I realize this sort of thing varies heavily from build to build, but what skills do successful GD players generally invest in, to what extent, and why?
Military Conditioning seems to be a popular choice for maxing, likely due to the Physique meta I’m guessing. Blade Arc and Savagery both seem to be maxed often when they’re taken at all. What other notable skills are usually maxed (with hard points) in any given build? And conversely, what skills are generally one-point wonders or places you put leftover points (if you have any)?
Max with hard points skills generally are main attack skills. For example if you use Cadence you have 16 hard points (or 26 points after +skills anyways, sometimes that doesn’t take 16 points). This holds true for pretty much whatever you use as your main attack whether it is fire strike, aether ray, quick jacks, etc. Sometimes this includes the other nodes of the attack and sometimes not - for example Dreeg spam would 12/12 Vile Eruption but only 1/12 Terrifying Gaze, because it is a one point max type node (and Dreeg cooldown would spec Dreeg differently!)
Then there are ‘soft cap AFTER +skills’ type skills. These are generally debuffs/buffs that just don’t scale well after their soft caps. Good examples are flashbang, which has vastly slowed radius and drops to 10 defense/level after rank 12 or Military Conditioning which drops down to 1% health/phys per level after the soft cap or Vulnerability. These are the skills you’ll see odd numbers of points in.
Finially there are the ‘one point and let +skills work the magic’ type skills. Terrifying Gaze, Decorated Soldier, or any skill where it is really hard to justify more than one point as the returns just aren’t there. Sometimes this is by a non-scaling stat on the skill (terrifying gaze’s chance to terrify enemies) or the skill just lacks the necessary power as in decorated soldier - 6% phys damage and 2% ele resist/point is a very low return.
I know I said three types but there is one more type of skill. Veterancy which is the laughing stock of skills and should never be taken… ever… under any circumstances. (I’m only half kidding here, if you don’t have at least +4 soldier skills/veterancy mods on your gear it isn’t even worth the first point.)
All of these can be figured our fairly easily by just looking at how the skill scales in Grimcalc. Make sure to check four things: How much do I get with just 1 point? How much does each additional point give me up to the soft cap? How much does overcapping it do? And finally are there any stats listed on the skill which don’t appear in grim calc (some skills are tricky this way!). If you check these you can see that most attacks, especially the more “spell like” attacks actually get 1/2 or more their damage in the ultimate ranks, where buffs/debuffs might only increase in power by 10-20% going from soft cap to ultimate rank.
There are also some two-point wonders like High Potency and Ring of Frost, although those skill trees also have decent return on investment. Canister Bomb can be a 4-point wonder with Concussive Bomb. I can’t think of any 3-point wonders though.
You are going to want to max your main damage outputs and best defensive skills. So if your basic attack and nearly all your dps is a certain spell, ya max the first part of it for sure. Sometimes the passives attached to those abilities further down the skill tree are not worth maxing, but often they are.
Some skills have an extremely powerful effect, then scale really poorly then on. Like blade barrier and mirror of ereoctes. Also some skills you can just take for the crowd control aspect, and minimize the points on their actual damage if you dont care about it. Cannister bomb is a good example of that
some abilities also change how well they scale after a certain point. So you may see builds stop right at that point to be most efficient since further points do less. Or, with gear bonuses, stop even lower so the final result is at the most efficient point
Alright, so, after fiddling around in Grimcalc for what feels like an eternity, a few questions came to mind that probably don’t deserve their own thread but I really want to float past people anyway. When a skill only really merits a point or two in it, tops, is that skill a bad skill? Do you think Crate needs to buff or change those kinds of skills to give people reasons to spec higher into them, depending on build? Is it possible, within reason, to turn a one/two-point wonder into a skill that you want to try and softcap at minimum if you put points into it at all? Would it even be a good idea to change those skills in that way?
It really depends on the skill, I’d say. For example, Mirror is a 1PW because you want it for the 3s invulnerability; the cooldown doesn’t really matter much at all. Other skills are just 1PWs because they aren’t worth spending points on beyond the first to get all those creamy +skill bonuses, and those could maybe stand a buff of some kind.
I think it would be a really bad idea to try to turn all skills into cap/soft-cap skills, since at that point you may as well just have stats increase on their own by level, make every skill 1 point, and go play WoW because that’s what it would be.
Well, this then kind of begs the question: Why did Crate set the investment cap so high for skills that don’t necessarily merit that kind of investment?
On a side note, what skills do you think could stand a buff? Veterancy immediately comes to mind, as in its current incarnation it apparently isn’t even worth ONE point. Brute Force honestly feels sort of wimpy, the more I think about it. Field Command and Squad Tactics apparently used to be worth more significant investments than they are now, but got nerfed. Is it too much of a nerf if a balance pass turns an “invest heavily into this” skill into a “meh, one point tops” skill?
EDIT: To clarify on my first question in this post, let’s take Scars of Battle as an example. I have never seen anyone invest more than 3 points into it. It could probably have a cap of 5 and no one would really miss that 8 cap much. What made Crate say “This is an 8 point cap skill” with SoB? Considering they already plan for over the soft cap on all skills anyway, it just makes me wonder. And I personally think SoB is really nice as a passive, if I had more points to spread around on builds I would seriously consider investing more in it (though why Crate made certain skills scale really poorly past the soft cap is another question I’d ask them if I could).
Because every game has trap options in it, either purposefully or accidentally. Or maybe they’re just there to add the facade of customization for people who don’t read the forums and just play the game totally self-found and self-built. I’m sure there’s plenty of builds out there that are viable for the main storyline only that people play and enjoy.
As for things that could handle a buff to make them worth >1 point, I notice a lot of the additional modifiers on buff skills end up being 1pt. I don’t know if they need a buff per se, but I do know that a lot of builds max out the main thing (or get enough gear that buffs the skill to that point) and then only adds a point to its mods because you have all these +class items so why not?
I would hope not purposefully in Crate/GD’s case, because noobtrapping is just silly.
I suppose. Though given how wonderfully complex GD is, I’d just like to say that I don’t think it needs any hollow embellishments of its customization mechanics.
I’m still very curious as to why Crate made certain things scale the way they did, whether they were trying to gently nudge players towards or away from certain things and so on.
There is no real “trap” because of how easy it is to re-spec the points. If someone feels like an ability is weak, and then changes it to one that is better for them, they have learned something about builds and the game and that process is enjoyable for most people.
If every skill is at the same power level, and also scales the same, it doesn’t matter what you do. For the people that like to find builds and experiment, that’s not a good thing. This is why I hated diablo 3. I had all skills avalable and they all did % weapon damage. So… where is the thought?? I could just use anything and it didn’t matter. I didn’t play through 14 times to the point where it did matter, but you shouldnt have to
Also just by the design of some skills, it would be a bad thing if they scaled well into the 20/12 ranks with great equipment. An example of this is an ability like military conditioning. If it scaled totally linearly, the amount of hp you would get from it would be hard to balance around. Since stuff already 1 shots 8500 hp characters but now bosses would need to be able to scratch 25k hp tanks too