This is mostly a feedback-designed question posed to the playerbase, but also to EHG as well I suppose. Half suggestion, mostly a what-if.
I am a total sucker for build variety. It’s what’s kept me playing LE for the last couple months (634 hours so far!!) and what kept me crawling back to another shall-go-unnammed ARPG for years. It’s something that the genre defines itself through, and an absolutely crucial aspect to an ARPG’s success, in my opinion. That said, so far even in its infancy LE is doing a fine job - I am just running out of weird ideas to try, so I had a different weird idea.
The idea posited here is basically the title, to expand a little; What if certain unique items, like the Soulfire for example, were to give the player access to the skill tree of Hungering Souls, regardless of their class? In this case, it would automatically be converted to fire, bringing an interesting mechanical ‘downside’ (for lack of a better term) to putting the spell in a different classes hands.
If that item was used on say, a Forge Guard, among the Sentinel skills in the skill panel, there could be another small section (because these would be rare and build-centric, probably 1 or 2 maximum for a build outside of silly situations) that houses “Granted Skills”.
Another simple example could be The Claw. Equipping this item on any class could grant that character access to the Wolf skill and its tree, allowing classes that are not usually able to access a minion like that the ability to do so.
Of course I realize that behind the scenes this would take a lot of work in order to get the animations and effects for certain skill/class combinations to not be completely wonky - among what I can only imagine myriad other challenges - but I think this could be a really cool and interesting way to add a HUGE amount of build diversity to this game.
I am curious to hear what you all think about this idea. Help? Hurt? Brilliant? Madness? Give me some examples of really cool interactions you can think of, or conversely ways that this might be completely overpowered and ruin the meta.
While i personally would like to have very rare and unique items that grant a skill (with skill spec tree) to different classes, i am not a fan of those skills being already existing skills from other classes.
Since LE has one feature that is very dear and near to me, that many many other similar games have lost (or never had): Class Identity
So i would rather see items of a new rarity (maybe this could be legendaries, we don’t know yet), that grant a specific skill, that is customizable with it’s own tree.
To give you a random example: A corrupted Void Staff, that grants you “Catalyst Of Doom”, a channel singletarget skill that corrupts the target, the longer you channel the more dmg it does.
This is just a random idea that came to my mind, but you could do alot with that system.
For sure, Class identity is something that can get lost, or focused on way too much. In this particular case I felt like Class identify would be maintained very well, because so much comes from passives. Because of that, I feel like any Skill you would choose from an off-class would already be one that synergizes and fits with your class really well. Releasing a horde of flaming skulls fits well into the Forge Guard’s pockets. An Bloody Acolyte with a pack of Bloody Wolves still speaks to her overall focus on bleed damage. Maybe the Falconer will end up having some Lightning focus and along with her Falcon could command a couple of Storm Jaw’s specced Wolves as well, since commanding animal minions is well within her apparent toolkit.
I think this could even further class identity in a lot of cases. Say if a Beastmaster - all burly and shirtless, with a passive that lets him put swords in his offhand - were to use Gladiator’s Oath and have access to Dancing Strikes. Imagine weaving in Swipe supported by Claws of the Bear (that adds a cooldown) between Dancing Strikes inside your little arena, accompanied by few burly and shirtless companions. To me this is like, Primalist+ - It’s not like he’s suddenly become a Rogue, he’s an enhanced Primalist.
EDIT: Also, another point: If this game was heading anywhere close to a “Just spam one skill” direction, I wouldn’t be having this idea. The fact that LE encourages you to use all 5 of your skills often, as a kit, inspires me to think that adding off-class skills would be able to maintain a very solid degree of class identity.
TL;DR, I feel like class identity would be maintained in a healthy way since the granted skills chosen would almost certainly be ones that fit into the classes design and synergy. I agree that it is an important aspect of this game and hope to see it maintained as well.
While the damage type might be something the other class already can do, summoning wolves as a acolyte or shooting skulls as a sentinel is not fitting.
Same thing, Dancing Strikes is something you execute with grace.
Primalist might be atheltic, but he is relatively bulky and does not have the finesse of a agile rogue.
Even if you would fit some things into classes, that are semi-fitting.
You could also equip items that frant skills that are totally not fitting at all.
Even my idea from my previous post already would break class identiy pretty much.
But it would at least keep the unique accessability from the base class skills.
The skill bound to a Unique is something I already proposed and I still think it’s a good idea.
I also think it should be a unique skill, not an already existing one. And it probably be bound to a class, in order to be balanced.
This question was asked to Mike Weicker during one of the Q&A streams. Generally, it sounded very unlikely that this would be something they’d do – for a few reasons;
class identity, as Heavy has already pointed out
balancing & potential bug related issues
but the big one is that many skills (and what they eventually want with most skills) have interactions with other skills within the same class (example; nodes of the Shift skill have multiple possible interactions with other skills of the Rouge which a different class would not be able to take advantage of)
allowing other classes to access the skills would remove those options for those classes, so other classes wouldn’t get the benefit of the full skill tree
you’d either be severely limited in your choices within other class skill trees or the dev’s would have to completely forgo adding this additional functionality between skills to allow for other classes to use the skills to their full extent (which seems very unlikely at this point as more and more skills receive interactions between skills of the same class)
I might be missing something further (because I can’t find the source), but these were generally the key notes of that answer.
It was a cool feature in D2 when Paladins could get access to teleport by using the ENIGMA runeword.
But in LE classes have a very balanced skill arsenal. And skills are also very class/mastery specific. This kind of feature would not fit very well, I think.
In general it sounds like a cool feature. But I understand the reasons to not implement it that Andrew quoted.
