Patron Epics: Powerset vs. Archetype

[GuyPerfect]

There's a bit of a dilemma that's been lurking in the back of my mind for a while now and I've just now decided to say something about it! See, the Patron epic pool pages... They've got all the archetypes' powersets lumped together in the same article. Is this correct? Is it better to have separate articles for each archetype?

On the one hand, "Leviathan Mastery" is shared by all Villain classes. It could be argued that Leviathan Mastery is like one big powerset, but that every archetype gets a different selection of the powers. I mean, Bile Spray is there for Mastermind as well as Brute, so how is that any different from Buckshot being available for Blasters as well as Corruptors?

On the other hand, they are in fact separate powersets, as defined in the game data. Their descriptions differ slightly between archetypes (like what levels they become available), and each "pool" of sorts is unique for each archetype. This would make for a "Leviathan Mastery (Brute)" style naming convention; keeping each epic set different for each archetype and keeping it consistent with the Hero epics.

But frankly, they both seem equally valid and correct to me, and I'm hesitant to say that one is needed over the other. I wouldn't be disappointed if we ended up with a collective Leviathan Mastery page as well as individual Leviathan Mastery pages for each archetype. (-:

[eabrace]

I guess if there's anything I really like about the current setup, it's that if a power that's shared by multiple ATs changes, you only have to change it once on the set's page.  As an example, when they added Accurate ToHit Debuff sets, I only had to add it to Dark Obliteration on the Soul Mastery page once.  Updating the power info would have taken more effort if they were all split into separate sets for each AT the way the hero ancillaries are currently split.  (Those were a major pain to update by comparison.)

I do see what you're saying about making them separate, but I think if we were going to do that, we'd have probably done the same for primary and secondary sets that aren't identical like Fiery Melee or any of the Stalker primaries.

[Aggelakis]

I don't see a point in separating them out.

Additionally, I'd really like to see the hero ancillaries combined so that everything is on one page (like Fire Ancillary Pool, Energy Ancillary Pool, etc), but that's even less likely to happen since few ancillary powers are shared between archetypes and therefore the pages would be huge.

[Lin Chiao Feng]

We could always set powers up like inventions: One page per power, then use DPL + templates to pull the powers into pages for each AT/powerset combo, and pages for eact power set showing all ATs.  Normally, I'd think that was too much effort for the reward, but eabrace over there is probably crazy enough to plow through something of that scale, Sekoia might be able to bot some of the work, and .

If anyone wants to try this, the best plan is to set up an example on their User page.  This gets touchy with templates, since you can't put them in the User: namespace, but you need to be naming the templates such that they don't interfere with anything else.

It would be plenty to just set up an example of what you think the pages should look like on some of your User pages and direct us to them so we can see what you're going for.  Copying source from the original pages is strongly encouraged; you might see some things that show why they're built the way they are.

One final point: the various Invention Category pages (e.g. Category:Sets that improve Accuracy, which has only 7 lines of source on that page) came about pretty much exactly this way.  Someone posted an example layout, I looked at it and started templating it, Sekoia came along and did the mass-tweaking needed to the various Invention pages, and eabrace and I (more him than me... way more) did the remaining grunt work.  Voila, an insane amount of info organized several different ways, and almost all automatically updated.

So feel free to just wave your hands some.  We won't bite... I think. >_>

[Sekoia]

This gets touchy with templates, since you can't put them in the User: namespace, but you need to be naming the templates such that they don't interfere with anything else.

Actually, templates can be made in any namespace. If I create a template User:Sekoia/MyTemplate, I can use it by doing {{User:Sekoia/MyTemplate|Foo|Bar}}. The template namespace is special in that it lets you omit the Template: prefix. Pages can be used as templates from other namespaces, just gotta include the namespace prefix. If it's from the main namespace, prefix it with a colon. The Main Page has an example of that where it uses {{:News}} to transclude from the News article.