[CRAZY IDEA] Skill & Combat Overhaul

Suggestions
1

I’ll open-up by saying that from the bottom of my heart,

I hate having to go on Hunts.

I’ve said it many times already. Why though?

One of the reason is that combat (to me) just feels plain wrong. As anyone else, I play a LOT of other games. Boundless might be the only game I know where I get this weird feedback vibe during combat that the game hates me and wants me to die.
The creatures can easily oneshot you unless you have the right skills, and then, you get that psychologically painful XP debuff which doesn’t feel right and is based on XP AMOUNT and not just TIME.

To me, the whole PvE combat system could use an overhaul.

• Skill trees

I would suggest to separate the skill points between 3 skill-trees which the player would be able to level simulatenously :

  1. BUILDING/CRAFTING : decoration, machine, weapons, food
  2. COMBAT : Tank, Heal, DPS Melee, DPS Ranged
  3. EXPLORATION : Luck, Running speed, Harvest-skills
    This way, the player could be a good builder and still go on hunts without having to swap skill pages or go on an alt-character. Skill pages would however be still usefull, but we would rely less on swapping them.
  • Yay for the separated skill trees
  • Nay for the separated skill trees

0 voters

• Combat

Even with the right skill set, you can get oneshot by creatures during hunts, and (to me), the way it happens is off.
I would suggest that creatures should do LESS base damage and instead use more phoned skills that you can avoid.

Here’s an example : Spitters spit bombs. They explode. You’re dead.

What if the bomb instead released an AoE which does something to you. For instance, it could be applying a stacking debuff which gradually removes your environmental protection and goes negative, making you even far more sensitive to these effects than you’d normally be with 0 protection, so that you don’t die instantly from the bomb, but if you stay too long in its area of impact, you’ll feel it!
Maybe we could have a way to damage the bomb before it explodes to prevent the AoE I described, or shooting it could bounce it further. Maybe Shield wearer could make them bounce back.

What if the charge of a Wildstock wasn’t dealing base damage, but instead applying another debuff, reducing your armor? A tank with a shield (we all know those are coming) could maybe have an option to wield it to stop a Wildstock charge.

That’s the sort of change which would make combat less ‘punitive’, and would still provide challenge.
Truth is, currently, during hunts, people are making towers & using grapples to be out of range of the Wildstocks, Spitter bombs and such.
That’s not really “fun” (to me).

  • Yay for combat overhaul
  • Nay for combat overhaul

0 voters

3 Likes
2

New content soon first please then more overhauls…

1 Like
3

I mean, yeah, I’d want furniture first.

But I’m not gonna lie, my portals are all going out in a week, I need to make oortshards, I don’t have the coins to buy any, so I need to go on hunts, and the mere thought of HAVING to stop having fun building to do something I hate just gives me bad vibes.

2 Likes
4

How much would you need to keep them going? coin wise I mean?

5

I have no idea. Do you buy Oortshards yourself?

I just need to get my butt in a hunt with some friends to increase the gains.

6

How many portals do you have?

7

More than I should allow myself to have at once.

One leading to my town, one leading to Raxxa’s capital, one to Raxxa’s Portal Seeker Hub, one to Sasquatchville on Alder, one to a hub in Sorissi (which just closed, but I don’t think anyone came through there anyway), one to an outpost to a friend I made on Raxxa, one to an Ash/Sand/Clay farm, one to another friend’s house, one to a room in the depths of the Raxxian Sanctuary.

I’m counting 8 1x2 portals.

Soon, I’m gonna re-think all of that. I’ll bulldoze the current portal hub at the Raxxian Sanctuary and I’ll rebuild it in the town below, and then I’ll look into what’s necessary and what isn’t.

Do you guys know a place that sells Oortshards at affordable prices?

