specialisation

So we have 3 major tree, combat magic and strategy,

Would be nice to have 3 spec but not more then 1 spec per tree.


Diablotine

 

I prefer my Water + Air spec for RP purposes (not going to debate how foolish it is in practical terms).

I suspect a lot of dexxer types will want to keep weapon + shield/armour specs so I don't think 1 per tree is a good way to lean.

 

I'd like to see some specialization restricted skills.. if you're specialized in tree A and B, you have access to a skill that other players can't train.

 

You have my support for 3 specs. Not that Catnip listens to me. They Don’t

 

Ideally combos would fill this role though not much has been done with that system for a while.

Otherwise, if we're talking "tree" as in a specific skillset such as bludgeon, there are so many possible A/B combinations that it would be a huge ask to develop synergies for every pairing. If we're talking tree as in combat/magic/strategy we'd end up with the synergies favouring e.g. bludgeon over ranged, chaos over water... balance would be nigh-impossible in either case.

 

I suggested that too. Called them Ultimate Skills.

 

I personally dislike the notion of exclusivity completely, it goes directly against the whole free character building/classless system. I understand the rationale of creating "balance" through "limitation" (which the system doesn't really do since the trees aren't balanced to begin with) but it does make for a clunky experience. The larger problem for me anyway, is that it discourages experimentation and lateral growth without time consuming and costly reroll/retraining activities.

We've entered an age of plenty, where the glut of experience gain far far exceeds original progression levels. I remember when a million experience an hour was considered power levelling, and here we are with 15-million-in-20-minutes and let's take a break. In this new age, there is experience in surplus and it would be nice to be able to use this to create alternatives for one's character rather than dumping a billion experience into a skill to raise its effective value by 0.1 whatever.

The proposal would be, to allow all specializations to be trained - specifically, allow experience to be put into everything, spend it where you like, forget this whole "one goes up the other sets itself down" and other clunky, awkward, accident-prone nonsense. Put your experience where you want it. HOWEVER, you could only have two specializations "active" at any one time, and we could add the ability to save different "loadouts". Many games employ this methodology to allow players to choose their build/setup based on what they are going to go do. Shroud allows it, to a point, but the specializations are pretty hard-fixed and many builds are simply not viable unless one is specialized. I'm not suggesting that the ability to "swap loadout" be done on-the-fly, we could put any necessary limitation on it - ie, tie it to the oracle or to speaking to the associated master NPC.

There'd even be monetization potential with this, too - adding additional"loadout slots" as an account based unlock (similar to bank slots, some for gold, some for cotos), adding a "tuning device" town deco item that people could engage with to swap their active specs (in town only, as alternative to going and finding the master trainer/oracle) and it could be a cool looking deco doohicky besides.

How this would work in practice is, I have all my gear to be a bard tamer and those are my two specs and I have my decks and such. I also have put experience into fire and sun specializations, but I get no benefit from them if they aren't "active." I go click the thing, and switch my active specs, and voila, I can now put on my mage gear and go roast things. There's no need to link decks to each loadout, as I think we have plenty of deck slots.

I think this would simplify matters greatly, in that players could invest some of the millions of experience in "alternatives" which could diversify their experience or allow more experimentation to truly find what their favorite build is. It also would help when new skills are added for people to give them a fair evaluation by having them appropriately specialized/geared. It would not make any difference to the current power level as we're not adding the ability to activate more than 2 specializations at a time, we're basically just allowing people to "waste" experience on inactive skills (much in the same way that we can now, i.e. if I've levelled up sword and bow, but I can only "hold" one of those at a time!)

There's other benefits as well, such as creating demand for more gear since its likely people would be switching more often / have more different builds to try and gear up instead of maxing out their current build and "job's done." It also opens up potentials that others have mentioned, such as adding special synergy skills that only become available when you have two specific specs, or even the ability to unlock a third specialization (!) at say, some designated adventure level, to give adventure level some sort of goalpost (as its currently pretty irrelevant). These are all kinda additional considerations to the core idea, which is just to allow you to change your character loadout without having to use unlearning potions and spend hours of tedious dummy-bashing every time you want to try something new (and then again fi you didn't like it...).

