The current talent system leaves quite a bit to be desired. I know that it is a work in progress and will likely receive multiple updates prior to 1.0, but I wanted to get out in front of these updates and share my perspective.
Here are the things I think desperately need changed:
Make each talent cost 1 talent point and award 1 talent point with each level. You can always adjust the talent points awarded in order to adjust the possibility of builds but scaling the cost of talents as talent points accumulate is silly and just leads to frustration. Keep it simple.
Separate talents from stats. The entire tree with power, control, agility, dexterity, etc should be removed from the talent tree and, with each level up, the player should be awarded a stat point in addition to a talent point. This is the approach, for example, that Elder Scrolls: Online uses. Each level you get a skill point and a stat point. Your stat point goes into your choice of stamina, magicka or health while your skill point is used on an actual talent. Remove all
Adjust the approach for talents to go from very benign, uninteresting linear improvements on things (such as increasing your resistance to kinetic damage by X%) to more interesting talents. Here are several examples:
Incombustible
Makes you immune to damage from lava.
Efficient Gatherer
Gives you a 20% chance to double your yield when gathering.
Iron Legs
Makes you immune to fall damage
Windborn I and II
Increases the range of your grapples by 25/50%
I’ve Done This Before
Reduces crafting times by 50%
Efficient Crafter
Your crafts yield an additional 10% of whatever you’re crafting, rounded up.
Light as a Feather I and II
Increases your jump height by 1/2 blocks
Weed Wacker
Foliage can now be gathered by simply running through it.
Some Like it Hot
Coal now generates 50% more heat
Sniper I and II
Increases your range with slingbows by 25/50%
The Wall
You are immune to knockback effects such as those from Wildstock.
Some of you may look at these talents and think “okay that’s too powerful”. I disagree. Talents SHOULD be powerful. Balancing these comes from the need to make difficult/interesting choices. For example, the talent trees might be organized in such a way that if exploration is your thing so you take Light as a Feather I and II and Windborn I and II as talents, you will not have enough talent points to also get Some Like it Hot (as just one imaginary example). This brings me to my fourth point:
Break the talent trees into archetypes. Have a tree each for the intended boundless archetypes of Crafter, Gatherer, Explorer, and Hunter. Within each of those trees, there can be additional specialization. For example, within Hunter, there will be talents available that improve your ability to tank while other talents improve your ability to deal damage. As another example, within Gatherer, there will be talents that are more miner-focused while other talents may focus on chopping down trees. Obviously, I’m just scratching the surface here but hopefully you get the idea.
Ditch mastery altogether (from a talent perspective) and simply unlock the use of better tools/weapons at certain character levels.
half of these “new” skills are already in the game… Bt i do like the idea. I however don’t like the ESO approach. IT would lead people away from the game. You yourself said,
But for real the concept is nice and all. The lava I doubt will be implemented cause its a little op. Maybe take less damage in lava. And the resistances are actually quite op. I have a tank build and 11 more levels to go but I take like 0 dmg for an hr then i take maybe 960 dmg and i keep tanking away. I love those skills. Yes being more descriptive would be awesome. Efficient gather is called luck in this game. I do love the crafting yields that has been brought up before and they pointed out using bulk and mass. Fall dmg is already implemented. Crafting times would be nice to be reduced. The jumpin is already here, weed wacker is a good idea but won’t be implemented cause its to op its like infinite fuel. Coal idea sounds nice but that is why they have different tiers. Slingbow range i’m sure there is one skill like that but if not I agree lets add. Immunity to knockback would be nice to have.
I also do think we need to do something with the current talent system. At higher level, it feels like we are all just like the same. Some swing faster, some jump higher, some run faster but nothing really too concrete that would differentiate one over the other. Like he said, we need to have more “interesting” skills that rewards specialized character.
Personally, the skills that I prefer are more of active skills or something that really feels exclusive to that profession. Right now, most feels like “just a bump up on the numbers of the attribute” of our characters.
Another concern of mine is the lack of concrete tree for specialization. While this is not entirely bad since the devs want to give us freedom on skills that are not bounded to our profession (you’re free to be anything), it deters the reward of sticking to a profession from ground up. What do I mean by that. I’ll just give an example. I had a pure miner character and reached lvl 20+. When I wanted to join the community hunt, I just have to level up once then pour all those sp to slingbow mastery. And just like that, I’m a level 20+ character with max power and max agility wielding high tier slingbow, another level more then I’m probably wielding gem slingbows. Kind of like an identity crisis moment for me.
One suggestion that I gave was to make additional requirements on leveling up masteries or other relevent skill to that profession. It could be for hunter, “Kill 100 creature” for Mastery 2, etc. etc. The foundation is already there (I think) with the addition of feat system. I feel like we could be more creative with the stats that feats provide.
I disagree pretty strongly with most of your points but I appreciate the vote towards the overall concept. Specifically, I disagree with the following:
The lave I doubt will be implemented because its a little op.
Talents SHOULD be powerful. What we have right now is a large collection of very underwhelming talents that really have negligible effect on the game in the grand scheme of things. Regardless, a talent such as that doesn’t have to be complete lava immunity. There’s plenty of creative freedom here. For example, it could be that you simply don’t take damage from lava for 3 seconds after entering to give you time to grapple out.
And the resistances are actually quite op.
Yes but they’re extremely boring talents. WoW and all AAA MMOs figured out a long time ago that talents such as this aren’t fun and do little for your game.
