POLL: Is there a problem with not enough restrictions on opposing skill trees?

So I was reading through the forums and I see some concerns with people feeling they need to level up EVERYTHING, which (in my limited game experience) tells me that I can level up everything. I had ideas, but I thought maybe it was best to just put out a feeler and see if people really see this as an issue?

Oh, and my idea was to limit skill access based on choices in the opposing tree.
So break skills into Tiers: 1, 2, 3, 4. As soon as I open up a skill in Tier 1 in water, tier 4 in fire is no longer accessible to me. When I open up a Skill in Tier 2 water, tier 3 in fire is no longer accessible, etc. This 'may' also be able to be done by putting affinity requirements on spells, though I don't know how well building up one tree really hurts the opposite tree to know if this would work.

 

Go back to the original threads on negative attunement for opposing schools. It was brilliant. I miss it.

 

Yeah, it's been a long time since I read about some of that, but that was my understanding of how the game was to work. Where developing Fire meant you couldn't build up Water, etc. So when I started reading that wasn't the case I thought something wasn't working properly.

 

The problem you had was people who actually like to play multiple magic schools were feeling neutered and it only affected those doing magic. Leveling up swords didn't hamper your ability to level up archery or pole-arms, leveling up heavy armor didn't prevent you from developing light or cloth armors, leveling magic didn't stop you from focusing on another combat style, etc.

If your intention is to affect ALL skill trees and not just magic, then I would be very interested in hearing some of your ideas about counters and how that affects various skills. But if its just an attempt to hamper the arch mage play style that is less appealing.

 

It will never happen so I will not spend much time on it, but add "affinity" as the counter to "attunement" in melee. Just as magic gets some kind of bonus for being having higher and more skills in that tree (attuned), then having higher and more skills in the melee branches also add some kind of bonus (affinity). Already setup I think, Shield opposite of Ranged, Heavy opposite of Light, Polearm opposite of Sword, and I guess Bludgeon opposite of something like Spear tree (I think it should be its own with 2 handed 9' spears). I do not have the trees in front of me, please copy an image if you want to continue the discussion further.

So same thing. You spend a lot of time on sword tactics up close, you lose a bit of your edge in the bow and vice versa.

You can still train everything and be decent, but the true masters need to specialize a bit more.
There is a possibility to lighten up decay in this system. @Moiseyev Trueden btw: good to hear from you again.

 

The real problem they were having when attunement in one school lowered your attunement in the opposing school was in pvp. If opposing mages fought each other, it was over in a matter of seconds.

 

That's a very interesting point/concern. But isn't that the point of Fizzle? By choosing to put on heavy armor and grab a shield, many of those spells become unrealistic to wield. However, if you are looking for a way to make it so that you can't master all weapon skills. Perhaps as @GreyMouser Skye mentions put in a weapon 'affinity' which gives a bonus for focusing. However, implement an Affinity Cap. (Perhaps a matching Attunment Cap) Where I can only have X number of Affinity Points. So if I want to truly master swords, I would build all of my Affinity points to Swords meaning I wouldn't have enough left to become a master in Polearms. As similar system could be put in place for Magic, which wouldn't necessarily impede opposing schools but put limits on how much you can develop. A system like this would mean that becoming a Generalist means exactly that: "Jack of all trades = Master of None".

I would keep in mind though that I must be wielding a sword in order to use my blades skills. I can't access my polearm skills when wielding that blade. So to balance that on the mage side, you could make it so you must be wielding a wand of the appropriate school to access the skills? But put two sockets on wands/staves, so the max would be to have 2 wands maxing at 4 trees.

 

I never die, Im lvl 96. My goal now is to just get every single skill there is up to GM. Sure it will take me a while but there is nothing stopping me.

 

Agree. I always assumed that all trees would have benefits for players that exclusively chose the tree over it's counter(s). Magic is just more obvious than most, fire and water.

 

Thanks. Its been awhile. Was taking a sanity break.

 

But I want to be a STEAM mage!!! Fire and Water merge for nasty skin burns, frothing of milk for cappuccino, frizzing of hair styles (I will be most hated person at the dance parties), powering steam boat casinos, and other vital applications. 8^D

Unfortunately, fizzle isn't really a significant enough factor. When trying to balance it the caster is either completely screwed without cloth armor or completely negates or mitigates the difficulty of the other armors. Unless its changed in the time I've been away, it was more of an inconvenience than it was an actual detriment after a handful of levels (not that I think it should be a detriment as such, never liked the idea that different armors limit casting ability).

Always been a big believer in this which unfortunately I don't see our design team finding a good way to implement it. They've tried a few options (for which I have great respect of the willingness to try even if some of the ways of doing it really frustrated me) but sadly I don't think there is a good way of doing it without capping levels. The attunement/affinity system could work, but it runs into problems with passive skills and extreme custom builds mitigated by capping it at some point... but only if npcs are also affected by the same rules (death focused mages not being effective against 50% of mobs in game at the time was really sucky). The disadvantages to the PvP battles were quite obvious (as Mac2 pointed out), which brings up the problem with the opposing skill tree concept in general.

All in all, I'd love to see there be an interesting balance to justify time spent focused in a specific direction (melee, ranged, or magic), but until that happens I believe this is stance most people are going to take

The only real problem with trying to do that now would be those who have spent a long time GMing a wide range of stuff will suddenly find major negatives if anything was implemented. Still a worthwhile concept, but I just don't think it fits with the way the current game design is going.

