upgrading of skills

Well I was thinking about the newest announcement of crafting specialization and a possibility to make specialization more interesting while still keeping the “you can do everything” aspect that seems to be a need and my first idea would a small but general change of the skill system.

Currently you learn a skill and level a skill from 1 to 200+. This would more or less stay as it is but instead of choosing a specialization skill you would for each single skill at GM get the possibility to upgrade the skill either by doing a quest or by simply visiting a trainer. After the upgrade you would start again at lvl 1 but the effects of the skill would be slightly different. (All the exp in the skill above GM will be transferred back to the pool.)

E.g. Thrust -> upgraded Thrust
Range = 2.5 -> 2.75
Cooldown = 5 seconds -> 4.8 seconds
Damage = 6-17 physical damage -> 8-20 physical damage
Exp to GM = 1.2M -> 6M

For crafting it would be the same. E.g. Mining Proficiency -> upgraded Mining Proficiency
Skillful Harvest = +0.5 -> +0.55
Exp to GM = 1.2M -> 6M

The current learned skills we have would be e.g. the scholar level of the skills, the next lvl the apprentice level and maybe there could be some more upgrade steps.

With the upgrade of a skill not just its stats also the visuals could change. E.g. all fire spells could get a color pattern displaying the upgrade lvl. E.g. red -> orange -> yellow -> …
Elementals could have different sizes based on the upgrade lvl e.g. small -> medium -> large -> … and so on.

For crafting this could mean that there are recipes you can just learn if you have the needed upgrade or the created items change or have a chance to change depending on the upgrade lvl (simple chair -> carved chair -> ornate chair ->...).
Nodes could offer more, changed or additional resources if you harvest them with an upgraded skill.

You would have the choice to keep playing just like you currently do or switch to a more rewarding but also more expensive upgraded version of the skill. This would offer the possibility to specialize by just choosing to upgrade specific skills while still letting you learn everything that seems to be a needed feature for a part of the avatars.

Maybe this could be even combined with the development of the episodes. E.g. with each new episode we get a new upgrade possibility for the skills with new effects, different skill modifications,…

It’s just a rough idea but what do you think?

 

Isnt this what combos do ? Seems kinda redundant to have 2 systems doing the same thing . I like your idea though ..i dont really like to drag glyphs on top of another to create another glyph .... I find the combat system very convoluted .. we spend too much time chasing blessings...buffing before each fight , combining glyphs, making sure we apply stuff like avoid or dodge soon as it expires ..it leaves very little time to actually enjoy the fight ...so i think any system that can make any of the things i mentioned more automatic is better .

 

From what I've read in his suggestion, it does not look like combos, it's ressembling more like a "prestige" system like other games had (Reset to 0 but get a small something out of it). While I do like the idea, I would really enjoy some overhaul to the combat system first, i.e. make Stances a toggle, not a castable, expand on the combo system A TON, and make some buffs slightly longer (a 30 second buff is really annoying).

 

Just as @Violette Dyonisys guessed I did not had combos in my mind.
I was thinking about adding sometimes new dots (bleeding, burning, healing over time,..) or effects (knock down, slow down,…) on upgrading a skill or change existing effects e.g. the ring of fire damage could be less constant and instead the longer you are standing in the ring the more damage it creates e.g. by adding a stacking dot or ...
On reaching GM you either can continue your progress to lvl to 101+ with the skill you know and love or you can upgrade the skill to a slightly different but most likely stronger version of this skill.

 

It would be nice if there were a way to have combos without glyph stacking. I don't have the bandwidth for it, so combos (even though being ranged/light armor/minimal magic, there aren't that many available to me) are never going to be part of my arsenal.

 

They should just let us combine them and place them in the deck already made. They could add a slightly longer draw time for it and count it as 2 glyphs.

Maybe even allow them to be locked with some type of drawback like a longer cooldown.

 

I don't bother with combo's anymore. Too much effort. I'd rather just charge up a skill rather than combo. Less of a headache.

Wish there was a better mechanic in place.

 

I like the idea of them, but they're not really implemented in a way that's ideal for people my age.

 

When someone says combo, I think the combining of 2 different skills, not stacking of the same skill, I call that dynamic stacking and heat stacking depending on the method to stack you are using.

 

As for the op, so what happens when I want to unlearn a skill? Would this make things harder to balance just like adventure specs brought imbalance? There is always good and bad about things, its good to try and be able to see both sides of something to really understand it. If one does not do this, you can have something that seemed like a good idea at the time become really really bad.

 

Well I guess there would be two possibilities:
A - They would handle unlearning just within the upgrade-lvl. E.g. you can unlearn a upgraded skill just to lvl 1 and need an additional mechanic to move one upgrade step downwards.

B - They would handle unlearning spanning. Unlearning a upgraded skill below lvl 1 would change the upgraded skill to the non-upgraded skill at lvl 99. (skill 100 = upgraded skill 1)

I would say B is the most reasonable solution as I fear the need to use e.g. a special unlearning book to unlearn the upgrade might create confusion.

About balancing…well of course this would make things more difficult to balance. Even if the skills are just slightly more powerful this can change the difficulty of combats. On the other hand if they would add one upgrade lvl per episode they could adjust the content of the episode to fit the upgraded skill system but this would also mean that staying with the non-upgraded skills would probably make that content a little bit more difficult.
In this context I guess raiding “overpowered” EP1 content might be just a problem if EP1 content would be more rewarding than comparable EP2 content.
Thinking about it it would be difficult but possible to let upgraded skills be just active in the content of the new episode. E.g. moving back to EP1 with an upgraded skill at lvl 40 this skill will be automatically downgraded to the non-upgraded skill at e.g. lvl 114 as long as you are visiting the content of EP1 and if you move back to EP2 you get your upgraded skill lvl 40 back.

Without a connection to an episode the skills might still be stronger but you will also need more time to lvl them up. In my example I chose a multiplicator of 5 for the needed exp that is maybe too high or too low but this might slow down the skill progress enough to balance the usage as we are not talking about doubling the damage with the upgrade and instead of maybe 10% difference between a skill 100 and an upgraded skill 100.
That just a small benefit in progress is enough to continue are you proving every day.

Thinking about it maybe one additional benefit of such an upgrade system would be to get again constant “you got a lvl up”-messages. I guess with the lvls at 140+ it is just rare that you get a lvl up info and yes sometimes they are annoying but as far as I remember dev talks a visual indicator of your progress is important as a measurement for the gamer that he is still making progress.