Locked Trees

Here's an idea.

Imagine there were 2 voluntary lock modes for an entire magic tree. In either of these locked modes, active glyphs from that tree would be uncastable. The more trees you have locked overall, the higher a "concentration multiplier" would go, affecting the power of all your available skills. In addition, the two lock types provide the following benefits:

Defensive lock: you lose your attunement for that tree, but get 1.5 or 2x your attunement value in resistance for that magic.

Offensive lock: you get an attunement buff in the opposing magical school.

Things this primarily addresses:

• there is no reason to specialize with the current system. this takes it from max/max to min/max.
• even if you want to specialize, you end up having to learn everything anyway just for resistance.
• buffs are so available that everyone casts all of them
• it philosophically strange that schools are theoretically opposed but there is no difference between e.g. a fire mage picking up water and a fire mage picking up earth magic.

Open-ended details:

• passives could be enabled or disabled for one or both lock types.
• buffs cast would probably disappear when you locked that school
• it would need to be balanced so that current effectiveness is correlated with a certain number of locked schools in the new regime, maybe 3 or 4?
• lock sets could be associated with decks, or independent, or both like gear sets?

Please: be critical of it, insult it, embrace it, laugh at it, improve it, just say it's dumb, call me any names you want.
Don't: propose completely different ideas... if you think your idea is better, make a thread so it can get the attention it deserves!

thanks

 

I don't like that it puts more of this aspect of gameplay into the UI, rather than into role-play choices that your character is actually making in the world. What is locking a tree realistically representing as a character choice?

 

I would say it is choosing to concentrate one's efforts, which i was kind of trying to allude to by naming it a "concentration multipier" maybe "shunning" or "disavowing" a school would be a better word than "lock"

 

Yes, I understand... But when you click whatever button it takes to lock a tree in the skills window, that's an action that I don't feel well represents the process of a character concentrating. It feels more like UI management than gameplay.

Arguably, some of the combat is already this way, and is one of the reason some players are dissatisfied with the way combat works and the whole deck system. I just feel this concept is even more explicitly in that direction.

 

I like this idea! It 100% falls in line with "adding" things to establish specialties rather than diminishing things to add the illusion of specializing. Would take this over the current system any day of the week.

 

That would, even more than it does now, encourage people to put points into magic trees that they don't use.

 

At the OP, I think this capability could be tied to decks instead of the player. So if a player has many trees, they simply assign one or two as part of the a deck. Then they can switch decks whenever.

It is basically adding passives to the deck. So another option is to create passive slots in the deck.

 

How so? To get the equivalent of 80 attunement of resistance in a school, you would only need to train it to 40-60, which would be like 1/8th the XP.

For an offensively locked skill, the opposing benefit would be the same whether you trained the locked tree or not

 

That's a cool idea but I was trying carefully to leave everything optional, so the proposal wouldn't contend with the concept of truly open-ended character design. Deck slots are finite so i don't know how they could retain that property.