So are you going to have the mastery bar on the side that unlocks the tiers , or are you going to go with the classic spending skill points on any skill. Perhaps something new altogether?
Skills are an interesting one. I really like the TQ skill trees and the flexibility they incorporate. But, are more skills a good thing or a bad thing?
Take WoW for example. (OK, ok…sry to mention it but you can’t deny it’s success…and it’s skill tree usage 
Bliz have just drastically reduced the number of skills available prior to Cata hitting the shelves. Not sure why. Seems they are reverting back to pre TBC days. They must have done it for a reason though.
Having just picked up TQ again after a few years of WoW, my observation is that in TQ, you have the potential in the skills trees for “tank”, “healer”, “dps” but in playing the game, those roles are not really that defined. In TQ, it seems that damage is what it’s about. The skills choices just dictates how you carry out the dps.
For example, I went Nature/Hunter to be the party healer with a bow. But, in all honesty, 95% of the time I wasn’t really healing much. And until I pushed up my Hunter skills, I was doing pretty piss-poor damage.
Like D2, TQ’s potion popping ability really negates the healer role half the time.
I guess what I’m saying is, skills are great, if they are provided for the right reason or rather within the right character class dynamic. If, like TQ, the defined roles are not that well “defined” then the skills, in my view, should concentrate more on maybe making the class build distinctions along the lines of how you kill stuff.
Not sure if any of that ramble makes sense but hey…it’s postponed my next bug fix at work for 5 minutes 
Lmaoboat - I’m still planning to use the mastery bar. It will play an even stronger role in assigning core attributes to classes this time too. I also like the continuous element of decision making it provides in the conflict between unlocking new skills or increasing your immediate power by investing in the skills you already have.
DaftMule - Your rant reminds me of an important goal in designing the Grim Dawn skills, which is to improve the function and role of non-dps skills. Changing the potion system should go a long way to accomplishing this. I’m also making an effort to more evenly balance the threat level for melee and ranged classes. I want melee damage mitigation skills to be stronger while ranged classes should have to rely more on crowd control and avoidance. In TQ melee really took a beating while ranged classes needed almost no defense because enemies were generally so ineffective at pinning them down.
TQ isn’t an MMO. Typically, ARPGs don’t fill all the “subclasses” well like an MMO, or hell, even a MOBA game would. In TQ the only classes you had were ranged dps, melee dps, ranged caster, and petmaster.
Any other potential class falls into one of those categories.
I never found that any ARPG has any roles besides those. In D2, Necromancer either plays ranged caster or petmaster (with no pet control), Barb is melee DPS (can tank better than others early on, but it balances out seeing as one of the only strategies in D2 is to grab strength and equip the strongest armor). etc.
And medierra - a good cure for the potions is to make them simply regenerate HP instead of restore a huge %. That with longer cooldowns makes them less viable, and makes the player rely on other sources more. I’ve used this in my own mod and I personally find myself using healing spells more often, which I’ve included at least one healing mechanic in most masteries.
Music to my ears! Sounds like you guys are really investing a lot into improving Grim Dawn’s skill system.
I really like the talk regarding improving characters in a more significant way other than just DPS.
Oh agreed…ARPG’s are not MMO’s. That said, I think the TQ scenario where it’s difficult to see why you wouldn’t bung all your points into damage skills can definitely be improved upon…and it sounds like it will be so that’s cool 
Yes, this is similar to what I’ve done. I intend to give most classes an effective method of healing, especially melee. I almost never use health potions when I play now, which isn’t to say I don’t occasionally almost die or actually die but they’re rare enough and have a long enough cooldown that you tend to want to hoard them. For some items the hoarding tendency is counter to fun, like with TQ scrolls, but I think it is the behavior we want with potions since they really shouldn’t be a dependent part of the normal gameplay. Rather, they should act as a reserve for very difficult / near-death situations. The rapid health regen outside of combat fills the role of TQ health potions but works better since you can’t activate it inside of combat and it takes a while to kick-in. Basically if you have to rely on that to heal during combat, you have to run around / away a considerable distance, which is counter-productive and feels lame. So instead it makes me want to have better damage mitigation and in-combat healing skills. Thus, the rapid regen servers the purpose of replenishing you while you run between encounters.
