I want skill [decay/death/mutilation] fading!

So, I'm starting to slow in how fast I get my skills and I have some skills that I don't want in the blades tree and it frustrates me that I have them... I figure this will happen down the road again at some point. It would be really nice to have a DOWN arrow that increased decay speed by ?4x? so I could increase my learning speed on my up skills and be a happy panda.

Just a thought!

 

Join the club.

 

Down is good

 

The devs already proposed this system in the telethon, though in a rather indirect fashion.

Their proposal was : You could sell back your skills at some fraction of the experience, thereby adding that amount back into your pool.

In doing so. it would increase the rate at which your other skills increased, since skill gain is based on a percentage of the total pool (and a bigger pool means a big gain with each use).

 

I was seriously not happy when they suggested that.. the whole point of skill decay (well a major point) is to not need respec..

 

ok, i'm confused

I thought that with use-based you could keep building skills...with no real limits the way we used to be limited to only however many skill points. I locked off the blade skills I don't need so the stuff I want levels, and if I get bored before the R23 wipe I may turn on new ones....
Agree with Bowen (if understanding you) that letting people respec sounds wrong somehow. Don't care if blades decay while not in use....hmm.

Is the issue not decay so much as trying to raise the skills you want faster? I didn't think having "extra" skills would slow it down if they are locked off

 

You are indeed correct. Having the extra skills does not hinder raising new skills.

Violation and Bowen simply want the ability to faze out older skills they no longer use, get them off their roster faster, while increasing the rate at which they gain the skills they do use (or rather decrease the rate they decay).

 

How many Skill Points will we max have?

 

I like the increased death/rot/fade skill as a temporal system that allow the ones who change build frequently to effectively respec through macroing (or ballhitting), so the amount of xp invested in skills marked as "down" are accounted as part of the xp pool. but if we're talking upon release i'm with Bowen; i hope to start with the character the way i want, not needing to respec from the very beggining, so skill annihilation by itself sounds like a fair way of "forgetting" skills.

If i recall correctly there's no hard cap, just the soft cap you reach when you raise more skills than the ones you use (skill obliteration is applied to each one of them, so your play time will limit how many skills you can mantain).

 

I'm not looking for a sellback xp booster... that's what I took from them is that by selling in skills I'd get a boost for other skills... I'm saying I want to degrade some things and I want to have control over that. I only want the natural gain of skills. For the lack of the skill gain boost this action would NOT cost me any experience.

 

Basically I want the same thing here but replace gustball and macro with enemy Avatar's face... aka: I want to be able to change speck VIA pvp after I've done a grind. If the change requires experience I can't do that. I'm okay with the macro issue... I don't see a work around that's viable yet... the game doesn't have something that makes you want to play it right now for anyone that's been in for 3+ releases. How you actually fix macroing and exploiting of things like this isn't a rule systems... it's value add. You make a game that people want to play. I'm extremely happy that they're not releasing parts of the story too early and the biproduct is that player events are the big draw for content right now so the skill gain stuff gets macro'd through this era at a higher rate than I expect it will be post launch.

Again, my goal here is to be able to NOT grind PVE through spec changes if I don't want to... That's the base purpose of my request.

 

To be very clear:

If I'm a master carpenter and I want to become a master blacksmith... I should be able to pick up blacksmithing faster than someone else who has never been a master CRAFTER.

So, in game mechanic that I'm suggesting for this is as follows: I can arrow down my carpentry and as I use my blacksmith my experience is returned to me from my carpentry at 3/4 rate and the decay eats 1/4 rate so the overall loss of carpentry is 4x rate. This allows me to pickup the new skill quicker than someone else who would be required to get additional experience pool from other parts of the crafting system where I would be feeding my experience pool via rapid skill loss.

That's about as clear a method and reasoning I have for it. Since so many commented on my original thought, what do you think about this explained version?

 

The solution is simple and follows the idea of brining in concepts from UO that a lot of people want.

SoulStone!!!

This would zap your points from a skill tree in to the stone. At some later point if you said "oh crap, I liked the blades better, you could add them back. Or just erase those points off the soulstone if you knew down the road you never wanted them back.

 

I like Violation's suggestion above and think that this could be a very viable solution for this. I think reassigning your XP like this should be allowed as you are losing a skill to gain another, but since you do have XP in the current skill it should be allowed to be reused rather than just sit there wasting away.

I think the SoulStone though is going against what the devs are looking to do with this system from the way it was described and what was stated during the telethon. I don't think they are going to just want us to "freely" move points all around. I think for us to move something we will have to lose something as well which is going to be more than just losing the use of the skill you are turning off. Plus it sounds like they don't want us to be able to just respec quickly on the fly which is what this would give us.

Respeccing should be a much slower process and I'm completely fine with that.

 

Soulstones came toward the end of my play days. Those were after the ea dummies started selling level 85 skill characters! Left a bad taste in my mouth when I saw that. Anyway, they're a method to bypass the system I'm referencing and that bypass needs to happen much later in the age of the game. Games have life cycling and if we get the bypass mechanism in now it prematurely ages the game I think. That's why I don't like that yet. I think post episode 5 it will be good to add them.

 

Yes, that is simply the more-drawn out version of what the devs mentioned...

Their version means you get a large influx of experience returned to your pool immediately, which increases the gain rate of any other skill you use afterward (until the pool is drained again).

Your version means you get a small influx of experience return to your pool over the course of some period of time, which increases the gain rate of any other skill you use during that period.​

The end-result of either approach is exactly the same.

I certainly agree with you that the "Down" approach is a more natural approach. Good suggestion.

 

I watched the whole time and even took part for some hours and can't recall when they talked about this... Anyone have a timestamp on which part?

 

Second Part - 48:00

 

Thanks

 

This is great! Exactly what I wanted. Needs to be 75% though @Chris ... 50 is too big of a loss.