'Skill Glyphs' in the loot system and overhauling PvP

For some time I've been an advocate for having a hard skill and stat cap for PvP in SOTA. I think this would make the game more friendly to fans of Ultima Online, which I believe is important. The concepts below would help eliminate the need to skill/stat/adv lvl cap specific zones, but depending how the hard cap is implemented it may also dilute the combat system in PvP in favor of balance.

I've had a few ideas about how to implement this in SOTA and one of the ideas would be separating the PvE and PvP damage scales entirely and creating a PvP tab in the Skills menu. There are probably better ideas on how to do this but this is what I've come up with. Anyway, lets just say we've separated PvE and PvP skill systems. And now PvP skills have a hard cap.

For example, there are now Fire Arrow (PvE) and Fire Arrow (PvP) skills. When you go to a trainer and train one of the skills, it unlocks the PvE and PvP version. There aren't actually 2 skills in the combat deck, you're just seeing them this way for the purpose of separating PvE and PvP skills for combat balance. This allows the PvE versions of the spells to have very high damage, while the PvP version could display lower damage if required and even different spell effects. This delineation of PvE and PvP skills will make people aware that some spells effects that work on mobs may not apply to players.

One school of thought might be - as you start using the Fire Arrow skill, it trains the PvE and PvP skills at the same time. The adventure XP pool distributes XP to both skills but does not divide the xp among them. And doing it this way, there would be a hard cap that the PvP skill will train to. For the purposes of this post, lets say the default cap is 80 for PvP skills. After this, you must go to PvP areas such as Blood Bay, Shardfalls, the various Ruins, or Obsidian Trials in order to train the skill above 80. Skill points that are granted beyond this point are use-based and there is no PvP XP pool.

This is where Skill Glyphs in the loot system comes into play. These are items that can be found by killing mobs. So, you kill a mob and find a Fire Arrow 1.63 skill glyph for example. By using this glyph, it raises your Fire Arrow (PvP) skill cap by that amount. Your PvP version of Fire Arrow will display something like 80/81.63 - and once you start using Fire Arrow skill, it will start gaining again.

If this system is launched, there should be 'named mob drops' or mini-bosses that aren't too annoying to kill. This part of the concept is inspired by a system in Shadowbane that worked very well - having guaranteed drops at regular intervals in the same location. Perhaps a powerful named fire mage or fire elemental drops a good quality Fire related skill glyph every 2 hours or 4 hours. The elemental boss might drop a random fire tree skill glyph, while the mage drops a specific fire skill every time. These bosses always show up in the same area. So if you're looking for Fire skill glyphs and you've found that particular dropper's location you'll know where to find it. This creates traffic and player conflict in PvP areas because players are looking for the same skill glyphs to sell, or use on their own Avatars.

How is the hard skill cap for PvP implemented? How many total skill points are you given to work with? Do PvP skills below 80 count as 0? What is the highest skill level? What if I just want to dump all my skill points into a few skills? What determines if there needs to be a PvP version of the skill or not? Should the PvP skills be worked up from 0 instead of getting XP distributed from the adventure pool to 80? That would all need to be hashed out.

Why implement this? Well for one, it is a player conflict generator for PvP players. It will encourage players to group together and gain skills - since it's use based in a hard cap system and not based how much XP you have in your pool, you can spar amongst your friends and gain skills. It provides another reason for players to farm mobs. Skill glyphs can still be found in normal mob loot but they will be rare, random and typically lower denomination.

The skill glyphs could be implemented for PvE and PvP but perhaps diminishing returns on the PvE versions based on skill level. Perhaps they could be upgradeable with Books of Learning.

We could tie this system in with creating a procedural dungeon mode for player dungeons as well. Part of my concepts on this involve multi-player dungeons that can be connected together which triggers a mini-boss in each dungeon, in this case it could be a skill glyph dropper. Could connect them once a day or once a week etc. Based on procedural dungeon size (you buy them in dungeon level blocks - they could also just be premade dungeon levels that are cycled) you may have multiple droppers but increasingly difficult mobs. I also had ideas on multi-player PvP lockout dungeons where one team wipes out another in order to beat the mini boss, after the dungeon ends or players are locked out, perhaps they get booted to Blood Bay, Shardfalls, or Ruins etc. Maybe PvP POT's as well (or an option for PvP POT owners to opt-in)

Anyway, just putting some ideas out there. Maybe a few of them would be of interest. But if we were to go in this direction I think we could give more of a substantial look at adjusting the loot for PvP kills. Loot incentive is a thing in PvP, at least it was in Ultima Online and Shadowbane. Maybe something like a PvP supply bag with some gold, regs, skill glyphs on death, etc. The skill glyphs might always drop on death in PvP. Or maybe a PvP supply bag draws from a player's recently acquired loot.

The obvious downside of this for established players (depending on how you look at it) is that it would essentially be a skill wipe for the PvP side of things.

Vecna
SOTA: Blood Bay, Twin Traders
UO: Lake Superior
SB: Many, many servers, guilds and nations.

 

Here's an example of what the Skills Menu might look like....this is just concept art. I've edited the Skills Menu using a graphics editor, there is a PVE and PVP tab at the top right corner of the Skills Menu.


Basically this is an example of a player that has high skills in the fire tree - lets say they have 1400 points on the PvE part of the skill system. But when they click the PVP tab it would show them only having 800 because the PvP skills are capped at 80. In order to get them higher, the player would need to obtain Skill Glyphs of the skills they want to raise, and apply them, then go to the skill gain enabled PvP areas of the game - such as Blood Bay, Shardfalls, PVP POT's (?) etc.

All of the other skill trees would be adjusted for the PvP skill system as well, I just did the Fire tree. Also, the Adventure XP Pool at the bottom has been removed when you click the PVP tab, and would need to reflect the hard cap skill system stats.. maybe something like skill points used out of skill points available. This is just concept art and trying to explain how the above skill system changes/proposal might work in SOTA.

In this proposal, the PVE skills stay the same - so your capability against monsters will still be effective in the various PvP areas of the game. Having your PvP skills initially capped at 80 will be a nerf though.

 

This might also be an opportunity to create combat versions of the Master Trainers (npc mobs) and their fictional underlings/apprentices as well, you could scatter them throughout the game world as glyph droppers. Maybe some of the glyph droppers spawn with bodyguards too.

 

This is by far the best idea I've seen in a long time for pvp. Thank you for putting so much time into this and really fleshing this all out. It really gives me hope for this part of the game in the future, which means so much to me.