Proper skill interplay in a classless system

The Secret World has probably the best classless skill system I have ever seen. It's a huge shame that Funcom just wasn't capable of capitalizing on their great ideas.

http://yokaiblog.wikidot.com/guides:buffs-debuffs

This gives a good guide to the buff/debuff system that makes their "skill wheel" roll so well. The skill wheel was just an alternate form of a skill tree. IMHO, a much better version of the skill tree.

I would consider it required reading for any game designer looking to build a good classless skill system.

There was so much versatility in their system. Builds could be put together quickly using a variety of weapon types and encompassing all types of builds. Pure tanks, Pure healers, dps/leech healers, dps/tanks, heal/tanks, etc. There was so much interplay between the various skills, for both solo play and group play.

Most of these stack up to 10 times and have a short duration so they needed to be reapplied. They were tied to dps abilities so generally multiple people in your party were responsible for bringing one or more of these effects to the group. For solo play, you usually picked 1 or 2 to focus your build around exploiting those status effects.

Exposed - gives bonus damage for everybody against the mob.

Debilitated - reduces damage done by the mob.

Corrupted - reduces strength of outgoing heals/barriers/leech abilities.

Afflicted - applies a DoT of varying strength depending on the ability.

Hindered (root) - Rooted and usually applied damage or other random effects.

Hindered (snare) - Movement slowed and applied damage or other random effects.

Impaired (stunned) - Stunned for a short period of time and applied damage or other random effects.

Impaired (knocked) - Knocked down/back/up for a varying amount of time.

These status effects were scattered throughout the skill tree in various weapon skills. So, you had a lot of variety in whether you wanted to do it from range, or from melee, and what weapon you chose depending on what other abilities you wanted to include in your build.

So imagine these debuffs scattered through the Death, Fire, Air, Water, Blades, Pole Arms, etc. Scattered in such a way you can be very versatile in your weapon/spell builds.

Also, some skills did more damage or have extra effects if the mob is suffering from one of these debuffs. Example, you might get more damage from an ability if a target is already Afflicted. Or you might get a Stun effect on one of your dps abilities if the target was already Hindered.

The buff system was usually more focused on self buffs and had a lot of self buffs scattered through the trees, which could be used for extra dps, extra defense, or to compensate for gear issues if you need more hit rating or something. Also, it added some elements to the boss mobs where they could push into ridiculously high defensive values and that required teams to use these buffs and debuffs effectively or they were not going to be able to down the bosses.

Lots of great discussions and build ideas, even after we had been playing for awhile, new and interesting combos of abilities still kept popping up.

Anyways, many pages could be (and have been written in forums) about this skill system and the interplay between the various skills. I could go on and on. The link I posted is a great summary of all the buffs/debuffs and you can see how many different ways you could achieve those effects.

The best classless skill system ever created. If I were designing a game, I would definitely incorporate their ideas into my systems.

 

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