 

Oops, this is my ALT account. I am GreyMouser Skye responding.

I do not see it as a problem. Know your limitations. Or have the devs fix the warding system (which is clearly labeled on the weapons you create when using a ward gem, seriously!) so it actually works with some sort of effect. A pure water mage could have full Sorcery Warding equipment to counter the Fire Mage.... at the expense of having even more Tempestry attunement or neighboring school bonuses. It is a trade-off, a choice. Choices are beautiful. Now it is a shopping list of which glyphs to grab first, as I am doing with my Alt. Silly mechanic.

BTW, it took me 2.5 hours to find my question answered in the last telethon, and then they almost did not answer because I guess they had not crafted these gems designed to add resistance to a school. Have over a 100 fire resistance just from gems and fire proof and get hit by an NPC fire mage.... it does absolutely nothing. @Chris

 

Its not really necessary IMO, because you can only use one weapon at a time, and there's a cost to switch weapons in battle. While you can go around carrying multiple weapons and switching between them its not really a great way to play. There's more of a problem with magic just because you can combine multiple schools, combine them with your weapons, etc. and at no cost in many cases because there are no reagent requirements.

Personally, my belief is that magic should always have reagent costs but then staffs or wands should help negate it at the lower levels for one school of your choice. Then, each magic school could be separated from each other by having at least one unique reagent per school. So, to mix magical schools you would have to get distinct reagents for each school.

But when we see more skill combos and magic combos come in there will be a reason to combine spells from opposite schools, which is why I don't like your suggestion of cutting off skill progression in opposing trees. So, for example, Fire and Water might be combined to create Steam spells, or Fire and Earth to create Magma spells, etc. Then you might even want to combo the highest tier summoning spell to summon things like Steam Elementals, Magma Elementals. You'd be cutting off some interesting gameplay by closing down progression like that.

I would rather just that the progression in multiple schools at once and active use of multiple schools at once just create an ongoing burden that would need to be filled. So this would incentivize specialization more unless the player wanted to juggle everything and absorb the costs.

 

The problem is their idea of Soft caps has completely and utterly failed - COMPLETLY

There should be no way a player should be able to GM and maintain Every skill in any way shape or form, so since they have let player get to such a point of imbalance with intended play that they are basically screwed along the fact that they refuse to accept a wipe as the fix to it.

 

I totally agree, which is why in the past 1.5 years I have focused on maximizing one full build totally expecting this to happen. But it hasn't and the dev's have let this drag on for a very long time and its long past the point where if they did start limiting things, there would be a complete and utter uproar form the user base. A lot of people have been complaining about capping in this game for a very long time and they never have and those people should not realize that its basically to late for them to do it.

 

I think we are just starting to see the soft cap system working. For example, to take death ray from level 100-120 costs about 13.9 million exp for 3 damage increase. To gm the entire air tree costs 17.5 million exp. To take healing burst from 100-120 is 20.9 million exp for 3 healing increase. Or, to look at this from a different perspective, It will cost 552.8 million to gm every adventure skill. Or you could get the air, death and earth tree's to 120 for 599.5 mil. Or you can get death mastery to 150 for 569.4 million. So, even before the multiplier on decay ( .5x for 41-80, 1x for 81-100, 2x for 101-120, 4x for 121+) a person is going to have to do more grinding to get one good passive to 150, then it would take them to get every adventure skill to gm and pay more on death. With the multiplier, they are going to lose more then 4x what a person with every adventure skill gmed will lose.

So, if you think it should be impossible to gm every adventure skill and maintain it, this also means no one is going to be able to get one good passive skill to 150, and yet the skills go to 200.

 

I don't personally think it should be impossible to GM everything as such. But currently there is neither a benefit nor a negative to not doing it. Sure the xp costs become exponentially cost prohibitive, but do the benefits make it worth striving for? As you point out in your breakdown, the cost to improve healing burst by 3 points once you are over 100 = enough to gm the entire air tree. So there isn't really a benefit to focus on improving healing burst by that 3 points. If they made it so that there was a solid benefit to pushing only a few skills up to those massive levels, then it would make it much more likely to stop people from GM everything because we now have something to strive for.

One of the problems is that the current "soft cap" concept we have breaks down to make it really tedious to grind out and don't make it worth the effort so people don't try to get everything to 200.

 

The benefit is versatility, the negative is, because you only have a limited amount of spots for skills, the exp used in all those other skills, could have been used to up the main skills you use most of the time, making you a little stronger, faster, safer for what you do most. I did have 151 gms, but now at 136. I did lose a little versatility, but gained in power for what I like to do most.

 

The idea of having new options for character development is valuable, and I can see that side of the coin, however I would like to put another spin on this conversation.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading "The Sorcerer's Daughter" in game, if you haven't read it, it implies a conflict between earth and fire factions. Putting aside the game mechanics for a moment, how does the ability to do everything impact the lore or world immersion of the game?

 

This was implimented and tested earlier in development and was very much opposed, also it was not working that well, as two mage sof opposing schools would often 1-shot each other.

But attunments, i believe, are the primary thing makign everyone believe it is neccessary to train eveery skill. So i woudl agree soemthign needed ot be done about attunments. The new attunment caps implimented seems to me to be fumbling tward the right direction!


I have not myself seen the effects of attunment defensively, but i hear that is the primary reason everyone takes all skills. If attunment lost thier defensive capabilities, you might have to tweak magic damage output again to prevent it being insane, but it might not make people feel they need to take every skill jsut to have some magical/elemental resistance