 

Perhaps an easier way to add meaningful choices would be adding restricted Mastery skills based on the skill level of the specialization. Once you get the specialization to a certain level (120, 140, 160, etc), it unlocks the new skills at the master trainer.

Some of these new higher level skills could be specific to the specialization and skill tree itself... and others could be tied to Specialization Groups - which would be unlocking skills that require you to train certain combinations of skill tree specializations. These higher level skills could also have specific skill requirements as well - perhaps you need Silent Movement at 140 and Subterfuge specialization at 140 to unlock a certain Subterfuge Mastery skill.

We could add additional Tabs in the Skills menu within the skill trees and they might be called the 'Skills | Mastery' tabs and the new restricted skills would populate in the Mastery tab based on your specialization choices.

The new skills would be a reward for sticking with a skill tree or magic school for so long, investing so much XP into it. Although the additional effects from the specializations are already doing this to some extent.



But I'd still want faster skill gain on the PvP side of it...somehow. As a PvPer I don't want to be constantly grinding grinding grinding mobs.

 

What if specialization-unlocked skills levelled up by some other method not strictly tied to grind? (Could be achievement based, cash sink based, quest based...)

 

I would suggest thinking of Specialization as a tree of passive skills that increase range, duration, or skill power.
I'll also give you some ideas:
1) Limit the choice of specializations to individual schools "Magic", "Combat" or "Strategy" (2 in "Combat", 2 in "Magic" or 2 in "Strategy").
2) Orient the "Strategy" as a direction of support,
consisting mainly of non-combat skills, offset by summoned pets and attacking auras.
3) Move "Trick" to "Fight" and name "Daggers"
Transfer "Life Magic" to "Strategy"
Transfer all summoned elementals to
Focus School.
Add to school "Fight" "Fight on horseback", combine
her with the Spears school.
There are many variations, I described what immediately came to mind, do not judge strictly)

 

im still a fan of the soulstone concept from UO so here i will call them... skillstones sell skillstones on the coto store that are bound to your account (so you can trade between chars if desired). you can right-click a skill, much like the unlearn scroll, but instead of returning the XP to the character pool you can choose to store it to the skillstone which stores the XP amount and the skill to the item (maybe the char too in case it is to be char restricted). when you are ready to bring the skill back, you right click the skill again and this time restore from the skillstone which it returns the XP to the skill. if its a specialization it would prevent restoration if you already had XP in two other specs forcing you first to unlearn or store an existing spec before restoration. if the skill isnt set to learn it would prevent restoration as well. would be a great opportunity to make some COTO store sales:

skillstone: 200 COTO?

i think the issue with doing more than 2 specs is that it will take a lot of work to implement as it can affect multiple areas including all the math calculations and tuning. with the disabling of a spec, the code underneath would still need to add checks for the active specs vs the inactive which again will be a lot of work. the skillstone concept has foundational precedents with unlearn scrolls and books of learning which really are just manipulating skill XP. all the maths and checks dont need to be touched at all.

personally i know i would use skillstones a lot for specs as i like to change up fairly often. currently when i switch i just unlearn one and spend time training the other spec back up with the XP. skillstones would be a huge convenience and would allow me to change more often.

 

S-stones would potentially be a great money-spinner if UO is any indication, I'm just not clear on the following:

Other than specialisations (which directly conflict which each other) and possibly a few others like the skills which reduce attunement in opposing magic schools... what would be the benefit of removing XP from one's character? Since the stoned XP are not available for reassigning to other skills I don't see any reason to stone my crushing blow/healing ray/camouflage etc even if they're irrelevant to my alt build. Maybe I'm missing the point?

 

I agree!

 

great question goes along with the capability of transferring it to a different char on the same account (if they built that in/allowed it).

 

My recollection is that we don't have a shared XP pool amongst different characters on the same account anymore because it was very exploitable in terms of XP generation, so I am guessing transferring it between characters would be off the table.

 

we still technically do. you can see it with the /xp command. daily login xp still goes to the shared pool.

...but yes, that is what i recall too.