Skill Trees; Lessons From RIFT

[matthewfarmery]

Originally Posted by NZSpy

I think you are forgetting a couple of important things. Choice. Players want/love and crave choice. Nothing should be decided for you in the build of your character.

Also, I don't care what system you create or for what rpg/arpg/mmo there will always be cookie-cutter builds, it's inevitable.

Some players like to do that some don't. Which is why choice even at the most basic level is extremely important.

I fully agree to what you said

I played rift for a bit, and got bored of it, while the skill system wasn't bad, you could choose from from classes, and different souls, you had in total 66 points to spend once you were at max level. I didn't get a char at max level, the game became a real grind, and I joined a guild that fell apart at the seems pretty early on, for LOL. to me, you had to really put a lot of points into one class to really be effective, before branching out to the others. another issue that quickly cropped up, and the same problem exists in WOW, is balance, there were plenty of cookie crunching builds, and plenty of patches followed to try and sort out the balance and many others issues. the game dropped from my radar, I only played it a bit. and I played WOW for a while but had major issues in that game, and I still think balance between classes is still a major issue, too many classes, and not enough balance

to change the masteries at this change would be a massive undertaking, and I don't think the D3 system sounds all that good either, where you skills you unlock while they level up with you, but seems that blizzard has taken away choice, again once the game ships, people will probably use one or two builds from each class, as they are the best, that really doesn't sound like choice to me. sounds like its forced. but anyway, I did like the TQ masteries, there will be 5 classes in the game, so a lot of choice, and a lot of choice in what skills points to put into the skills , as the amount of skills have been increased to 25 I think? so I would call that choice

I think the issue is how fast you level, that seems to be your problem @OP, of course games will take longer to level as they go up, unless you mention WOW, where you can get to 85 in no time at all, but I have no desire to go back to that game, and a fast levelling system like that would bore me to tears

but anyway, I like the TQ system, it will have choice, which is more I can say for a few games these days

[mamba]

Originally Posted by djolar

In one variant of this system, placing points into mastery would unlock the ability to place points into skills in that tier. And then placing points into the skills themselves would add flavor such as increase the number of projectiles or widen beam skills or add piercing percentage or add extra bounces to chain skills.

that is exactly what TQ did, or am I missing something here ?

Another variant of this hybrid between RIFT and TQ would be that some skills are awarded by points in the mastery and some skills won't be awarded unless you put points into them even if you have unlocked the tier with mastery points.

What is the point of this, I can just as easily invest a few skill points to achieve it - and I can even chose the skills I want, rather than what someone else thinks are the core skills of this mastery...

The latter is complex and diverse pretty much from the getgo. And of course it is much more time consuming to implement.

Not sure why you consider it more diverse, if anything, automatically getting the same skills as everyone else is less diverse than the player picking the skills

I prefer the former as some uniformity has many benefits.

the former is TQ... so no need to mix RIFT in it seems

[mamba]

Originally Posted by djolar

4. I am one who would complain about the TQ skill system. I believe it is a smash in the very short term (levels 1-20 for a small handful of builds) but ends up wearing thin in the long run. (higher difficulty levels and more than 3 months down the road)

how is it wearing thin ? How is that a problem with the skill system and not the individual skills ?

[mamba]

Originally Posted by djolar

There is a difference between skill effectiveness and skill type. Large amounts of the former hurt a game's longevity which hurts the developer's bottom line and affects their ability to make more of the games you like. The latter increases the longevity potential.

not sure what you try to say here, that having a lot of diverse but ineffective skills helps the developer somehow ?

TQ's skill system offers a broad spectrum in both skill effectiveness and skill type. There is a split of skills where some are and some are not incredibly powerful when you get them. There is further a split of those powerful skills where some become useless in 5, 10 or 20 levels.

All my hope is that some streamlining of skill effectiveness of TQ's system will make Grim Dawn more enjoyable over years instead of months. So I presented modifications to TQ's skill system based on other proven game's systems.

