Conversation with Chris on skills

Excessively good news Redfish! I thought the skill caps were gonna be capped! Now I can have a character than can do all the harvesting and crafting without the need to fumble around with 2 characters big Yippe Yay!

 

Actually, thinking about this, there isn't any reason a bow couldn't be held in one hand by a mage either, even though he'd need both hands to fire an arrow.

The only weapons you couldn't hold in one hand are heavy ones that require both hands just to wield.

 

Couldn't one just rest a two handed weapon on your shoulder, or on the ground perhaps, leaving your "mage" hand free to engage ?

Perhaps a penalty could be that there is a delay when casting while both hands are in use ? Simulating the need to place the weapon at rest before casting.

 

Yea, they could possibly do that. They're already doing a penalty for mages when wearing armor; they could do a two-handed penalty. However, I don't think it should apply to things like staves and bows, which might need two hands to use, but only one hand to hold.

Maybe a weight penalty for what the mage is wielding, in which case playing a mage with a sword and buckler would be easier than a mage with a sword and shield -- and larger shields would add more penalty. But what about a mage that tries to dual wield two blades, while casting magic? It seems it would be a bit complicated. Possibly, they could just simply find a good game mechanic to distinguish weapons that require 2 hands to use, from those that require 2 hands to wield.

There's also an issue of the visuals. It also just doesn't look as good if a mage is holding something in the hand he's firing a spell from.

 

@Mishri

Not so. What Chris was quoted as saying here is precisely the type of thing we were told early on. RG gave us a big IF on skill caps.. if they were used they would be raised as new skills were added.. one of the first things they told us was that the main limitation to learning skills was time and the sheer number of skills there were to learn. It was all the talk of skill caps that was the change from what we were told early on.

If Chris is saying this recently then I can only surmise that the overall though process has never changed since the beginning. It's their communicating their intentions that is misleading. There have been comments made which sound very much like there will be caps. Such as the founder's FAQ talking about having caps in order to promote player interaction (which is what prompted the discussions about hard caps).

 

Also, some spells could require two hands. This could be used for spells deemed too powerful or non-combat. Just like 2-handed weapons.

Remember, they haven't put sheathing in yet either, so hopefully there will be some solution coming with that. I think it makes sense to have the mage spend an extra second to put away the weapon. It's not going to fizzle your spell & it'll work automatically (or based on a setting). Different draw times would be a welcome addition to weapon speeds. It may not make a huge difference, but the more ways to alter dps in a game, the less advantage it gives to one method.

It would be cool to see some extra moves added into skills like allowing a staff or pole arm or blade to be stuck in the ground for a quick-draw type ability (or multiple arrows), or to allow a character to just drop an item and pick it up later.

I'd also like to see a mechanic like that applied to say, throwing daggers. PLEASE can we just not have magic returning knives? Except in the case that they are actually super cool rare knives enchanted to return to you! Instead, allow "holstering" of weapons in various pockets / sheaths over the body. It would be great to see numbered preferences on weapons, so if you are say, disarmed of your sword, the game knows you want to draw your dagger next. Or maybe you have it set not to draw and you'll cast immediately in such a case.

 

Combining spells could require two hands, possibly.

 

They just need to think through the skill trees and have them make sense.

For example:
Some fire skills require a fire wand.
Some skills are some sort of buff which may add more damage to either a weapon (make a flaming sword) or my fire wand.
Perhaps moon doesn't require a wand because it's always designed to work with some other primary damage weapon.

Again, that was just an example.

My concern with the original skill lists was that they seemed a bit jumbled rather than fitting well into categories. I'd rather see a small number of buttons with knobs then a large number of buttons.

 

It sounds to me that we are in for a very bumpy ride for the next year untill everything becomes polished.
(as far as balancing)

 

PrimeRib <---<<< (one of the people who's comments I watch because of their sometimes profound nature ) Said;
They just need to think through the skill trees and have them make sense.

For example:
Some fire skills require a fire wand.
Some skills are some sort of buff which may add more damage to either a weapon (make a flaming sword) or my fire wand.
Perhaps moon doesn't require a wand because it's always designed to work with some other primary damage weapon.

Again, that was just an example.

