Damage per second. So you have one taking a lot of damage without dying one dealing a lot of damage very quickly and one that makes sure that neither dies during the fight.
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But Damage per second is kind of a stupid name for the role^^ I mean every class has a DPS. Ambiguity is bad^^
DD makes much more sense.
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That’s up for discussion that should probably not take place here. I was only curious because Vastar mentioned typical MMO raid setups and nearly all of them that use the holy trinity call the non-tank/non-healers DPS. I’ve been playing MMOs for 10+ years now and this thread is the first time I’ve ever seen DD. I wanted to clarify what he meant in case others were also confused by the non-standard terminology.
As far as I know it’s been used for years because it’s a fairly nice metric to judge damage classes by. Healers and tanks can be measured by how much damage is being taken overall and if everyone is still alive. But without metrics such as DPS it’s difficult to tell how well a damage dealing class is doing. Since for most games the objective is to do as much damage as possible in as little amount of time as possible (to minimize encounter duration and incoming damage) the metric of DPS was born and has since plagued raiders as a preferred quality over skill and raid awareness 
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I think the terms are fairly regional. I only ever hear DPS in the States, but I’ve seen DD in most euro forums. 
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I assumed as much but for some reason thought Vastar was US-based. But found a few posts with him typing in German so I guess I was wrong.
Willing to drop this whole DPS v. DD conversation soon hehe 
. Doesn’t really seem like the thread for it and it’s trivial at best. (Only reason I’m not dropping it in this reply is because I don’t like being misunderstood and wanted to make my original post as clear as possible).
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We will be supporting multiple characters on one account – we still want you to be able to experience all of the content Boundless has to offer alongside differentiated abilities/characters.
It’s our plan to support this in a very limited fashion (like an emergency wrong-decision parachute). Anything other than infrequent adjustments would trivialise the reason for having differences between characters in the first place.
We don’t make you pick all your specialisms a part of the character building process up front – choosing your first specialism comes after a fair amount of play where you’ll already be familiar with how the system works, and hopefully you’ll have scouted out all the trees and you’re planning your route through them.
Boundless combat is not going to be as in-depth as most MMOs, so cast aside major expectations and comparisons to WoW et al. However, we want to provide that feel within Boundless, teams with different specialities and roles. Will provide more on this in the future – late game combat is something we’re yet to flesh out in it’s entirety[quote=“Heurazio, post:4, topic:4189”]
Can you go more into detail how profession progress and the “infinite unlock” works.
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Professions levels (eg: ‘Miner Level 23’) are not tied to skills or upgrades. So infinite progression there relates to you being rewarded with status indefinitely rather than a buff. But it’s a very, very late stage problem – our plan is for hundreds of hours of progress (per character).
Just to fill in a few gaps, here’s an example flow:
- As you mine blocks you earn Mining XP (and every profession has it’s own set of actions that award XP)
- Repeat mining until you cross a threshold and you become Miner Level 2
- Ever time you level up a profession you earn an Upgrade Point
- Upgrade points can be spent in specialism trees (Founder, Explorer, Hunter, Defender, Builder, Miner, Gatherer, Trader and Crafter)
- To begin with you’ll only have access to Founder. As you progress in the Founder tree you’ll earn the ability to unlock more specialism trees.
- You earning Upgrade Points through any profession (eg: Explorer, Defender, Trader). They can be spent on any skill (levelling up in Mining doesn’t mean you need to spend that point in Mining).
- If you max out all of the skills across all trees you have unlocked (this will take a long time) you’ll still earn XP and levels for professions – there just won’t be anything for you to spend the additional Upgrade Points on (unless we add additional content to existing skill trees, which could happen…).
If you really care about trading, and do it a lot, you’ll want to unlock the Trader specialism tree because it’ll make you a more effective trader. If you’re a casual trader you’ll probably want some of the other trees instead. Maybe you really like Mining, and so being a Trader is a great complement to that if you like selling the ores you find. Or maybe you prefer to craft with the ores you find, in which case get the Crafter profession.
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Not a fan of this but was to be expected.
As you might have seen, my stance is that in the end everyone should be able to do everything with one character. But it shouldn’t be easy. In fact it should be close to impossible, but only close.
Reskilling is kind of a backdoorish compromise I somehow could live with, albeit not really being happy with the system.
