With respect, I don’t think you can be making claims about end game until you get a character to end game.
Fair I guess, but when I make this exact same post at end game because I’ve been playing this types of games for years and can already see the issue at level 30, I don’t wanna see people making that argument.
While I don’t mind the skill capped at 20. I wouldn’t mind seeing a way to go over this cap with items or crafting.
I don’t think you even read my post. I said they can balance it around by moving node positions and reduce the requirements to reach specific node. Or probably just increase damage per node.
You also completely disregarded the fact that I mentioned Ashen Crown as an example unique to solve that problem. No, it’s not a node. The only node that I mentioned was Luminaire.
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To add to the conversation:
We already had a very large post about the exact opposite behaviour: You get the skill/gamechanging nodes before level cap around skill level 10-15 and so the last 5-10 points don’t add anything mechanically, only stat wise. So the climax is at around 50-75% leveling thr skill, making maxing out that skill boring.
By following the route you suggest we would have the game changing nodes right away and only increasing stats. This would make skill leveling boring for 95% of the time.
You don’t get all skills, all cool passives and all the nice item from the start. You progress towards them, lvl up and earn your power. That’s playing an RPG.
That’s right. Terrible concept in D3. I’m glad LE goes the exact opposite route and makes skill building special and meaningful.
Since I am playing LE I see people complain about the skilltrees having to many nodes and that you can’t take all that look cool. This is called tradeoff. The fact that there are trees where “more damage” modifiers are spread out so you can’t skill all of them, is called balance. Its intended to not get them all. You say its terrible, I say its clever skill design.
So you’re not the only ARPG veteran in this community. And the attitude “I am an experienced player, I don’t need to test things. I already know what it’s like by just looking at it.” is very questionable to me.
This is not a topic about right or wrong. This is flavour and opinion.
See, they differ.
The fact is that many new people start playing that are used to D3 skill system. LE does the exact opposite. For a reason.
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I just want to say up front that I am really enjoying the game as it is, and this is my opinion after having reached the current end game on 2 characters of different classes and seeing the same frustrations between each of them.
So I keep seeing the term “choice permanence” or “developers want it that way” pop up when people are suggesting changing how things like mastery, skill point caps, the leveling curve with regards to point gain and such works. These discussions come up quite often and people say the developers want it that way, then most discussion stops.
Can I just say that verbally vomiting to people that “devs said they want choices to be impactful or have a sense of weight” to someone suggesting a change is a really poor argument?
What the developers want isn’t important. Period. We as players are the consumer so what we want matters, within reason. If you as a player don’t like the way the system works, then make a post and are told devs want it this way or that, then what are you going to do? You’ll stop playing because what you want in a game isn’t what the devs want and it makes the game less fun for you.
Developers keep pushing the idea of choices having weight. I like the idea that choices should have weight, but choices having weight needs to be reworked. Choices are much more impactful when they have drawbacks. “This skill gains X% more area, but Cooldown is increases by Y%” is a great and impactful choice. I am giving up cooldown for more area. I want to cover my screen with my cast, but I won’t be able to do it as often. This is an impactful choice.
Not having enough points to make the skill work a specific way is not an impactful choice. Skills being labeled with specific damage types to keep them underwhelming (looking at you disintegrate) is not impactful. Passive trees that shoe horn you into a specific play style is not impactful.
Many of the mastery skills are lackluster. These skills come off as though they should feel like an ultimate skill that you really would benefit from working into your build. Right now they feel like an added skill that may or may not be useful if you just so happen to be building around that type of damage or spec. Let’s take meteor for example. I tried it a bit and read through all the passives and knew it was useless for my build. I think something that comes with a class mastery should have more options to it than anything else available aside from the passive tree itself. If I am going lightning sorcerer, what do I get from my mastery skill? Nothing. I feel like the mastery skills should come with very diverse trees that can emphasize all the different play styles the class has available. I think an example is that meteor gets a node that changes it’s damage type to lightning, and instead of calling meteors, it calls a large lightning strike that deals about the same damage. All fire damage on the tree is converted to lightning. I could see the same for a cold version with a glacier that comes up out of the ground.
I see people saying that they (devs) want choices to have weight, but the execution behind “choices should have weight” feels bad. Currently my choices are “do I make the skill work the way I want and give up damage,” “do I get damage and only get half the effect of the skill I wanted,” or “do I even have enough points to make the skill work how I want it to?” The last option isn’t even a choice.
I love the idea of how the skill trees work. It’s on the right track, but I think the execution is lacking. Skill trees should change the way a skill works. Damage should come from the passive trees and gear. I believe that this distinction would make it not only easier for players to build around, but also easier to balance. I agree that things like buffing modifiers within 4 seconds or knockback should be on the skill tree, but I don’t think defining effects such as casts on target instead of on self or more projectiles, should be locked so deeply behind other nodes like penetration or things that largely won’t change a build like spark charge.