My concern with the original skill lists was that they seemed a bit jumbled rather than fitting well into categories. I'd rather see a small number of buttons with knobs then a large number of buttons.
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TL~
I agree with all that he said, but I also believe this points to a very provocative truth;
Players are seemingly not becoming "a this or a that" in our SotA world where all is optioned as possible all in one with a plethora of combinations depending on which direction the player wishes to explore. Thus a player may "lean towards" being described as a Mage or Knight or Rogue depending on the stack of cards he chooses to incorporate into his Avatar.
As vastly different as the astrological maps of the Egyptians are to the middle ages European star charts, our game's sigils may become very entwined as if being a combination dial, but has yet to become fully visualized as such because of our past MMO RPG learnings. This is called the Mocking Bird Effect whereby what we have been taught as the parameters of knowledge are only those things we've all heard over and over again. "New" is then a very misunderstood concept with such effects as we can only draw from those "options of cards" that we have placed in our brain's deck.
I am interested in Rogue Skills and I see some in all the presented sigils and skill trees that seem the Rogue's property. Yet by way of the many options of card collecting, we could eventually see a magical Rogue that can walk through a wall and maybe even unseen.

And as Mike11 states in clear fact to us all, "we may be in for a very bumpy ride indeed"!
When there is no road, we must therefore hack our way through.
"New" Britannia, what a concept
~Time Lord~

 

Thank you Time Lord. I find myself annoyed with myself because I find myself talking about a classless system in terms of traditional RPG classes. Le sigh. I guess we all need a point of reference. I suspect our terminology will change once we are really in the game and creating new pathways and combinations.

 

It's really two forces at work. One is class and the other is role. So in WoW today, you essentially have a sub class locking in your role. But it didn't work that way originally, you could freely pick from all three trees for interesting builds.

RIFT had 8 trees for each class. So you had really interesting builds mixing range, melee, dps, healing, tank, support and lots of other ideas within one class. You ended up with so many overlapping skills that it had a fairly complex macro system. I hope they change the card system to be more or less like this.

But as I said before, I don't like a big mess of skills. I'd rather see something like:
Why: I press the <attack> key
What: I'm in fire->moon->chaos stance (fire being the damage source, the others adding buffs, procs, mana recovery, etc.)
How: Holding <shift> gives me a flame jet doing damage over time vs fireball

 

Sounds like Moon magic

I suspect we'll see a lot of cross-types, but I'd still like to see the 'pure' types somewhat distinctly defined in that they're kind of separate fields of expertise, and I think that would make that cross-types more interesting in the end. Instead of a guy simply 'happening to have some magic skills, fighting skills, and thief skills', he'll have to figure out a cool way to build that character and bring it to life.

 

I'd love to hear more about this...

For me, the thought of a pure casting also using a bow is beyond frustrating, it's blasphemy. The casual nature which some people seem to have no problem with this is equally annoying. But in terms of balance, it suggests (from my point of view) that everyone will be a hybrid spell caster. And while that may be "fun" for some people, it devalues traditional ideas of what being a mage is.

I would hope that if someone is carrying (for example) a bow, that it also adds dead cards to their deck just as armor would. If someone uses a Staff or a Wand, it might also add dead cards (but not many) to their deck, and if someone uses HANDS FREE (which is the purest form of spell casting in my humble opinion) then they would have NO dead cards in their deck.

 

I think it would be good idea if someone made a thread where every poster suggested one combo and what it would do.

 

In a talent buy system, which appears to be what we are solidly moving into, the "pure" build has the advantage of getting the abilities deepest into it's tree, the "master" abilities. Assuming these are sufficiently shiny, they grant a definite advantage to the "pure" builder as a reward for his devotion. OTOH, if they are TOO SHINY, they deny the ability to build viable cross-tree builds, a-la modern RIFT. When RIFT released a patch that redid their 32 talent trees so that the mid-level core abilities had power dependent on how many total talent points had been spent in the tree, and those core abilities outshone every other ability in each and every tree, cross-tree builds became an endangered species overnight. That was the moment that I an my ilk started leaving RIFT. Bottom heavy skill trees prevent "pure" builds, Top heavy skill trees compel them. It's an issue of game balance.

Assuming that the above referenced issue of game balance IS in fact balanced, the penalty for carrying a bow (that you can actually use) is in points spent in the archery tree. Even one point spent there will mean one less point spent in magick, and since you will be losing the top skills from a magickal tree, to gain the bottom skills in archery, then (provided the game balance is good) it will be a harsh tradeoff. Some people will opt to be lesser mages in order to have the reliable archery skills, more dedicated people will find that the only way to build a true archmagus is by eschewing all other skills.

If the talent trees are NOT balanced correctly, it will be possible to see it by watching a massive overview of player talents and builds.

Record how many players have each talent, and display it on a graph. Weigh the talent points as more significant if the character is getting more play time, more success (quests completed, high dps, high kill rate, high wealth), and more overall story progress.

