Specialisations

I sorta wish the spec buffs were actually just part of the normal skills, which unlocked at GM like perks. They'd start at about what you'd get currently if the spec skill was at 40. But, the "perks" would only improve if you were using the spec skill. Mainly, because it annoys me that I use the Tactics spec for literally one skill, because the spec bonus for that one skill is better than other entire trees' worth of spec bonuses.

 

Well, as someone who always tries to play the jack-of-all-trades character in any system, I have been running into some walls. However I don't think these walls are necessary insurmountable.

* Tactics Speculation is a kind of jack-of-all combat equipment specialization.

* Focus Specialization lets you have unparalleled control over your available glyphs, and with hot keys for 10 combat decks cycling through focused sets is not complicated. My main criticism is that Focus Specialization doesn't make summoned pets any more viable or approaching on par with tamed pets.

* Taming Specialization pretty much let's you explore any other style of game play and never have to worry about being effective in combat.

* Barding Specialization lets you completely ignore the downsides of heavy armor in terms of magic, and gives you a means to supplement the magic schools or completely ignore them as you focus on building resistance to them.

I understand the desire to want to be able to face every threat in the game without issue, or be able to take advantage of the bonuses of each specialization when convenient, but there needs to be something that differentiates people from each other in pvp and in group play - otherwise there will inevitably rise to the top a "one correct" set of armor and weapons to maximize the most beneficial cumulative effects - and I like that choices have to be made, even if the choice is to sacrifice a specific role and specialize in multiple generalist schools to specialize in flexibility, with the inevitable shortcomings such decision has always brought.

 

Spot on on that. Having a summoner stance or some kind of summoning passive on the spec would be great.

 

This is so much spot on. When playing anything, and whenever you ask people for suggestions, it often comes down to the same things : Pick a spec, push as hard as you can to push it to its limits, and then take a spec that will push the limit of the first one further. If gear was less important for mages, if your second weapon's skill tree mattered when dual wielding, if players had more means to deal with resistances (especially for all magic schools except fire and death), this system could actually work better. I know that there are so many ways to make things work in this game, but to reach the harder zones, such as Tartarus, Ruined Keep and such, you need to focus much harder, you can't attempt to play a Earth + Water mage in Tartarus maze, because the mage satyrs will never die, heck they don't even die against a Water + Sun (for Enlightenment buff) mage who geared up 100% in water. So many things that could be solved by either reducing the impact of attunement at higher levels (or attunement from gear at least).

 

Generally a lot of the problems in this game come from the fact that power comes from just stubbornly stacking stats for a single purpose. Having a clever or unexpected combination of skills is never more valuable than simply having overwhelming numbers on your side, and that's a massive flaw with this game. I think attunement should be removed from gear entirely and replaced with a generic spell power stat. The whole reason attunement was added to the game was so that people wouldn't just cherry pick the best spells from every school and ignore the others, but when attunement was added to gear the game went the opposite extreme where mixing magic schools is very inefficient for a high end character.

Maybe attunement shouldn't even be based on how many skillpoints you have in a school, but instead on what percentage of your deck is dedicated to that school of magic. Then change attunement from increasing spell effectiveness to modifying fizzle chance/cost of the spells, and you wind up with a system where you can freely mix one magic school with heavy armor, shield and weapon, to make something like a fire tank, or a cleric build, but a classic wizard with robe and staff can mix multiple magic schools together.

 

Agreed

Agreed as well

I can see ways to still implement pushes of power for one school, but not to the extreme attunement has forced it upon us.

Spell damage could simply be dependant on the amount of glyphs of the specific spell in your deck, with locked glyphs being dependent on how high you stack it, without requiring any attunement for this.

 

Specialization activation could have 15min(or a day) cooldown, so you can swap active pair, but not mid fight.

 

One thing that had been suggested a while back was that to swap specs you would need to visit the oracle, forcing you to actually go back to a town for this specific reason, it was a nice idea.

 

Maybe if it was more of a "currency split". Maybe we have 5-10 specializations slots, but they're per-skill, and not per-tree.

 

I created five separate accounts (gmail is wonderful) so that I could create specialized avatars.
Mage, Heavy Archer, Light Archer, two handed sword Heavy Tank, and two handed bludgeon Light armor.
Great fun, and it is has worked for me.