These skill defining nodes are what make these skills fun for people. People want to modify their build to work a specific way and then need to find damage from other sources. This is how games like this work. You find the build you want, then you find the damage and such from other sources like gear or passive trees.
Passive tress feel to me like I don’t actually have nearly as many options as it seems on first look. I see all these nodes, but when I really sit down and say, ‘okay which nodes should I take to make my build actually do damage’ I find that I don’t really have all that many options… Flat damage here, penetration there and base stats of course. I originally wanted to run an ignite build. I quickly found that I really will not have damage if I run that. If I want damage over time, bleed has much more options and poison has an absurd amount of damage in comparison. I figured when I picked sorcerer I’d get enough elemental damage and such to really make an ignite build shine. Instead I found that I can proc it only very slightly easier, and only barely make it last longer (from 4 seconds to 5.38). It only lasts long enough to get 1 extra proc of damage. Ignite in comparison to poison is laughable. Bleed is good because the options to get more bleed damage are plentiful.
There are a lot of issues with the game, but that’s why this is the beta. We get an option to try out things and bring up the questions and points or issues that we see while playing or after reaching the end of current content. The problem is that saying, “devs want it this way” doesn’t do anyone any favors, devs or players. I don’t give a flying ____ what the developers want. I am sure their investors don’t either. What I care about is what is fun and what keeps me coming back for more. What doesn’t keep me coming back for more is other players removing potential discussion about the pros and cons of each topic by telling people, ‘no the devs want it that way.’ Okay, I’ll take my play and money elsewhere in that case.
TL;DR: “The devs want it that way” is not a good argument and doesn’t lead to constructive discussion on feedback. Stop using it.
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I read it all, I swear 
I just use this TLDR part as point of discussion.
I honestly don’t care what devs want. I am glad they are making this game but what they want will never stop me telling my opinion. However this is where I share opinion with them. I also want some sort of permanence inside the game. There is already enough wiggle room, we don’t really need more.
I know there are many people who see things differently, but be sure, we are not against easy respec because they told us they don’t want easy respec in the game, we are saying it because we don’t want easy respec in the game.
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I certainly agree that you can state your opinion and I have no problems with someone saying what THEY like and don’t like, but to the points above, I feel the need to address something.
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I think the ‘devs want it this way’ is often stated AFTER the same points keep getting raised (often by the same people) in newly created threads when there have been threads already created and much more easily collected by the devs to check ideas and such if people bothered reading the forums or, god forbid, doing a simple search to find one of the ad nauseam topics on this discussion.
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I emphatically disagree with your second paragraph. It IS, the developers game. No ‘ands’, ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ about it. It’s their creation. They can damn well do whatever they want with it. YOUR choice as a consumer is to buy it or not. You can also certainly express what you like and dislike about it and vote by spending, or not spending, money on the game. As a filmmaker, I, for one, really wish we’d see a return to the creators sticking to their visions (falling flat or soaring high). Because that vision is going to be unique. Too much these days is created ‘by committee’ and while it certainly might appeal more to the general masses to cough up the all might dollar, it almost always lacks any substance or unique vision to it.
All that said, I’ve leveled about 10 characters to end game. And when I first started I had the same feeling about the penalty to experience, but once I played through many characters I realized it slows the game down, just a tad, and makes me really look at how something works. I think THAT is good. So I no longer have a problem with it.
As to having more skill points to build it the way you want it, all I can say is the intent by the game developers on how the game is supposed to feel, flow and play might not fit whatever you may want in this regard. They may not want certain things to happen. One bigger things I’ve noticed, except for a few outliers, the game isn’t supposed to be ‘fast.’ The combat isn’t supposed to be step in and 2 seconds later everything is dead and you move on. Yes, of course there are outliers that some of the higher end gamers are discovering, and it’s usually those very same outliers that get the hardest nerfs. That should tell you something about how the devs intend the game to feel. So perhaps, when you structure your critiques it might be best to also keep this in mind.
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I like that there is currently a choice where I can choose between damage, CC, QoL like runspeed, or defense.
If you upgrade your skill to have more area of effect, it may not feel like there is a drawback but there is an opportunity cost. You could have chosen more damage or something else.
But you are not arguing with developers here. We are all customers that already paid money. We are the base. It’s not that you opinion is more valuable than others - or vice versa. People here like the design of the game as it is for reasons they mentioned. And they share their opinion here.
There are numerous examples where EHG has changed their opinion because of the player base. So its defenitely not that they refuse to adapt to their customers.
I am a customer and I disagree with you on the topic of general skill system being bad. What now?