Luckily it’s up to the Unique design entirely as to which skills we could get access to. Also, just because a unique is focused on a specific skill, doesn’t mean it would necessarily be one that granted said skill. Unique items that do this could be focused around more simple skills, ones that are just damaging skills, minions, nothing that provides a level of utility anywhere near Teleporting, no skills from Mastery Subclasses, etc.
A lot of people seem to be reading this as “let every class use whatever skill they want all willy nilly” and that is not the intended idea.
The problem with stuff like this is, having one or two of those items granting skills to other classes… that’s kinda cool and “unique”… but then people will demand more and more.
Once a system like this is in place, the demand for certain skills will become bigger and bigger and then the question is:“Where do you draw the line?”, it’s really dangerous to implement such features, because once they are in, it’s very hard to revert or dial back some of this, without upsetting people.
This could be said about regular uniques, shards and mods, classes, skills, sets, item bases, passives, subclasses, etc. Almost any aspect of the game. I don’t see much of a difference between people “demanding” more items like this, or “demanding” new skills for the classes, or “demanding” new sub-classes, etc.
Again, every game ever has a few thousand people coming up with brilliant ideas all the time. Maybe like 0.000001% of them ever get anywhere near development, but some do. There are a handful of player designed unique items in a lot of games…even…Last Epoch. The dev’s aren’t giving these creators free reign any more than they pander to the desires of every salty suggestion post where people demand anything. If they’re careful about the skills they choose to do this with, it’s no different than adding a no-class skill like your channeled void staff, which if any class had access to would have just as much impact on their identity as holding a different item that granted a different thing that they didn’t have access to before.
To reiterate: It is not the intended idea to grant access to every skill to every class like shall-not-be-named. It is the intended idea to use already existing skills and passives from other classes on Unique items that grant skills, an item trait not unfamiliar in APRG gearing.
Because implementing a an entirely new mechanic to an item(granting a skill) in a game, that didn’t have that before is very dangerous.
Also demanding new classes or skills is also very different.
expanding the pool of skills within a class is totally fine, but as soon as you implement any mechanics that breaks the usual restrictions (like class restrictions) it can become very hard to balance or expand that without getting the wishy-washy/homogenized “classes” alot of other similar games have.
Now see, this is where I think this mechanic would shine. Using that unique item would come with the downside of not being able to utilize a large portion of that skills tree. The reward obviously, is being able to use that skill. The “risk” is…maybe your 20 points will be a lot harder to get the full benefit of towards the end, because not only can you not utilize those particular passives, maybe the unique (like the Soulfire example used) also converts that skills damage. Removing those options, and severely limiting your choices within that Granted Skills passive tree is the very common trope of “powerful item has powerful penalty” that we already see on a number of uniques in the game as is. “The big one” indeed.
I’m gonna have to disagree and say that adding items and skills to an ARPG is probably a pretty good move.
You said earlier you’d be down with items that granted skills that were not class specific, I’m curious why you think a powerful item like that, that would give a Channeled Void Spell to a Primalist, is less dangerous than giving him the Dancing Strikes skill because you don’t think homie can do a cartwheel - despite having a handful of viable Dexterity focused builds already?
As i already said, adding new stuff and expanding upon a classes tool kits is great.
That should be the longterm goal anyway.
I just want to avoid anything that homogenizes classes too much.
Ideally, if those items would ever make it into the game, you still would have 4 other class-related skills and would retain alot of the class-identity.
While you are correct that primalist has some limited dexterity scaling, he doesn’t have any “agile skills”.
You could also argue that dexterity is only how much finesse a character has with weapons, but it doesn’t necessarily related to how agile a character is.
Seems like semantics. The game is pretty clear about what Dexterity represents. Throwing in “agility” to differentiate sounds like a straw-man since within the game there’s no real difference.
I feel like this is exactly the kind of broken things people are wanting when they ask about these things. They just don’t want to come straight out and say it because it is obviously OP and they don’t want the pushback.
I am against the idea when it comes to active use skills. I don’t feel so bad about triggered or aura type unique skills from items. Them having a skill tree is another thing entirely. Given enough balance, it could be okay.
This actually gives me a thought about what a Legendary could be. Maybe a legendary item is one that levels up and has a whole skill-type tree instead of affixes and you get to customize the item that way.
I’ve said numerous times throughout this thread that it should only be certain skills that are not utility focused and have limited benefit outside of their own skill tree, you can go ahead and give me all the pushback you want friend, but I’m just here to discuss potential coolness in a video game we both like, not start a fight, and I don’t appreciate being called deceptive.
I tried to use examples that were good examples of this: Hungering Souls has no interaction with any other Acolyte specific skills, but does have interactions with minions in general; something most classes have. It also has a number of passives that alter the way the skill deals damage by adding/subtracting projectiles, it has “when hit” procs, and furthermore the Unique Item itself converts the damage to fire - a much more universal damage type than its base Necrotic. A great example of an item and a skill combination that would do really well with this kind of mechanic.
Same with the wolves, they are a very good universal minion tied to an item with limited functionality otherwise. It has some health and minion melee damage, and some base cast speed. This item, to a player seeing it for the first time, screams “I give you Wolves” no matter what class you’re on. Wolves again have a very universal passive tree - within the tree itself lies the “up to your maximum number of companions” functionality with its own +wolves passives. They have lightning damage, cold damage, physical damage, bleeds, and again not a single one of the passives has a something to do with another Primalist skill.
Once again; The title of this thread has the word “certain” in it twice. This is not a blanket “let all the classes use all the skills like PoE” thead.