I still think it would be a great idea to just make it exponentially(or even higher degree) more expensive to unlock skills after the 3 proposed spezialized ones.
Would take ages but still be possible. Casual players wouldn’t attempt a 4th skilltree anyway with this system. Or they would maybe unlock a new skill every 2-3 months or so.
And you would have a use for your points.
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I personally too preffer exponontiel timespan, but allowing access to the other professions. The same goes for the first 3 skill trees actually, making the last skills very timeconsuming to get taking up maybe even months of gameplay for small extra buffs would a nice way to make the players have endgame buffs to work towards.
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I don’t know. you have to make a compromise between casuals and hardcore players.
And I think to have 3 skill trees which have linear growth in costs is good for everyone to start and those who want to go the extra mile can with the other skill trees which are much more expensive to climb.
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Yeah I agree on that but think it would be cool that in the end of all the trees there is a few very time heavy abilities, so you can either choose to use time on getting better in a new dicipline or take the last few few abilities that gives you a small edge
Or you know just do all of it investing a lot of time into it.
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Yea I see what you mean^^ I’m kind of split and would be fine either way to be honest^^
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I can see the plus side of allowing multiple characters. For example, a family with 2+ kids - only one console, so only 1 game - allows all kids to play the game (albeit separately) without messing up each others characters, progression, builds etc.
I personally prefer it that you can only have limited abilities per character - it makes you think more about your character and how you want to play it. For games that actually have defined ‘classes’ you don’t allow a sorcerer, for example, to use the best melee weapons as a warrior would - not sure why professions should be any different - you’re still given a choice at least so you can mix-and-match. Additionally, in real life, it’s very rare that one person is good at everything - we’re all in support of realism here right?
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In reality you can always be mediocre at everything 
Which would happen if you wanted to level every skill tree equally from the beginning with the proposed exponential (qubic etc.) growth of costs for every additional skill tree after the first 3. Which you can level just like it’s planned at the moment.
But yes I can see this positive side of multiple characters.
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Hah yeah, that is very true indeed!
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With the proposed system, you would be mediocre in everything, but you would only gain xp by doing your chosen professions activities. You don’t need to put points in every tree for that.
The problem I have with eventually filling all of the skill trees is that the more advanced a player gets, the less character identity they have. All late game players would be identical.
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You will gain experience with every profession but can only specialize in 3. At least that’s how I understand it so far.
No late game player would be identical if you make it hard enough.
As a small example. If it takes a dedicated person 1 month for the first 3 skill trees to be completed and every additional tree takes twice as long as the one before (assuming you complete them in order, but that doesn’t change the total amount of time you’d use to complete every tree).
Then that person would need 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 = 63 Months to complete every tree. And this is without any additional content in those 5.25 years!
Looking at this you could even make it less difficult and you’d still have noone with everything unlocked in the first 2 years without any additional content.
And Ben said that even with the plan of specializing in 3 skill trees it would take a long time to have everything maxed out.
So why exactly would anyone be identical to someone else?
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I don’t see it as all late play gamer being identical…
So although you can earn points in all of the trees by doing specific things, the ‘level’ mentioned, is only for status really … although you additionally earn you skill points for each of those levels. You can then spend earned skill points in any of your 3 chosen specialities (as well as in the global ‘Founder’ tree). Doing this will grant additional abilities / perks within your chosen specialities.
So basically everyone can do everything, but you only earn additional perks from your chosen set of 3 speciality skill trees.
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Absolutely, it’s an explicit goal of ours to avoid this. And we’re pretty happy with being flexible about it in this kind of a system, rather than most RPGs which make you pick a class/race/whatever upfront with no way of changing it.
It doesn’t matter how long it takes, ultimately if you allow everyone to unlock everything as time goes on everyone will become homogeneous. This just isn’t the kind of dynamic we think will work in a massive, player run universe like Boundless. We want players to rely on each other for their expertise. We want groups of players to think about their skills as a group (“you’re a builder, I’m a crafter” etc) because Boundless is a multiplayer universe. We want players to have as unique skill sets as they are visually customised.
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Cool, kinda looks like WoW in some way. IDK how
But only if you stop adding content and if you set the difficulty so low that everyone can achieve it until the servers are shut down forever.
In every other case not everyone and most likely rarely anyone would unlock everything.
In the end I’d have to try your proposed system, ingame, on my own.
But for the moment I really can’t say I’m happy with it.
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