Vitality greatly messes with the game balance. It has major impact on the perceived difficulty of the game. The same monsters on the same starter planet for the same character level can range from trivial to impossible based on the amount of vitality skilled. Already the first 5 skill points double your health.
Not skilling vitality is almost always a bad idea. Even as a crafter, builder or merchant you will encounter sources of damage sooner or laster and dying has a high penalty. Skilling vitality is a no-brainer. If you know about it. If you donāt know, you will have a bad experience playing the game. I bet most of the threads here on the froum about the game being to hard or about dying too much are from players without enought vitality.
I looked through the skill templates, all of them have at least lv 3 vitality. (Except the Builder, but i can tell you, thats a bad idea when building on a higher level planet.)
So here is my Suggestion:
Let vitality scale with the characters level to the amout of 3 to 5 vitality at level 50 and offer the rest as a percentage bonus deeper in the tree so that hunters and tanks can have like 200% or 300% more health.
To recap, this suggestion aims to reduce unnecessary frustration for new players and to clean the skill tree of an redundant choice. A choice that can only be right or fail is not a very interesting choice in a skill tree, so get rid of it!
I would agree. As someone who is helping with a build on a tier 3 world, I need the vitality or I would constantly be killed or return to sanctum for an extended period of time. Both of these would end up wasting a great deal of time, so even though my main focus is building, I have the vitality bonus set at level 7. A lot of skill points I could use someplace else, but as @Kirinvar said, a requirement if I need to work on a higher tier planet.
I donāt think it would make the life of those that donāt know about vitality easier. It would make the life of those that know about it harder. Because everybody would end up on low life for a long while.
But I still think itās a good idea.
Actually what @Jyanin said sounds really good, to have a part of it scaling with levels and part of it staying a stat. Because ānerfedā that way the stat isnāt a no brainer anymore, it would stay a great stat on hunters and co, and become something you can skip for safer lifechoices.
The thing with the Attribute skill tree is all of them can scale with level. In fact, I think that would be a much better idea. So for things like Luck, it would max out at 5% at level 50. It would leave the entire skill tree for Attributes open for other things that provide better character customization.
Like Power could increase something else and not damage or Agility could increase something other than what it does right now (movement speed stats and something else). Agility could enable wall jumping at a certain skill tree level taken just like Intelligence could help with creature detection through blocks (such as a feint outline) and not only a red dot on compass.
There are a lot more interesting things that can be done with those Attribute skill trees than what we have now to promote more diverse gameplay choices and experiences.
@james tagging you james so you are alerted to this thread. I think it will give birth to some interesting ideas to evolve the current character customization and enhance gameplay across the board. I donāt expect it to be something that will happen in this next skill tree rework either.
Not sure about making every other stat scaling. I kind of like those stats as they are. I have maxed agility on my explorer character and I love it. but I donāt need it on the other ones. Something like luck Iād rather see it disappear completely than to scale with level. Luck scaling with levels would trigger me. It would mean that when it comes to gathering any resources, I would always be inefficient unless I hit max level. I would hate it.
If what you want is to add more skills, you donāt have to remove the attributes for that, you could just make a new category for them.
Attributes are skills that are not very interesting in themselves. But because there is a lot of tiers to them you can fine tune how much you want of everything. Itās not bad. They could be reworked a bit, but I donāt think the whole idea deserve to be thrown away.
Flat increases in stats from a skill tree is boring. Thatās really all I am saying. There can be more done with the skill tree than just give additive increases in stats.
Whether Attribute skill trees are removed or not is pretty irrelevant. The stats themselves are boring to even look at and arenāt really much of an after thought. But yet, something to make them more meaningful would be nice.
I am looking forward to see what changes they continue to make to the skill trees. I am sure everyone is. Iād love to have some sort of 20m charge ability that you can activate which just sends you like a projectile forward in the direction youāre facing and follows the same physics as Slingbow shots and bombs.
I would like to see some general growth in some attributes or stats when a character gains levels, but please KEEP the vitality as an attribute to be also raised by skills. I donāt want a happy hippo autoleveling boringness like ion Diablo 3 or some other games. I want to style my character as I want as as much I can. With removing Stats from being leveled up by skills you limit the possibilities of gameplay.
I like the idea of scaling stats with level but keeping skills relevant. What if you gained a point in all stats every other level, for a total of 25 by level 50, leaving 75 points for skills? So the skill investment still feels relevant and lower level characters can still mostly keep up with efficiency. But levelling is still relevant for squeezing out those last few points of efficiency.
To make the situation simple I think only hp and (or not) energy should scale with each level while leaving their attribute gains in the skill tree. At a small amount giving you even 100hp per level would give you 5600hp at end level allowing the skill tree itself to provide a purple hp bar which would be nice. Now the gameās difficulty doesnāt warrant that hp pool but in the future with world bosses and tank builds, yes it will be.
To throw a wrench in the works, I personally think our core attributes should be on a separate set of points that scale identically to how they do now. Having alts removing crafting skills from main players makes this whole skill system thing exploitable to a certain extent and having a cap on core attributes would prevent unrealistic supermen by providing a boundary on core stats. I think I have way too many of my core attributes maxed and will have more maxed when I have an alt at level 50 alt to take my crafts and chisel skills away.