If you start to see large spikes and dips in your graph, with an ability never taken or only taken by characters that do not do well, as well as abilities that EVERYONE seems to have... time to do some landscaping.

Of course, the exact approach to HOW you rebalance such a thing is what separates the great game developers from the hacks. A few years back when Wrath of the Lich King came out for WoW, a new team of devs took over, and the change in rebalancing style was instantly visible. They went from occasionally tuning a class to be more aligned with the pack to completely re-writing classes and overpowering one class at a time in rotation, regular as clockwork. Then they progressed to completely re-writing the talent spec system, not once, but three separate times (at which point I lost interest, they may have done it again since).

The best way to rebalance a talent spec system is with tiny little changes, carefully watching the player population's reaction. Test, test, test. The assumption that the devs know exactly what their change will cause, and that they know where balance lies, is at the heart of most MMO design screwups.

 

@MalakBrightpalm

If we look at this purely from a balance perspective, I get it. No one will care if you're using a bow, a bazooka, or a bamboo kitchen utensil, it's all about the balance.

But this is a roleplaying game, and bow using, plate mail wearing, mages are stupid. So beyond just balancing the numbers, I want to balance the world of SotA so that it's at a minimum slightly enjoyable to someone interested in being a pure caster. For that to happen, there MUST be a solid advantage to having nothing in your hands while casting and wearing robes. Otherwise, SotA will not really have mages, they'll just have bamboo kitchen utensil wielding death knights.

 

From MY perspective, this is all still a balance issue. The pure mage who gave up plate armor and archery, who doesn't know how to use even bamboo kitchen utensils, must gain something from that. In the talent buy system, that is represented by the top end abilities being WORTH giving up armor and archery for. One of the things I note: we have several ability trees that are incapable of making a complete character on their own. I like this, it shows the devs are doing more than just making classes and then letting us mix them. They are creating INGREDIENTS of classes.

If this is true, then technically, by taking NO armor or shield or weapon abilities, the pure mage gets to put that many more points into magick Schools. My understanding is that the Avatar is supposed to inherently and automatically be a somewhat magickal creature, what with the whole immortal being summoned from another world bit, and thus I'd like to see the available points vs points needed to be balanced such that all characters can have SOME magick.

If it turned out that you could JUST BARELY buy every single magick school to the end of the tree with your talent points, and then went from there, those who wished to be pure mages could do so, and would gain access to every magickal ability, both passive and active, as a reward. I think the passive side of the ability trees needs to be developed heavily, the current offering of low end resists and bonuses is nice, but it doesn't give that end of tree KICK. Right now I think the ability trees are bottom heavy.

IF the trees were re-tuned to give a bit more at the very top, and we had just barely enough points to buy out all schools of MAGICK, then anyone building something else would be defined by what magick they gave up to master swords, or axes, or plate. The armor and weapon trees could be made more dense, giving lots of optional branches, so that truly mastering all weapons and armor would use up nearly all your points, leaving just the tiniest bit for magick. Still a mystical immortal creature, but only just barely so.

I think that's the right balance to go for. That would give Pure mages, playable hybrids, both "mostly mage who gave up a bit of magick to be good with a bow, maybe some armor" all the way over to "master of one school of magick, one armor, one weapon", on to "Multi-weapon adaptable warrior with a bit of magick backup", and also allow someone to be a master of all things un-magick with barely any mystic power at all. That IS what we are all thinking about SotA being, right?

 

Another thought hits me. What if the benefit from the top of the tree abilities was synergistic? Instead of giving the end ability just a spell, it would give a SLIGHT bonus that helped all magick. Then if you had a second school of magick, that would benefit from the bonus, and if you got the top tier ability, that would give you ANOTHER, stacking bonus of some sort, something small, but that fed back into your first school. Then if you got a THIRD school, all three would be benefiting from your two top tier passive bonuses, and then it would end with a THIRD such bonus, which would feed back into the previous schools.... and so on.

The system would take some serious tuning, we would have to assume that someone would take all the school masteries possible, and check how those bonuses would stack, make them small enough not to dominate the game, but big enough to be noticeable. Maybe like a 3-5% improvement in something. 5% less cost, 3% more damage, 4% less cast time, 5% longer duration, 3% more heals, 4% reduced miscast rate... and on and on.

Technically, the same could then be true of the weapon and armor trees, with each one having a top tier passive bonus in line with it's tree, Heavy armor might grant a slight increase to armor at all times, light armor a slight increase to dodge, Swords might give... say... a bonus to attack speed. The key would be to make them all very very slight, 10% would be way too much, 8 would be too much, hell, 5% is pushing it.