Customisation in skill trees

This was posted in the New Player Welcome thread, but it deserves special mention as feedback.

The whole "I levelled Purify Burst to 40 even though it's useless just to get Banish Undead which is great" is an excellent argument in changing how skill trees work.

I get that there needs to be some replacement for learning higher level magic, but maybe there should be more choice in what skills are levelled up before the next whole tier opens up.

Make it so that levelling either Healing Ray OR Purify OR Beneficient Blessing unlocks the ability to learn any/all of Healing Burst, Purify Burst, Banish Undead, Life Power, Life Reach.

It's a lot less complicated for the player to only be levelling tiers instead of individual skills, and they can customise their character much more uniquely. Balancing skills should become easier as well.

We'd basically be getting a step closer to building our own spellbooks the way we want them.

 

Part of the issue is that the game is extremely grindy right now. If you had quests constantly dropping 5k xp in your pool, you'd probably blow through 1-40 and not care. Not that I'm defending the skill trees - there are probably a dozen things I'd do differently.

 

I don't really mind having to unlock things. I just wish that all of the worthless skills that are seeing no use at all were either improved or removed.

 

I'm not cruising through those get-to-40 trees, stuck on trying to get more XP.

What would you do differently? Let's brainstorm this for the devs as much as possible.

 

The increase from level 10 to level 40 as a requirement to unlock skills deeper in the tree has added this need to grind out skills to 40 that you'll never put on your bar again.
There has been a *lot* of XP pooling and gustballing to affect this result. On one hand, - with magic at any rate - it helps build up attunement which has a long term benefit, but on the other hand you are forced to 'waste' a lot of experience that could be put to better use, especially at low levels.

I don't really understand some of the dependencies either; I think an idea would be to remove some of the 'dependency' lines and instead have skills available (like passives for example) that are trainable once you have a 'total' number of points in that tree, rather than 40 points in a particular skill.

 

Oh heck yes.... please.
Makes a lot more sense....

 

I think possibly the total number of points combined within a school of magic could be the requirement. That gives more flexibility, if you don't want certain tier skills you can skip them entirely as long as you have enough levels in earlier skills.

Maybe add in a basic innate to each school of magic as the very first skill as well. The Earth school variant could be called "Lore of Gaia" (or simply Earth) which would be the very first Earth skill you'd learn. As an innate it would increase overall Earth effectiveness and add to attunement and with enough points let you access further skills within Earth. Somewhat like Swordsmanship.

 

I think someone suggested something alike…but I do not remember where…...whatever, I think too that this could be a possibility.
I do not think that e.g. fixed 40 points for each skill tier would be good solution and would suggest that we would need different attunements for every skill.

E.g. fire magic (These numbers are just examples)
Flame Fist needs 0 fire attunement
Highly Flammable needs 1 fire attunement
Ignite Weapon needs 3 fire attunement
Fire Arrow needs 5 fire attunement
Fire Proof needs 7 fire attunement
Fire Reach needs 10 fire attunement
Immolation needs 13 fire attunement
Fireball needs 16 fire attunement
Ring of Fire needs 20 fire attunement
Summon Fire Elemental needs 24 fire attunement

The current need to learn e.g. Highly Flammable bevor you can learn Fire Reach I would keep as it is but without the need to have x lvl in the prior skill.
Maybe they could even add the need of different school e.g. to Summon Fire Elemental you need additionally 5 air attunement.
Also they could maybe add additional quests for learning specific skills.
And maybe even some skills could be mutually exclusive...as a type of specialization. E.g. either you can learn Fire Arrow & Fireball or Ignite Weapon & Immolation but not both and whatever path you choose both paths will unlock the possibility to learn Ring of Fire.

Edit: Adjusted attunement values

 

When it was 10 to unlock, no one cared, but 40 feels like an investment.

Pretty sure it was to slow down advancement to higher tiers more than anything.

But a quick pass/shuffle of the glyphs in the tree may have been a good idea at the same time.

Purify used to be quite handy when Zombie Plague would kill u. Perma DoT

 

I personally don't have an issue with it. I could see it dragging down lower level players though. Level 0->40 for me is hardly any XP investment. Plus purify definitely does have its uses. Such as for clearing posion DoTs and the zombie plague once it returns. I'm assuming there will also be other negative status ailments added to the game in future releases that it will be necessary to have for clearing.

You said Banish Undead is good, but I have to disagree there. It's not good imo because it's a single target spell and has a long cast time. Why use Banish Undead when you can just use Searing Ray instead which does about the same amount of damage, has a shorter cast time, and takes less XP investment to unlock? I think Banish Undead needs to become an AoE like Earthquake to be a good spell personally. Especially consider its visual effect looks like it's an AoE.

 

That's an insanity....

 

Banish undead is AoE... that's what i always thought at at least... Looked in my case as if it was damaging more than 1 undead, when they were bunched up around me.

 

When I last used it, it was hitting single target only. If you hover over the tooltip, it has a "RANGE" rather than a "RADIUS" like all other AoE skills. It's range reads something like 33 units. That would be an insane AoE. I'll have to try it again, but I definitely wasn't hitting other undead around me last time I tried it. Maybe it was bugged at the time.

 

Banish undead: it would be cool if it did AOE and Ranged! But I think it is also only ranged, 2 seconds to cast, hits one target. I used it a few days ago.. and couldn't see why I would want to use it over Obsidian Arrow, or Searing Ray.

 

It's funny...I recently bug reported banish for not hitting multiple mobs...It has an effect of light shooting all around so I assumed that was the intended effect...I hope it is otherwise it is pretty worthless for a single mob kill.

 

Banish in itself is not AoE (Although I agree it should be). It does spellweave with Healing Rain into Cleansing Rain, which IS an AoE that both damages undead and heals friendlies.

 

I think its ridiculous that I have had to put 350 points in fire and air so far to try to get resistance to their uberness in PvP (more air then fire) and it still barely seems to make a dent in the damage. Such a waist of time and resources.