I’m currently considering to skills for the soldier class that would be mutually-exclusive toggled buffs that would confer either more offensive or defensive attributes. Working names are Bulwark and Vanguard.
Question is, how involved should they be? I’m currently on the fence as to whether they should be full skill-trees each with 2 modifiers or just single skills.
Option 1 (full skill trees) is cool because I think it would generally cause players to want to follow one path or the other due to the skill-point investment it would require to fully spec in either tree, thus promoting more possibilities for different soldier builds.
Option 2 (single skills) would allow people to more easily invest in both and switch between them during combat based on the situation.
What say you?
It’s funny but I think writing this all out already helped me make a decision. I’ll see what you guys have to say though.
Depends what the synergies provide. If it was something like say, the defense tree provided essentially what the Battle Awareness tree provides in TQ, probably not worth separating it, but if it was as useful as the death chill tree… Not that the deathchill tree was defensive, but it was very useful, whereas the Battle Awareness line was more like…meh, one point in base, max mid synergy, 3 points in top synergy… 8 points rather than the maximum of 18 or so…
I personally loooove synergistic skills, provided the synergies are worth getting. Like in Storm, the ice shard tree was AWESOME and perfectly done, albeit it didn’t scale well enough. Also having it point heavy and making it a “one or the other” type aura would truly give that feeling of following a dedicated path, making each build quite unique, while the other could max both and be the jack of all trades when the moment arises, which isn’t bad, but imo gives less of an immersive feeling.
The one thing I am afraid of with this is that having to choose between an offensively or defensively oriented tree could result in a melee character that is too skewed in one direction or the other when they really probably need a combination of both offensive and defensive bonuses.
I never cared much for skilling skills that were only situational. That’s the reason I hardly touched Spirit Ward + Spirit Bane and never even tried Circle of Power in TQ.
I’m not a big fan of choosing a path within a mastery either, as they forced you to choose, effectively removing the diversity of a mastery (like the trance aura’s in Dream).
Sorry, can’t be of much help here, I never like choosing the lesser evil.
I personally like option 1. I always like creating single tree or mastery characters but is generally turns into an odd ball build since multi tree/mastery classes tend to be so much more powerful.
I agree with those situational skills 100%. But I get the picture medierra is talking about general boosts to either offense or defense, that doesn’t involve any sort of defense/offense against specific type of creatures, thus making them more viable option in general in compared to the ones you mentioned.
I think I’m leaning towards the single skills in this situation since I love having something else to do with buffs than clicking them on when I start playing and… yeah, that was it. Switching them effectively during fight seems more dynamic and strategic element to me. Like when you’re pinned down badly you could switch to defensive mode for maximum survivability.
Seems like that would work a lot like Dream’s Trance aura’s. But I always choose one aura and went with that. There wasn’t much choice involved either, as it was already evident which was best for which specific build. So, for every specific build I already lost 2 skill choices. Sure, skilling all trances could give an advantage in specific situations, but it would feel to me like the character was less complete. But that might just be my personal issue with mutually exclusive skills.
But since I don’t plan on playing close combat warriors anyway, so my opinion doesn’t matter too much
Well, I think dropping the exclusivity-skills down to 2 and maybe make both of those more useful even at lower levels could help a little. Also if they are not tied to any specific builds, it would help also. Getting good defensive or offensive bonuses has use for every build, and to pretty much every situation I think. It’s just a matter of choosing one of two, no need to think of any too specific stuff.
I dont know really, I think there was only one really good trance in TQ anyway, never had difficulties of choosing. I think this could be a whole different story.
These will be similar to the Dream trance skills except that those were just meant to provide somewhat different abilities to suit various builds, not really be situational.
In this case, I think the skills would work better in either case since they are more strongly favorable to different builds / situations.
I think I generally agree with the majority of people so far that it will be more interesting to have two full skill-trees where players typically select one or the other depending on their play-style / build. I am not sure though whether to be concerned about the automatic loss of 3 skills from the mastery for whichever tree you don’t choose. I think if we’re going to have masteries that can be played in very different ways, the exclusion of a number of skills from certain builds is to be expected. I also don’t think this will have as much impact as it would in TQ given the larger number of skills per mastery in GD.
Myeah, I’d go with full tree skills than. No small passive boni, so in case you do want to use them both you still get a slight benefit when using the other?
I like talent trees/mastery trees/skill trees… whatever you wish to call them.
The fact you can choose to go full defensive, full offensive or hybrid is one of the best parts of creating your character. I’ve never been a situational player myself. I like to make a general build that is good against say, 80% of the game, and for those 20% situational times, I deal with them as they come. If it means respeccing to get through that part, I will.
I love option one. Like in TQ Rogue build, there are poison enchancement, throwing knife, trap, bomb and calculated strike (excluding lethal strike). Since you won’t have enough point to spend on the whole trees, you got to choose. And if all the build trees are exciting/interesting enough (since i don’t like trap and bomb), this will have more possible rogue build.
For me the first option is the best because I like to create specialized character who isn’t great in everything, and don’t pretend to be a superhero who destroys the whole hord of bad guys only by one sight. In addition that choice gives a player a chance to run game again just to test the other skill tree and see which more comfortable for his type of gaming.
If I may I’d like to make an entirely different suggestion:
Just for clarification: I’m going to differentiate “base skills” and “enhancement skills” - where the base skill would be the one, first skill (active) on the bottom of any path - and “enhancement skills” would be the other dependent skills (passive) along the path, that improve said base skill.
Make some of those enhancement skills exclude each other.
For example:
Base skill = “fire-bolt”. That sits at the bottom.
One line above it, are two other skills connected to fire-bolt. One of that is “multi-bolt” (allows you to shoot 2,3,4,5 fire-bolts at once in a spread), the other one is “mega-bolt” (which increases the area of effect radius of the firebolt.)
You can have only one of those two - you have to make your choice.
On the next line above that, there’s another two skills again. Both can be chosen, independent of whether you chose “multi” or “mega” on the level below.
That would be “quick-bolt” and “scorch-bolt” and they would exclude each other again. One would increase casting speed and reduce cooldown of the base skill, the other would increase the damage.
So you could individualize any single skill you use.
It depends how much distinction you are going to make between tanking and dps. TQ blurred that distinction too much so that dps was really only the viable option.
If you see a tank actually having a place as threat holder and meat shield then having individual skill trees is the way to go. People will then feel it is worth while investing the skills in that tree.
BUT, you need to give the “tank” warrior the right skills to let them do the job…i.e. some sort of AoE agro grabber, and some means of holding that agro. Otherwise, you’ll just get a fed up warrior tank doing crap all damage cos all his skills are in damage reduction and agro holding. DPS will be dragging the agro all the time and in pretty short order the warrior tank will be a redundant build. Warrior tanks will revert to a dps build as the only way is kill the mobs quicker than they can kill the party a-la-TitanQuest.
I’m not saying you need anything like an MMO style of compartmentalisation but you need something better than TQ.
As a side note, I presume you are building in some sort of “player threat” factor into the game. It’d be a bit broke without it obviously. How complicated is it likely to be? Will healing generate threat? Will you have threat reduction skills?