So far it all seems to be working fairly well together but you can see for yourself once we get to alpha.
Woo, can’t wait!
Lots of the Skills in Titan Quest became obsolete in higher difficulty levels. Are you going to try and make more skills scale with level better?
Glad to hear the direction this is going. It sounds like medierra is taking the necessary steps to improve non combat skills without pigeon holing classes into predefined roles (tank, healer, blah, blah). I hated that mechanic in MMOs and it is the reason I have sworn them off for good.
I hope so. I was fairly inexperienced when I originally designed and balanced TQ and after that experience I feel like I have a much better idea of what to look out for this time around. I’m sure I’ll still make some mistakes but hopefully they will be fewer and less severe.
Part of the problem on TQ is that I realized some skills were bound to be underpowered at higher levels / not scale well but there wasn’t much I could do to address that without creating other imbalances. It isn’t just a matter of tweaking some numbers on skills. The supporting role that equipment plays is critical to this problem and I’ve tried to be more mindful of that from the start this time around.
Well if it makes you feel any better, the TQ skills were much better than those in Torchlight. A good idea would probably to have damage mostly scale up with level, and have skill point be more about improve proc chances, radius of effect, and that sort of thing. Of course on the opposite side of the spectrum are one-point wonders.
Not sure how your first quote above and your second quote re change to potions really marry up. Don’t they contradict each other a little…certainly as far as the “healer” goes? If you make each class able to effectively heal themselves are you basically saying there will not be a place for the party bandage in Grim Dawn?
I’m not objecting if there isn’t as I realise this is not an MMO it’s an ARPG. In fact, one of my main objections to MMO’s like WoW is that soo many people get stuck in the tunnel vision rut of their supposed class role and think that’s the only way to play it. To me, being flexible and able to adapt to situations (and have the skills to do so…a bit of off-healing by the tank, a bit of off-tanking by the dps, CC from the healer etc) make for a more interesting experience.
Just trying to clarify in my head what you are thinking
We have had prior discussions about this and since this is an ARPG, every class will be capable of being a “DPS” class. Grim Dawn is not an MMORPG and many people will be playing single player, so trying to pigeonhole classes into specific roles is not ideal.
Some classes may have more or better ways to heal themselves, while others may have more of a kamikaze offensive fighting style, but at the end of the day I believe all of them are going to be able to do enough damage to keep the game at a fast pace.
28 Skills?! I was hoping GD would be simpler and more fun than TQ. It seems GD will be more complicated and harder(according to other threads/posts).
As people have said a lot of TQ’s skills were obsolete, and it only had 20 compared to GD’s proposed 28…
More complicated and harder IS more fun. Go play Barbie’s Magical Fairy Adventure. (make sure you set it to easy)
I hope it will be more fun (although that imo will not be easy, I certainly had more fun with TQ than with any other ARPG - and most other games in general).
I certainly hope that it is not any easier however.
As people have said a lot of TQ’s skills were obsolete, and it only had 20 compared to GD’s proposed 28…
This is an argument for having better skills, not fewer - and medierra already said the new skills should be more useful than the ones which were obsolete in TQ.
As far as I am concerned, the more skills, the better. This allows for more / more diverse builds (much like you focus on cold or lightning in Storm).
Easier and fewer skills turns it into Torchlight, which was not that much fun to me.
lol Barbie’s Magical Fairy Adventure wouldnt be fun no matter what setting it is on, so you are way off base with that comparison.
I disagree. More complicated IS more complicated, not more fun. More fun IS more fun. 
I am probably more your average casual gamer, not the hardcore gamer that mostly populates and posts on this forum.
Don’t be such a naysayer all the time, trust in Crate just as the US trust their government. (ok bad analogy)
More skills isn’t bad, less skills is because it leads to a boring, dull game. More skills means more build possiblities which means more playability. Not hard. Hard if you have some sort of OCD and need to max every skill, in which you shouldn’t be playing arpgs anyway cause i’ve never played one that lets you accomplish that.
As far as I know, most players end up finding 1-2(or so) active skills(passive skills are another matter) that they like the best and suit their style of gameplay and use them for the whole game. Having 25 other skills(no matter how good they are) they wont or rarely use isnt going to make the game more fun.