Given what you wrote, it seems that all that is needed is a slight rebalancing of skills, not a new system

[Gazz]

Originally Posted by djolar

Please look further than, "He wants to assign skills automatically so therefore he is automatically for removing all choice!" This is a discussion and suggestion and that is not what I am saying. For what it is worth, in that system you would still have choice as you could choose to put more or less points into the masteries to get more or less assigned skills.

RIFT is a full-blown MMO and in order to make sure that players pick at least some core skills / abilities for their class, these are assigned automatically.

And don't tell me that all players are so smart that they don't need that help.
You could join a party and find out that none of the casters / priests has a healing configuration prepared. *facepalm*
Giving them the full choice would only make matters worse.
But that's an MMO.

In an action RPG, players generally don't have to rely on each other so it's no big deal if someone's running with a weird-ass build.

Experimenting with different skills is fun and there's just no reason to assign "must pick" skills. I'd rather be curious how far I can get with a whacky specialist build...

[Italofoca]

In my opinion this post hit the nail.

The only advantage of fixing what skills each character will have is that the developer can build monsters and other events knowing the players have certain tools.

I imagine designing monsters for ARPG might be quite a challenge as the developers don't really know what kind of characters players will be. For this reason monsters and boss fights in this kind of game is kind bland compared to action and adventure games.

But that's how the game is... It's more active in nature. It's more about your character and less about your enemies.

[Aicus]

From the post, what I can make out is the OP wants to know what skills are the must have for each masteries so that he won't be severely gimping his character build because he misses those, hence the auto acquisition of core skills.

Unlike most ARPG games where each class has a few core must have skills that will significantly make the class more powerful, there are none in TQ and GD, what matter is your play style and your ability to utilize the skills you choose tothe fullest. Across the forum you can see people argue about a skill is totally useless to them while other people disagree saying it is the best thing ever created since sliced bread, that is what the developer wants to encourage.

[Rivis]

Originally Posted by Italofoca

I imagine designing monsters for ARPG might be quite a challenge as the developers don't really know what kind of characters players will be. For this reason monsters and boss fights in this kind of game is kind bland compared to action and adventure games.

Or you can look at it the otherway, and assume that the devs don't care what tools the players use, and build bosses however they want...

Anyways, back to the original post, I don't think that the rift skill system works here, honestly, I kind of feel that rift borrowed from TQ in it's original design. I would like for GD to move a little bit away from a direct cut&paste copy of TQ's skill system, and the only way I can see of doing that really, is allow "upgrades" to be dependant on your other mastery or lack of other mastery.

For example: The Hellhound, I think was the example I used before gets a cleave type AOE, now imagine for a minute, that when you went into the demolitionist tree, that changed from a cleave into a breath of fire. You could allow these skills to function pretty much identicly, but it gives these hybrid builds a sense of Identity, that honestly is lacking.

So, now your Demo/Occultist went from being a demo/occultist to being a Pyromancer. It gives classes a sense of ownership of there builds that I feel is a bit lacking, and it is the one complaint I have about the system.

Granted, most melee/soldier classes have better synergies with each other, but than you have the caster classes, that have none, no identity what so ever.

[i.n.s.a.n.e]

The only thing I would really appreciate to be changed is to get some "breakpoints" in the skills' levels to make them more interesting (similar to how it was with "Tiers" in Torchlight 2). I mean:

http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showt...874#post103874

Otherwise, I love the GD's skills trees!

[bug77]

Originally Posted by eisprinzessin

I would not like the game to select skills for me.

You would, if there was some randomness involved.
It's clearly not the case for GD, but a game where a wizard would be awarded some skills upon leveling up, with about 80% chance to get the fireball could be something interesting.
I remember playing a 4X strategy thingy where the tech tree was a little random. Sometimes you'd get that awesome missile, sometimes you didn't. I don't remember the name though.