Efficient Gatherer is just luck in this game
Not exactly. Luck is a stat and each “talent” of luck you grab provides some negligible chance to reach the next possible “tier” of drop quantity from what you’re gathering. Only at max luck do you guarantee this higher tier of drop quantity and the drop quantity potential varies by type of resource whereas what I’m asking for is simplification and a bit more fun: a flat 20% chance to double your yield.
weed wacker is a good idea but won’t be implemented cause its to op its like infinite fuel
How is this ANY different than farming foliage with a topaz axe? I can tell you one key difference - farming foliage by running through it would be fun and isn’t that why we play games? Who cares if it’s infinite fuel? Fuel is trivial in this game. You can gather enough fuel to completely fuel any beacon in under 2 minutes.
Coal idea sounds nice but that is why they have different tiers
No offense but coal is the single biggest blocker for me and many others in this game. I can spend hours upon hours upon hours farming nothing but coal and then spend hours upon hours compacting that coal. The moment that coal is finished compacting it’s gone within 10 minutes. Always. Coal needs a serious improvement in this game and, no, compact peat is not a viable replacement. Farming enough peat to compete with coal is objectively worse than just farming coal.
or maybe you have it set up so that each thing you do will slowly level up a separate exp bar for that skill set that gives you points to put to certain skills in that tree.
What if, we separate the stats altogether from the SP system. As we progress through the feats, it rewards an increase in the stats corresponding to the activity done.
Killed 100 mobs: +1 Power
Mined 100 rocks: +1 Power
Traveled Distance/Dodged Attacks: +1 Movement speed
etc but have some stats like vitality increase on level up. It makes everything you do feel rewarding and the game sort of automatically progress you on what you’re actually doing without the needs of your intervention. Just a thought.
Tying the permanent stat bonuses to the current feat system or a more robust one seems like it could work.
I’d be inclined to disagree with this suggestion. Either the bonuses should be minor or stats like these could have their own feats. Taking X amount of damage from enemies or a specific enemy type could increase stats.
Thanks for the thoughts guys – it’s really interesting.
We are planning on a decent sized overhaul of the skills, and I’ve got some ideas, but there still a lot of thought needed, so these kinds of suggestions are very useful.
Overall our ambition is to allow people to make their characters as they want to, and not force them into rigid types. The ides is to do something a little different, and avoid the class-based systems that many other games use. That’s why we’ve so far moved away from profession based trees, and in fact trees altogether. I agree though that the current implementation is a bit flat, and a bit dry, and doesn’t encourage specialisation.
I think it’s becoming a little bit harder to specialise … There only seems to be two main types that will cover most aspects of the game… One is crafter/builder and the other is hunter/miner/explorer … With the advent of creatures now spawning in caves you need to be able to defend yourself wherever you go.
I’ve maxed out my skill points with a level 50 character that’s a general all rounder and there are still a lot of points that will be needed with future updates planned.
When you’re mining you need all the tools mastered (except chisels and maybe axe), grapples, the Explorer skills and now slingbow, the must have for me is also the zero damage to tools carried. As a hunter/miner/explorer you won’t need any of the advanced crafting skills.
On a side note I also agree that coal/spark core fuel is definitely a real rolling road block. I can live with some of the crafting times as I can set up all the machines and then leave them overnight to do their thing but getting the fuel for the spark core and furnaces just takes soo long, I often have to leave my build for a few days to go mining then leave that over night or more to compact and then all that effort is gone in an hour …Not a good balance, especially as I work all day and only get an hour or two if I’m lucky each evening to play Boundless.
Keep in mind that bombs and lances will come in and if we dont get more skill points (or not much more), then being a fighting character will need more weapon masteries meaning less points for exploring/mining skills. Truly specified miner (full death penalty and durability bonus) will need to be very selective in endurance skills, while specialized hunter would have endurance part completed and most likely will have to give up on full durability bonus etc.) Having one alt covering fighting, mining and efficient exploring (compass upgrades and warp range skills) wont really be possible without making him a bit more of a generalist.
Exactly …that’s part of the problem …If you’re going to go exploring then you’re probably going to want to gather/mine anything you find of interest and chances are you’re going to come across creatures, especially spitters, that aren’t going to make things easy for you. I went cave exploring the other evening and ended up spending a good chunk of my time swapping between weapons to kill the spitters that kept appearing and my hammer to do mining. I couldn’t even pick up the bones, meat etc they drop because all my slots where occupied by my weapons, tools, coal, ore, tech, fossils etc that I was looking for.
When mining I ignore killing mobs other than when I must defend myself and I only use silver sling (to save on costly weapon mastery). I dont gather leaves, trunks or props with my miner (unless I find a free slot than sometime I would gather something on surface when moving between mining areas).
When I get my hunter, I kill mobs, complete meteorites and gather on surface stuff as well as do general exploration. I save skill points by not going beyond basic hammers here so I don’t bother to mine with my hunter.
I thought I would have one hunter/miner when alts were introduced but I would end up with unsatisfying stats due to necessity for hammers and weapons mastery at gem level and other tools at gold/titanium level. That kind of build would also require combining endurance skills with survival skills and getting them maxed would be impossible.
But for real the concept is nice and all. The lava I doubt will be implemented cause its a little op. Maybe take less damage in lava. And the resistances are actually quite op. I have a tank build and 11 more levels to go but I take like 0 dmg for an hr then i take maybe 960 dmg and i keep tanking away. I love those skills. Yes being more descriptive would be awesome. Efficient gather is called luck in this game. I do love the crafting yields that has been brought up before and they pointed out using bulk and mass. Fall dmg is already implemented. Crafting times would be nice to be reduced. The jumpin is already here, weed wacker is a good idea but won’t be implemented cause its to op its like infinite fuel. Coal idea sounds nice but that is why they have different tiers. Slingbow range i’m sure there is one skill like that but if not I agree lets add. Immunity to knockback would be nice to have.