Suggestion related to Skills and Talents

[Manipulation]

Hello Zwieb.
I dont know how exactly you plan to design the future skill/talent system but considering the current one i have the suggestions below.

Skills

Allow player to choose skills freely. What do i mean? Players will have access to all skills and every X lvl they will get a skill point which they will spend on a skill of their choice. Now, if you think skill X is stronger than skill Z, you can simply apply level requirement. So one skill might be learnable at lvl 10 and another at lvl 50 etc.
In the current game you choose between 2 skills every so lvls, and the downside with this is forced builds, because it may be very possible that someone is not interested in neither of these 2 skills.


Talents

Just like with skills, i suggest the same here. Meaning, do not have talents in teams of 3 every so level, instead let players choose the talents and again apply lvl requirement for the talents that are stronger than others.

I remember being annoyed with talents that i wasnt interested in but was forced to choose 1. I truly believe this system is a lot better.


/EDIT

I noticed a small problem regarding talents. And that is: Players can keep their points until they lvl to 50 and learn all the "good" talents.

To balance this you can simply apply different amount of *point requirements* for each skill. What do i mean? For example best skills may require 3 points to be learned, weakest skills may require 1 skill point, average skills may require 2 points.
This way you give players a choice: spend 3 points on 1 single talent? or pick 3 weaker talents?. This will take the entire char build option to another lvl.
I truly believe such features offer vastly more quality than just adding more dungeons, items etc. Because you build the core of your map on great features/mechanics.

 

[GIMLI_2]

I support this.

For the talents: either that, or create a fitting option for each skillbuild

 

[S0ulseeker]

Earlier versions of Gaias actually had players learn abilities in a very similar system to that. Each class would start out with one or two generic abilities then you were able to buy additional abilities with gold or certain bosses actually had abilities you had to find as well. This essentially allowed players to build their character any way they wanted. It certainly had it's advantages in terms of flexibility and I was against the change at the time but the new mechanics of selecting abilities has grown on me. If I recall one of the biggest supporting arguments for this system change on abilities was it was earlier to balance the game for dungeons bosses and fights when there is some kind of consistency involved with the classes themselves.

The Talents followed on a rather similar system as well. Each level you were given points you were able to dump into any stat you wanted. You could focus on spending all your points for example on HP and int if you were a mage or druid. The problem with that is perhaps it wasn't the intention but it actually almost restricted customization because it required people just maxing between two stats and again the new system makes it easier for balancing

When the old system was changed there was a poll Zwiebel posted suggesting three different ways to implement the skills and the current one was voted the best of all the alternatives.

Granted there's not a lot of developing going on for the map at the moment as zwiebels waiting for wc3 to essentially allow him to work on the map again, once zwiebel is able to work on the map changing the system will ultimately just delay the release of new content even further. I don't know how the majority of the community feels but personally I'd rather see D4 implemented as a priority and start running some dungeons

 

[Manipulation]

You wrote a lot, but, doesnt change the fact that the current system forces you on skill and talent choices you simply might not be interested in. And i think its something that can be improved.

Ppl waited and can wait even more, life wont end if Gaias' orpg next release takes longer.
The goal should be to make the map better, with longer lifespan at its given version.
The more complex and free mechanics a game offers the more enjoyable it becomes and it increases the lifespan more than any *just additional of the same*.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

As S0ul already said: We had this before and it didn't work for many reason, the biggest which has been the inherent imbalance that it supported.
Situational spells simply aren't as good as non-situational spells and there is no way to balance that, no matter how good the situational spells are, which leads to a situation in which situational spells are always discarded in favor of more general purpose abilities.
If you have the choice between a low cooldown direct damage ability and a highly situational spell like dispel or ressurection, you will almost always pick the direct damage ability.
If you can pick all your abilities freely from a pool, it will lead to everyone picking the same abilities, simply because some of them are clearly better than others by design.

The current system has the huge advantage that it allows me pairing up abilities that are simply not comparable by default.
If you have to decide between a stun and a heal, then that is a meaningful choice, because both abilities serve totally different purposes and aren't in itself clearly better than the other. It allows me to create class-defining spells that are in itself clearly stronger than others without fucking the whole class balance over.
Abilities like Servant of Nature or Enslave are by a large degree better than pretty much any other ability in the game, and there is no way to balance that without making these abilities a joke.

Rather than having to balance all abilities with each other, the current system makes it so that I only have to balance abilities of the same tier with each other.

Talents follow the same design principle. If I allow players to freely pick from their talents, it prevents me from making class-defining ultimate talents that change the whole playstyle of the class.


The bottom line is: Sometimes it is restricting the freedom of choice that allows for more choices.
The current system does not really show its benefits yet, simply because we don't have the intended number of choices currently. The ultimate goal is that players will be able to pick from 2-3 abilities at every tier, not just the lower tiers and there are already many new abilities planned, which I just didn't implement yet.


And yes, I know that it's frustrating if a tier of talents provides nothing really beneficial because the only abilities boosted are abilities you didn't pick. But this is simply because I didn't rebalance those talents yet after the change in systems was done. In the future, all ability-boosting talents will be revamped to provide bonuses depending on the abilities picked at that ability tier. Take a look at the Valkyrie talents for reference. These were made after the new design philosophy and you can see how every ability boosting talent actually provides a bonus to all abilities of that tier, so that you never have a "dead" talent.


I suggest that we all remain patient until february/march when the big editor pre-reforged patch hits and allows me to get my hands on the new editing tools. Then (after researching all the new possibilities they provide) I can give you a bigger picture of whats exactly going to come for Gaias Retaliation Reforged.
Depending on how much freedom the new UI allows, I might be able to come up with something better or merge talents and abilities into a single system.