Skill Cap (food for thoughts)

General
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When I have some more time and reset my characters to test buying skills from scratch, I will present my builds and what I would like to be able to achieve skill-wise when lvl 50.

I will use 3 examples - crafter/builder, hunter and miner.
In all 3 cases I will describe an all-or-nothing build I imagine would be satisfying from my point of view, as well as a more all-rounder build.

Please all interested share your ideas and thoughts - share your vision of a perfect skill cap (how many skills should one be able to have after maxing out an alt). I’ve seen some responds to the quoted question posted in the 187 topic, but I thought it would be good to create separate one as it’s a broad subject and it would be easier to have it extracted from there and put in its own dish.

NOTE: I assume we agree a skill cap is needed so we don’t end up with all max level players be exactly the same.

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Maybe as you progress you earned two different things. A skill tree point, and a skill point (i know, not very creative). Let’s also assume that the games skill system works as follows: each level, for up to (for ex) five levels, you get skill tree points. You use the skills in order to unlock a tree in which skill points will start to generate as you level up. With each level up, you get a skill point in all the trees you have unlocked. After you reach level five, the skill tree point will become free use points, where a skill tree is not required to be unlocked in order to unlock something from it. So let’s say you have unlocked the skill trees of cooking, hunting, mining, business, and Crafting. You gain points in each for every level up. Since you have unlocked five skill trees, at this point you can pick and choose random skills from skill trees you have not unlocked. You really like walking on water for ex, bu that skill is in the immunity tree, and you can unlock it. I’m just thinking of ideas to improve the skill point system, and i really believe it will have to be completely remade. The articles of confederation do not work, so we must make a bill of rights and constitution in place of it.

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Bigger overhaul of the skill tree has been announced already. Here let’s just focus on how much we think a character should be able to cover after reaching the top level.

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BUILDER/CRAFTER
All-or-nothing build

All-or-nothing means that I pick skills I think are a must for builder/crafter and I should have enough skill points to have them maxed out when reaching level 50. These skills are:

  • all Crafting skills
  • all Chisel Masteries
  • Control attribute
    TOTAL SKILL POINTS - around 650 (current live)

All-or-nothing I imagine as a “sacrifice” build where I really want very narrow specialization. That kind of builder/crafter would sit in his base, travel through warps and portals rather than on foot. I am happy to use copper/iron tools (be it a grapple. a hammer, a shovel or an axe). If I have to break higher tier blocks when building it’s ok to use gold hammer with no mastery. If it comes to fighting its the same, I am happy with a copper/iron sling - no masteries needed (that’s assuming I won’t be outside too much if it’s not a home world).

There are skills there that I find secondary and happy to have them at 50-75% of possible level and expect to have enough Skill Points for them:

  • Inventory Space 2
  • Jump 2
  • Shadow Effect 3
  • Health Regeneration 3
  • Death Reduction 3
  • Item Durability 3

TOTAL POINTS around 280

And skills I can have on lower level:

  • Vitality/Power/Dexterity/Agility/Energy all at 3
  • Stamina Regeneration 2

TOTAL POINTS just below 100

That leaves me with less than 200 Skill Points. Now I can get let’s say Warp Distance 1 and maybe Light Source 1 and add 1-2 levels on some attributes (maybe get full Attributes Bonus). Thats over 100 Skill points gone. There is still enough to get something else, like maybe Impact Armor (falling more likely than creature caused death with this certain play style).

New update brings 300 additional Skill Points but also a lot of expensive crafting skills that use it anyway.

All-rounder build.

In this one I pick an area of crafting that I am not interested in. I aim at being able to craft most, but not all items available in game. So, maybe I will give up food crafting or brew crafting (from current testing update). Or I won’t craft weapons, or maybe decorations are not my thing. That could save me 100 maybe 150 or even 200 Skill Points depending on how big is the branch of crafting I’m giving up.
These points go now towards skills that will let me be more active in other areas:

  • limited hunting (by getting Sling Mastery 4 and buffing Vitality and Health Regeneration plus maxing out Death Penalty Reduction)
  • limited mining/gathering (by getting Hammer/Shovel/Axe Masteries up to 2-3 level or pick one of them for level 4; again buffing Vitality and maxing out Death Penalty Reduction)
  • other ideas (Tax Reduction for shop keeping? Warp Distance for easier traveling? Grapple Mastery 2-3 or even 4?)

