@Berek- Question about skills (Jack of all trades or Master of all trades?)

HI! I was just reading in a post about " Decay " and someone mentioned about users running around with 75GMs. which got me wondering the direction in this regards.. I do remember the devs saying they wanted users to have skills in multiple schools but to which degree is intended?

1: Is it intended for the future for users to be able to maintain in the 60 -80 Gms ? As there will be spots so hard that even these users will not be able to fight alone?

OR

2: Decay will gradually apply the "Jack of all trades Master of none" Where users will only be able to hold 10-20 adventure GMs in a few schools and will need to have different Characters to full fill difference Roles?

NOTE: Forgive the strawman post, if there is a third option I am sure you will let us in on it

 

With the changes to spell resistance/immunity I don't see how this can be enforced, it is a requirement to be good in as many different skills to be effective. I'm currently an air mage, however I have found some of the creatures I liked to slay in the past are now immune to all of my damage and some of the bosses I liked to kill are now very resiliant to air magic. so I may have to train another skill - say archery; which would mean I need to train a lot of those combat skills to go with it.

 

Same here. Aside from some mobs being immune to magic, the current focus depletion rate is also problematic for mages because they have no focus-free auto-attack. I started training blades yesterday for this very reason, and switching to my melee deck in the middle of battle has saved the day for me several times already. I don't know yet how hard building up and maintaining a second build will be in the face of skill decay, but I'm not in danger of acquiring even one GM anytime soon. And the recent changes (mob immunity and focus depletion) make it harder for new players to level up their primary skills since they have to diversify at lower levels now and spread their hard-won experience amongst more skill trees than was previously the case.

 

Without hard caps everyone will use everything. It just gets a little harder to maintain all the skills at a high enough level. Don't know if they really want to change that, as it became kinda necessary for PVE with the very high resistances of some mobs.

 

would be interesting to hear an answer but I doubt we will.

either they are working on decay/ a system to limit this. or they are not.

and I don't think we will hear about it either way until a change happens as the earth ele not taking dmg from earth ele while mining was intended until it wasn't

 

I think the system should have more limitations, but not from choose from all you want but from keep all you want. Even if you play 25 hours a day and constantly kill Lichs in DR not dying you need to make choices in the end and do some specialization.
Lets say a decay would drain from every skill ahead 80.
1-5 GM's are easy to hold if you made it to 100, but you have to constantly yourself these 5 skills and make enough xp to keep them up. No big grind, but if you dont care about they will decrease to 80 in some weeks.
To hold 5-10 GM you need to constantly play, use the skills and get a good amount of xp for them. Grind Highlevels.

I think everything beyond 10 GMs is immersion breaking, boring to play because of beeing overpiwered and not realistic at all.

Choose from what you will Master.
And dont think you can Master everything.
And learn that to be a Master doesnt mean you are ready and from now on never need to do something to keep your Mastery.

If someone decided to push a skill ahead 100 it should be more and more cost to do so. Lets say to keep a skill at 110 you need the XP to keep 2 GM, 120 = 3 GM...

So you can choose to push some skills ahead grandmastery on the costs of holding more GM's

Question. Are Pool XP limited?
If not, i would like to see a limit for Pool XP.

People should need to constantly play to keep their skills high and should not build up a big pool to grant them the possibility to keep skills very long up without having to get xp.
Lets say a full Pool is to keep 5 GMs two weeks up on 100.
So casuals who made it to 5 GM can build up a max pool to not loose any skills while 2 weeks offline.
If you have more than 5, this pool maybe just lasts 12, 10, 7 days in cause of 10 GMs.

And to say this, decay works offline too.
If you pause a long time you come back at skills 80 and need to retrain to GM.
And keep playing to hold that.

 

Well that's because their design/balance is kinda guiding our hands on the matter. It's a really tight grip too.

The lack of hard caps doesn't automatically make everyone want to use everything. I sure as hell don't.

If they didn't allow people to maintain so many GMs, we might be able to see specialists who masters a few skills instead of everyone being masters at everything. You know, like the "[G]rand [M]aster" title entails. Then, there might be a need to group up with different types of characters in order to effectively deal with the wide variety of monsters.

It certainly doesn't help that most skills can't go bellow level 40...

 

Yeah, I always kinda knew this system was going to end up allowing players to be everything. Yes, there is exp decay when you die, but what if you don't die? There needs to be some kind of cap on progress, or natural decay of skills not used often/ever.

 

The system is setup to be very difficult to achieve a lot of skills at GM level. You will train more efficiently if you choose only a few at any given time.

 

... Okay... define "a lot", please.

Also, the later statement doesn't really say much concerning player's ability to reach GM levels; only that they most likely trained one (or few) GM skill(s) at a time.

 

DISCLAIMER: Vastly oversimplified explanation below. I am purposefully overgeneralizing here:
Decay operates as a function of your total exp, and (oversimplified) decays at a rate of 0.0025 of your pool, per 24 hours. The actual amount is less because right now max decay caps at 12 hours.
This works out to ~0.0001 (0.01%) of your total exp per hour.
Your cheapest skills (1x) cost ~1.4 million exp to gm.
Most trees cost around 20-30x to gm everything in them, with some exceptions.

So roughly ~45 million exp to gm a tree entirely.
Now note it doesn't matter where this exp is, in lots of skills or a few, or in your pool. Just your total amount.

