Limiting passive skills

I'm having a real real tough time with this, I'm level 3 at the moment, and with my heavy armor can carry nothing, but I cant spend enough on passives to get to the point where I can increase my encumbrance.

Also, my sword and armor is deteriorating rapidly, and I similarly, cannot invest in the passives to bring those up.

Both the encumbrance passives as well as the armor/weapon preservation passives are points spent to make the game less annoying for the player. I haven't really even begun to invest in my combat passives, and I'm already out of passive points.

When it comes to points that I will want to spend on actives, they are VERY limited as there are really only 2 combat actives I use. I don't need actives, I wont use them.

I'm not sure what the rationale behind the limited investment ability in passives, but if people are spending too many points in passives there are other solutions:

1) Make the passives worse so people wont want them (bad)
2) Make the actives more worth investing in (good)
3) Make the passives more expensive

I feel really limited right now, any suggestions on a good build that makes use of actives? I do not play the draw decks with slugs, I use a regular old combat deck with cooldowns.

 

The biggest problem that I'm having is that for many of the active skills to be effective, they need accompanying passive skills, which seem to cost a lot more. Perhaps if they made it a 30%/70% split then it wouldn't be so bad. The 50%/50% thing is just too little for passives.

 

I still think, however, that the whole idea of limiting passives is just dumb and unneeded. If active skills were actually worthwhile then people would get and use them.

 

Instead of fixing what is broken, it seems they break one of the few things that was working.

 

It's a bit like solving an insane persons biting problem by removing everybody's teeth.

 

Im still finding the limiting of spending points where you want to very depressing.......got to level 21 and im wasting 46 points

 

nerfs melee big time

except for the duel I fought at 5th level everyone duel I've fought has ended in a stalemate.

 

Another option would be to allow additional glyphs of a selection to increase that glyphs effectiveness.

With a random deck they only affect the appearance rate, also the more active skills you have in the deck, the less predictable your strategy is able to be.

With a locked deck, 1 glyph is as good as 5.

This is why people aren't taking many active skills in favor of passive skills, because passive skills are the only way to increase a single glyphs EFFECTIVENESS.

If taking more copies of an active glyph increased that glyphs effectiveness, it would be a non-issue, because now people would actually have motivation to take more active skills.

And then you can simply adjust the point cost range for passive stat modifiers like str/dex/int relative to the active glyph point cost range to balance specialization (more points in a few particular active skills) vs generalization (more points in str/dex/int that affect all skills).

 

Save money and do not repair your sword. Pick up a sword that you find in various places in the game, such as Owlshead Blacksmith Shop next door to the Armor Shop there is a Jeweled Longsword, in the building with the two guards outside, you will find various other weapons for free as well. They respawn as well. There is also a Great Sword in the one unburnt building at Solace Bridge. There are more of the same in Adoris in the same types of shops as Owlshead.

 

I thought this as well for a long while but glyphs can be stacked with themselves, so if you have more glyphs showing up more frequently, you can make more 'super glyphs'. It's still a bit of a hassle and I'd prefer levelling the skill to also increase base effectiveness, but at least it's something.

 

Hey Alpha. More glyphs decreases your locked cooldown.
More glyps in unlocked lets you stack them and when they are not bugged they do get stronger. If you wonder how players are criting over 150 its most likely that the have high innates and are stacking random glyphs. This is also why you are not allowed to enter combat in some tourneys before the green light to fight is given.

Even with a completely unlocked deck having maxed multiples of glyphs you will run into the artificial innate ceiling.

Now everyone can get a pet phoenix for something to do with the extra unusable points.

 

As you get higher level the problem gets worse.
I'm at adventuring level 51 and producer level 28 have 177 adventuring skill points with nothing worth spendind them on.
Sure I could spend them on actives just to spend them, but they are actives I would never cast, and including those actives in my deck would just weaken my deck.

The only good part is with so many useless points I am able to instantly try out almost any active skill I want.

It might be different in PvP, where you don't care how much gold your spending to get a kill, but when you are grinding for gold and levels the majority of the spells are counter productive.

First there is reagent cost, it's 20 gold each to buy reagents from the reagent vendor in owls head. with the big spells costing more than one reagent, exactly what can you farm to make more money than you spend? Sure you can gather some of the reagents, but the killing you would need to do to clear out the spawn so you can gather without being interrupted would consume more reagents than you can gather, and ultimately gathering reagents would just slow down your progress. Sure you can cast without reagents, but the fizzle chance is high usually around 50% before armor is considered so not reliable enough to attempt during combat.

