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.
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
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.