8

I agree on the hunting is not fun. I had to go on hunts again recently for mats and oort, it’s soooo boring. Gotta love the oneshot too oh and dont forget the lag kills. Wildstocks spawn game lag spike, your corpse flies through the air~

4 Likes
9

I think the skill tree should remain one cumulative page. I like the being able to decide what I want at one time. But I definitely think more needs to be added to combat such as the shields will bring.

New weapons, new monsters, new skills (adding on top of what we have currently) need to come first before changing the skill page structure if it happens.

But if you have multiple skill pages, then you can do this anyways, currently. Just takes switching back and forth.

2 Likes
10

New monsters that work the same way as the ones we already have would NOT help the game in any way, IMHO.

And new skills would force people to have MORE pages than they currently already do.

Having several skill pages require you to level-up A LOT.
What I was suggesting was to gain 1 skill point per skill tree for every 1 skill point we currently would gain, so you can make 3 choices instead of the current 1 choice.

11

I had an elaborate rebuttal to the skill trees partially planned but honestly I’m on board after reading through yours again. I don’t necessarily agree with the whole execution but the general idea is sound.

I don’t love debuffs as an alternative means of creature combat, I hate the ones already in place TBH but getting a one-shot suuuuux, too.

More relevant loot tables for meteors is the simplest first step.
More creatures with different abilities or totally random meteor-only creatures and ability combos might be next. Think an AoE suction ability or a regen terrain ability.
Titans/boss creatures, too.
A planet-wide trigger that allows an opt-in to warp to the battle against a boss/titan? Strengthens the boss a little and increases the loot table a little but joining also boosts player damage?

Anyhow, I like where your head’s overall.

1 Like
12

If anything… skills need to be simplified… too many 1point things. Too many epics… maybe combining some

2 Likes
13

I would consider all of this content. Hunting/Combat is not finished at all in my eyes.

14

I’m finally learning some details I didn’t know before and meteor hunts are starting to work, and now yall wanna go chang everything. I like the unusualness of Boundless stuff, the more I learn them the more impressive the balancing and the more consistent a sense of lore-like style to the unique stuff starts to emerge. It feels like a really good old wierd scifi masterpiece rather than an airbrushed chrome reboot to suit tastes of a duller time sort of universe.

There’s sposed to be healers who revive you with all your stats intact, I’ll be one of those on my next hunt – my region has really crappy unreliable broadband or I would have had time to show it off last night instead of crashing and accidentally sending myself home instead of to the exo we were on.

I wish somsone would take up leading hunts on Delta C regularly; those were less hellish b/c familiar terrain, less lethality.etc, but still fun. I’m learning to enjoy the exo ones (except Alpha, too many sudden death pits) more, but I miss romping the familiar lines of Delta C.

15

I have to admit I was getting really intense reactive depression over the hunts, but I assumed it was because everyone was doing harder hunts than the ones I thought I’d have to do to successfully take over management of Tigg’s Tunnels (which currently have all T6 stops detouring via local portal to Portal Seekers so people used to using the Tunnels aren’t stuck finding some other route to work unless they want to – the hops themselves will come back as my cash/oort accumulation skills improve but they were the least used hops and a third of the budget – for now it’s all T1-T5 planets and set up with people who like to wander-explore in mind, and I’m building up the stops to have more information about the planet and hopefully more local portals to regen farms, etc, because that would make them useful to me making money to keep them fed :).

I lost my train of thought in the thoughts I’m obsessed with, sowwy… anyway I had to start hunting every day to ahve any hope of keeping the tunnels working, but I was getting hit with terrible depression jags from it, I’d literally be trying to hunt through drowning eyes and a runny nose and pouting like crazy. I got a lot of help and information I didn’t know that made a huge difference.

Also – you can go on meteor hunts as a total putz just to add your body to the count that sets the size of the meteor. You can go as a healer rather than a fighter, you can stay stay back and just watch one of the white square warps the critters come out of and shoot what you can. There’s the slingbow and bomb augments I had no idea existed until yesterday or the day before, etc…

Maybe some of this isn’t the same old same old stuff you already tried?