The only reagent spells that could potentially be worth casting are the summoned pets, because you can Fizzle cast them without reagents before combat begins. However these have a big focus cost (except for the skeletal footman from the death tree), that focus could be used to kill instead. It takes time to fizzle cast spells, time that could be spent killing instead. The pets don't make a much difference in combat, (except at very low levels). The pets are dying from the moment they are summoned, and healing them back to full is more expensive and time consuming than just fizzle casting another. The pets can't tank for you. To make matters worse they are frustrating to use, every time you re-summon a pet you have to manually switch them back to aggressive mode or risk them getting stuck in the terrain, and standing there waiting for you to drag the mobs into their attack range. (this isn't as bad with ranged casting pets like the water elemental). With all the time and focus that pets cost you, you can kill more faster by simply skipping the pet all together and just killing the mobs by yourself. The only exception to this is when the avatar is low level the skeletal footman from the death tree can be worth casting. It costs less than a Healing Ray to summon. It's quick to cast. It's low reagent cost means it has a lower fizzle chance too. However by the time you get to mid-levels it's usefulness disappears, why bother with all the fizzling, lost focus, and mode setting when you can just kill without. So it doesn't scale up as you level and quickly becomes obsolete.

Archery skills, archery is still waiting on their postponed love, so I'll be brief. Best case scenario, you are plinking a mob to death with 2 gold per attack. Basically you are killing a mob by burying it under a pile of gold. You can swap decks to only pull with archery to reduce the costs, but if all you are after is pulling ability you are better off using a wand, it's cheaper and seems to have a longer range.

Skills from the heal tree, other than healing touch or healing Ray, are mostly useless. First off, using them means you are going to be in multiplayer mode, otherwise what is the point of Area effect cleanse and heals or the Ressurect spell. Multiplayer mode currently means that you are going to be permanently stuck in combat mode after farming in a popular zone for longer than 5 minutes. Which means your focus regen is going to be pitiful. I went hunting yesterday with two guildmates helping them catch up to a level where soloing wasn't so dangerous. Out of 30 deaths combined for them I was only able to successfully Ressurect 1 time. By the time I could clear the spawn and gain enough focus to cast rezz their timer was up and they were back at the entrance. Ultimately it was just faster for me to focus on killing and letting them heal themselves, run away, or die.

Buff spells, like Enlightenment, Strength of Earth, Celstial Blessing, seem to be fairly useless outside of PvP. Unless you are willing to risk your high dollar pledge account on one of those Icon Stacker programs, they waste more focus, time, and attack oppurtunties than they provide benefit in killing time after low levels. They also burn draws, nothing worse than getting 10 buff draws with no attack icons. Yes you can make an alt deck with nothing but the buffs spells, but by the time you could get a full stack to cast before you begin combat you could have already killed the mob(s) without. Over time it's faster and ultimately more profitable to grind without them.

So after eliminating component spells, pets, buffs, and most of the heal tree, and archery, as far as a Leveling /Money farming spec goes there just isn't enough stuff to spend points on that would actually be useful to an effective build.

 

training 5 glyphs in a locked deck will drastically reduce the focus cost of the spell compared to the 100% focus tax that locking glyphs starts with.

 

I have over 80 unspent points now.

 

...which, of course, requires more passive points.

 

Incorrect, requires more active points

 

Eidetic Memory is an innate skill and requires passive points.

 

Armour damage is too high.. i have to carry a lot of repair kits (that i can't move for encumbrance) to take with me for a FIGHTER PVE..
Seems that developers of SOTA ARE TOTALLY MAGES and doesn't try to use ARMOURS (really use.. not just for a test) please fix this .. reduce Armour damage (A LOT) and fix this encumbrance issue

(it's not possible to change player muscles based on STR? graphically.. just to identify STR of a player and to make more real the game)

 

Actually, raising the level of a skill in a locked deck reduces both focus AND cooldown for that skill. It's critical to have only maxed out skills in your precious bar slots, given the insane focus/cooldown penalty on locked glyphs.

Source: me, every day since R11.

 

With the crafting events you can now make gear with +5 stat (and other bonuses) per piece and an additional +5 from your weapon. The first 20 stat increases are relatively cheap making a total of +50 that used to cost a massive amount of skill points to obtain. At level 50 this release i am stronger than i ever have been in previous releases at this level and repair kits now repair 20 points of damage on crafted gear instead of 5. I am a mage at the moment but switch back and forth between that and melee. I used the points i could not use in my main deck to build a second deck and, after investing in the quick-swapping skill, switch between the two constantly in combat. This allows me to have a focussed DPS deck and a healing/AOE deck that makes me more versatile. I have all the inates i would have had last release minus the high amount of +stats, which i now get from my equipment. Right now an ingredient is missing for the +int so i am using +str for the health, but this will likely be fixed soon. It is not a change i would have asked for but it has made very little difference at all, i still levelled the same way in the same area in the same amount of time... i just had to do a bit of crafting first.