New Class Or A Use For The Offhand?

Ok this is just a thing I saw while looking at the trailer, there's a new type of item called "Mastery Tome" and to me that made me partially think of either a boost that is given to players or least likely, a summoner weapon but I think that is less likely then you happen to see as at roughly the same time you see the Unid Mythic Mastery Tome, you see a Mastery Tome of Weapon Mastery II and that doesn't show any class requirements. Also, I just saw the Fabled Item Scarlet Veil's Major Id and stats and it is looking stupidly likely like it's meant to be mainly used with Collapse.

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Also forgot to mention that it the boost idea could be used in the off hand slot.

 

I do like the idea of mastery tomes if they're based on build archetypes, like things to make your tank actually tank, and your damage feel damaging. Basically rewarding you for playing a certain playstyle. That's what I hope it is/think would be cool.

 

The server works on 1.8 behind the scenes, so actually adding an off-hand is practically impossible. From what I've gathered, these give permanent boosts to a class, and drop through raids. What we don't know:

- If they're switchable or one-use
- If the effects can be switched or you're locked into one once you apply it
- If the different tiers work through combination, way of obtaining or something entirely different
- If they all have similarly disgusting effects of damage boosts (along with normal ids)
- If they're related to the buffs we see are at the entrance of raids

Personally, I'm hoping they'll be limited to raids, with free switching in and out of your tomes.. though I'm skeptical about the application of them, they could do a lot of good and bad and the example given in the trailer doesn't give me a very good feeling about them.

 

I think a fun use for the offhand would be purely cosmetic shields. Each shield could only be won by something in-game, unlike pets or weapon skins, where you can just buy a bunch of crates until you get whatever you want.
Once you get a class to 106, you could get a shield with "106" on it
Once you've killed 100,000 mobs, a shield with a zombie head or something similar would be cool.
Once you get all classes to 100+, a shield with a bow, spear, dagger, wand, and relik would be epic
Of course none of this would be possible with vanilla shields, they would need to do something with the texture pack.

 

The tomes will probably be put through some rigorous testing in the beta so the +25% damage might get nerfed, so I'm not worried about that too much

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Hmm the +25% damage could also mean +25% spell damage & melee damage, which wouldn't be broken imo