So, if you gm'd one tree entirely, and ignored everything else, you'd have ~45 million exp on your char(adventurer level 90), and would therefore decay at a rate of (45,000,000 * 0.0001 = 4500 exp per hour). Maxing out (currently) at ~54k at 12 hours without a death.

If your farming rate is ~300k exp per hour, and you hunt 5 hours a week total, but you die multiple times every day to max out your decay rate, your exp flow would look like this:
300k/hr * 5 = 1,500,000 exp earned.
Decay rate = ~112.5k exp per day at maximum decay rate (dying constantly or at least 1 per 12 hours).
1,500,000 - (112,500*7) = 712k exp spare. So almost double our decay rate.

So basically, if your maximum farm rate is ~1.5 million exp a week, your character will reach "equilibrium" at ~90 million exp on your char, or 2-3 trees fully gm'd.

But that assumes you die all day every day (you won't), and that you only earn 1.5 mil exp in a week (most at that level earn more).

Hope this was informative.

Bonus information:
The amount of exp required to get a skill to 80, is roughly 15% of what it takes to get it to 100. Which means if they're the same "difficulty" of skill, you can have ~6-7 skills at 80 in place of 1 skill at 100.
This holds true for any gap of 20 exp (6-7 skills at 60 for every 1 at 80, etc ).

Note different skilsl have different exp multipliers. Train strength requires 10x what the base archery skill costs. Meaning to GM it requires 14 million exp, not 1.4 like the base archery skill.

Oversimplified Rule of thumbs:
Base skills in each tree cost 1. (1.4 mil to gm)
Passives usually cost 3-4x (4.2-5.6 mil to gm)
The stat skills (train str/dex/int) cost 10x. (14 mil to gm)
Some trees as a whole are cheaper. Gming the air tree costs less than half what gming the fire tree costs.

Shameless plug:
SotaHUD (link in signature) currently shows an approximate exp amount for your char, as well as decay rate calculations based on that (Accurate to within 5-7% depending on how close you are to your next level). Just type /stats and look at the stats overview tab.

 

I really wish the dev's could give us a real answer to this question. You dont give a time frame for the comment. Right now is is *FAR* to easy to achieve a lot of skills. Its ridiculous to see people with 100+ GM's already, crazy... yes they have put a lot of hard work into it but I have a total of 10 GM's and Im casual. I can only assume that you mean that in the future it will be hard? How hard?

 

Your not really answering the question , There are users that are at 50+ GMS as we speak and I also know quite a few that are getting there dayly, ( And its something we all already know ). So what are you saying then for the future?
Are you saying that the Future holds what is going on Now? ( I ask this because your statement is not clear or informative enough to invoke clarity on the subject).

 

even if you have 200 gms, you are limited by your deck, so it doesnt matter.

1: its up to the player to choose; do you like losing excruciating amounts of exp when you die? over 60 non-crafting gms is very painful. no one likes losing hundreds of thousands of exp upon death

2: preferably. deck limits this though

 

I saw a person last night that had at least 150 skill in a str buff. They are a PvP player who also hides their GM's (locking them at 99.999). Massive GM's are the outcome of being able to gain unlimited and unchecked XP but that also does not mean its just in GM skills. eventually people will have 200 GM's that are at 150+.

This is why in UO you were limited in total skill points.

Death? Bah... I have died like 3-4 times since persistence (and those were stupid deaths like being AFK and getting agro) and Im adv lvl 90. Im not worried about losing any exp.

Death has to be the worst idea for trying to limit this.

 

please explain how someone with 200 gms can make a deck that exploits all these GMs without being a deck that is too large; large decks will leave you wishing you had made a smaller one when you aren't getting a specific spell that you need.

and you would be worried if you lose +400k exp when you die,...

p.s.: i dont care for the decay system, its an outdated style that makes no sense to me. but i like the deck limitations and would push for 3 decks per character max, instead of 6

 

How do you account for the "200gm guy" to gm all of the passives like health, strength, intellect, critical damage, etc? Those aren't required to be in a deck and they make a heck of a huge difference in combat.

 

Please rationalize this with me.

"deck". I have GM's in my primary attack skills so thats only 5-10 ish skills. I am trying to actively raise the ~50 - ~75 *passive* skills behind them. Every single one of them benefits me. I sure am not limited by a deck. To boot, I focus on Earth and Life. My obvious goal is to get as many skill points in both those trees as I can to maximize my bonus in those trees, even if I dont use the skills. To boot, I use a few skills in almost ever tree so eventually to be strong, Im gonna need to raise up every skill in those trees to get my base bonus up.

But, you are again limiting your reasoning.

There are a total of what 50 crafting skills.

Im a casual player who works 50 hours a week. I GM'ed the primary skills of blacksmith, Carpentry and Alchemy in the first 90 days after persistence. I also have some others like mining GM.

So, is it a good thing for the game that eventually and actually pretty quickly now, I could easily GM the other primary crafting skills as a casual player. Which means hard core players if not already, will have GM's in every single crafting skill in the game... how about GM's at 150?

Again, unchecked exp. And again, Im not worried about losing 400K exp if I die, I dont ever die.

 

I know... i train every single innate myself too,... and?

 

I am not limiting my reasoning, im excluding crafting skills, why would we be talking about crafting skills? there is no limit and no decay for crafting.... do you want a limit? if so... why? why limit anything really? crafting skills have nothing to do with the deck system or my post... so i dont know why you would bring this up