Thats whats possible with current 1200 Skill Points in current live version.
Question now is: should we have more than 1200 Skill Points (or 1500 after 187 goes live)? So even the all-or-nothing build have more secondary options (examples use for extra points below):
1.Maxed out Death Penalty Reduction and/or Tool Durability
2. Combination of Masteries between 1 and 4 for Hammer/Shovel/Axe/Grapple/Sling
3. Warp Distance, Light Source, Inventory Space above level 2
4. Armor and/or Resistance of sort
5. Atmosphere Protection when it comes in future?
6. Higher levels of secondary Attributes.

I myself would think that in current live version an additional 100 points would be great. I would think about level 1 masteries for tools and sling.
I am of opinion that being able to have more additional skills should mean dropping some of the crafting ones (thus creating the all-rounder builder/crafter spec that needs to buy some of the materials/items to make up for missing crafting abilities). That should encourage trading meaning a big plus for well working market system. If we can have all crafting skills and still be quite strong/fast/resistant to perform hunting/mining/exploring with solid efficiency, than we might well scrap off alt system and forget encouraging people to specialize, trade etc.

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Boundmore, didn’t read the whole post but I will say that since we can have 3 characters per account. That way we can make our characters hyper focused on certain things.

I do think it’s a little silly to have skill costs of 5 or 33 or 40+ etc. when things could be more simplified cost wise. But that’s just my opinion on that.

On the topic of how much should a single character do? I think if you make a character a hunter it should be able to get everything you want for the core playstyle of the build in addition to a little extra stuff to make some variety between people’s builds. I think the one thing that should be avoided is cookie cutter builds.

“To be a builder/crafter you must have all this stuff.” or "To be a hunter you must have all this stuff. And same for a gatherer style character. Without a little bit of skill tree build variety the game gets pretty stale on that end of the game. It’s a little bit of a skewed perceptive since we don’t have dungeons, raids, titans, player owned worlds, all the tools we could have, vehicles, etc.

There’s a lot of stuff we don’t have on live and this topic is going to come up multiple times. I think the majority of people are going to have their 3 characters hyper specialize in different things to make the most out of those characters but also want a little bit of flexibility if they want to change something up, such as swapping out an armor type or maybe get the jumping skills.

Right now there’s very little point in having a variety of builds with a mob hunter character since defense skill stats are absolutely garbage since they mitigate practically nothing for damage.

To me it seems like there’s a couple routes that can be taken. Either reduce the amount of actual skills you can pick up but also increase the number of options available to you (skill cost adjusted accordingly). Cause spending 40 points to max an Attribute is kind of pointless when the number of those skills you pick up can be significantly reduced down in number… like 2 or 3 at most.

Just some quick thoughts before I head off to the gym. :slight_smile:

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That’s why its important to find the right balance if it comes to skill points total available after level 50. If we get too much there will be no differences between certain types of alts (so hunters will all look the same etc. as they will afford everything). I reset my builder/crafter to test how much I spend on what and to see if I lack points or maybe have too many. And from what I see I could do with additional 100 but not more than that. Some may argue of course that 1500 is better (talking about current live, with the 187 testing update it would be more like asking for 1800).

I agree there is no need for high numbers. Where we have 5 we could use 1 and where we have 100 it could be 20. However, that doesn’t affect the skill cap discussion as such. If we scale down skill costs we also scale down skill points we get per level. So, question remains the same - where is the well balanced amount of skill points vs. skill costs. Atm we have to use numbers that are in game. If the game starts using lower numbers, we just scale down proposed numbers in a discussion like this.

On a different note: I will have to do the same reset with my hunter and miner to see if there is enough balance between costs of different skill-sets. 1300 skill points after level 50 seem fair to me in current live version when it comes to creating builder/crafter character. It might be that skills needed to build an effective hunter and/or miner cost more in total than all crafting skills thus making 1300 points look too little.

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About that.
Sling Mastery tree is what has bothered me for a while now.
For a build like a builder, crafter or even a miner, I find it enough to use silver slings. So I spend points on getting Sling Mastery 1 and then live in frustration that I can’t use rapid fire without buying Sling Mastery 2 and 3 before I can unlock it. I think the slings special attacks could be separated so we could buy it independently of how far we want to go in Sling Mastery branch.

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