usually good, soundtrack is excellent.
• Gameplay is good for an action mmo, the best yet in my opinion - animations lock your character in place to add weight, and you have 3 discretized classes of spells - at will (spammable), encounter (short cd), and daily (once per fight usually, require obtaining action points by doing your job to use).
• The intro zone has a dedicated story of getting into the city, introduces the main villain, and shows off the most important game mechanics.
• Visuals on the bridge (mortar fire, fire in general, crumbling expanses) are great.
• The dracolich corpse at the start is a direct tie in to the intro cinematic and is a really good story builder.
• Tutorials are informative - abilities are flashy as you level up and skills appear on your bars, tips tell you the specifics well.
• You are able to write your own story for when people inspect your character.
• Character titles, including two right off the bat from your god and home.
• Moderately good server stability for an MMO launch.

Cons:

• The characters introduced in the cinematic are never touched on again, and the game seriously (in the long run) lacks persistent characters besides Jonas and his wife throughout the spellplague storyline. This starts here with your companion on the bridge, who dies. Barely any other characters are persistent (and the Sargent you constantly report back to in Protector's Enclave is barely characterized after the start).
• The ability scores are really stupid to have in character creation - they aren't actually rolled, there are just ~8 presets of score rolls to pick from. While mousing over them tells you what is "good" for your class, you have no idea what really is the best for you, and any new player is going to be completely lost on what to pick here. Ability scores also matter a lot. The consequence is that a major mechanism of the player is defined off the bat, remains unchangeable forever, and can cripple a character before its even made.
• Abilities are slow to come by - it takes a while to unlock all of your (outrageous!) 8 ability binds (counting the tab class ability). It makes combat really lackluster at the start since you really are only spamming one at will and one encounter and doing nothing else.
• The paragon system in conjunction with the "specialized" classes like great weapon fighter and trickster rogue rather than just fighters and rogues means down the road the game is going to either focus on providing classes with paragon paths (good) or adding excessive classes (bad).

Overall, the beginning is a resounding positive. The combat is sound, the graphics and audio are good, nothing is glaringly wrong - in most bad MMOs, right off the bat bad textures or broken models or crappy combat or lag would hint at flawed games off the bat, but that doesn't happen here. The game has some polish.

My primary criticism of the introduction is a lack of engrossing story - you land on a beach with a hand waived boat crash, you progress through a battlefield doing things for random people, you find a guard who goes with you across a bridge, you find the necromancer from the cinematic, fight a hulk, finish up, and never touch on any of this again. It is a pervasive issue in MMOs that the stories rarely carry weight - the effects of the intro only lead you to the Enclave in the city, and while NPCs will remark you were the one who fought on the bridge, it quickly evaporates and the impact on the story is negligible.

Also, the presence of prerolled sets of ability scores to choose from in my opinion is an unnecessary hold over from D&D proper - yes, ability scores are essential in D&D, but making every class have a forced preset of ability scores (plus a forced level set allocation of scores) would help mitigate a newbie from putting all their points in intellect as a fighter (or taking a sub-optimal initial score roll at character creation). Considering there is no way to re-roll your ability scores even with zen, it becomes an early game core mechanic that can make or break your character.

The issue with class distribution is two fold - for one, your ability to tailor your character to your job is limited if they release classes as specialized roles in combat rather than paragon paths. I've argued in the past why providing few classes with discrete role customization that isn't on the fly changeable like a wow spec is the best way to make each character unique but keep everyone capable of doing a useful job.

In Neverwinter, this is the principle reason there are so few guardian fighters - because they are pure tanks, and no matter what their paragon paths are they will still be a sword and shield fighter, they don't give off an epic appearance like the dps roles, cleric, or gwf. If there were a single fighter, where one paragon path was great weapon fighting and the other was guardian tanking, the shortages of both classes would almost certainly be less severe because more people would have rolled a class that had options in their role.

It seems apparent the reasons for the decision - paragons are about a few powers, not class function in combat. The classes are defined by the weapons they use, and the various styles of using any given weapon set falls into a paragon path (I anticipate at least, given that every class only has one paragon path at launch). But like I said, this means role customization is lacking, and it means everyone is pigeonholed into a single function, and while the cost of leveling alts isn't nearly as bad as it is in other games, the lack of any heirloom-esque items to speed up the process of a reroll (which since the foundry nerf means you are going to be repeating the same content over again each time) which isn't very fun for anyone.

But overall the early game is great. It is probably why the MMO is popular right now - you do get a good impression besides the blemishes. In part 2, I'll be harsher, have no fear.