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This is a really weak argument for “choice” honestly. CC, QoL, and such I’m fine with, damage doesn’t really have much place on the skill trees unless it is a conversion node. The vast majority of damage will come from gear/passives so why not double down on this and make the trees more diverse in their effects and how they change the skills rather than placing random damage nodes in there that largely won’t have an affect aside from making me waste 3 points more than necessary to reach the effect I am trying to get? The opportunity cost can still be there, it would just be between this change or that change to the skill rather than this change and negligible damage or that change.
They have to be careful not to streamline passive tree too much. I know having more cool choices inside the skill tree itself would be cool, because +5% damage is not very interesting, but you don’t want this to happen to character passive tree. You could argue that passive tree is more generic, but still, you want have some cool choices in passive tree too.
Also sometimes it’s not about NOT wanting to put more cool options into skill trees but development resource management is real. Yes, it could be cool if there would be 10 different mechanics for tornado skill for example, but they may not have manpower to create 10 different art and mechanics for tornado, so they flesh out 3 cool ideas and rest of the tree is filled by “filler” skills.
Balance is the key, I think it’s great that both passive tree and skill tree offer fair amount of interesting choices and “boring” nodes. Both these types have their place in both systems.
I kinda disagree with this viewpoint. I presume that the devs have a particular viewpoint for the game that they want to make & they think that it’ll be fun & work & that’s the game that they want to make. If a load of people then come along & say, “no, we don’t want an aRPG, we want a sidescrolling 2d jumping game, or a MOBA, or a flight sim”, I don’t think it would be reasonable for the devs to immediately change what they’re working on. My view on the relationship between devs & players is that they make the decisions & we give feedback, but that that feedback is most likely to be based around small tweaks to their vision.
That said, while I do kinda like the idea of most skill-changing nodes being on the skill trees, if the skill trees only had skill changing nodes I’m not sure there would be enough to “fully populate” a skill tree. And that how many points you can invest in a skill is one that our feedback might be able to tweak a bit (by either adding or decreasing numbers of nodes), I doubt the devs would scrap their work & totally re-do things to accommodate some people that want to be able to take every node.
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They are indie devs because they aren’t backed by a publisher that’s supplying them with cash to create the game, they’re independent.
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I’m having a really fun time tweaking my storm totem and deciding between more chill or more damage.
If damage was only from gear and passives, I’m not sure the decision would be as fun but I would be willing to try it.
Also, in the current state, I think the skill tree can have a large impact in the overall damage because I think it is usually multiplicative (unless it says global increase or something like that).
This is correct, damage modifiers from within the skill tree go into a separate bucket of modifiers & are effectively more/less. When they give global modifiers, that’s a different cup of tea. Though it’s an interesting question of whether the skill itself double dips on the global modifier (I would assume not) if it gains the modifier as part of the skill (& that would be a more/less) and as part of the global modifier (as an increased/ decreased). I would assume not but without a decent skill dps it’d be difficult to tell.
I don’t like the idea of converting damage modifiers of skills from the skilltree to passive tree.
The skilltrees actually offer a mix of mechanically changing a skill (playstyle) and passive bonuses like damage increase, mana efficiency, and so on. The first modifiers are the “cool” ones that are visible and attract people. The others are very important, but not visible. The stats increases also are skill specific. So a more damage modifier on warpath only affects warpath and no other skill.
To put them into the passive tree you have to
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either make those modifiers global
(You have to create new nodes for specific damage types of a class to cover all skills and delete the corresponding nodes on the skillsoecific skilltree) -
or make them skill specific
(This means you’ll float the passive trees with a lot of skillnodes that only apply to certain skills. And unless the number of passives skillpoints is not increased for the same amount that you add skills, your char will definitely be weaker. You get a new tradeoff by having to choose between buffing a skill or buffing general stats)
In both cases skill progression and character progression are tied together. You can only increase skill damage by gaining passive points. Actually the skill progression is faster the higher your character level is, so it’s faster to level skills at higher levels. It’s the exact opposite for character level progression that becomes slower with character level increase.
So now by linking skill progression to character progression you slow down the skill progression speed (massively!!).
The balancing to get all this into line with each other is gigantic and in top you leave skills with may be 5 skillnodes that change the behaviour. How would you distribute the skill progression of 5 nodes over character leveling to 100?
It’s already the case that you out level your skills very fast. And because of this you can experiment with different skill builds. You can get them to max easily. And if you don’t like it level another skill to max in a few minutes.
Edit: The most outstanding feature of LE for me and also what is advertised to every new player and audience is the skill specific trees that can be leveled independently from character passives. This is what separates this game from others. And while there are some skills that need love to have more viable routes and choices, the main concept is great.
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