Skill level cap is way too low

I bought into early access between PoE leagues and really like the game (keep up the great work!). New league rolls out but after a week the league and state of PoE is bad and I missed playing Last Epoch so I quit the league and been having a lot of fun trying out skills and builds.

I’m now level 65 and was looking forward to progressing through monoliths and later arenas with this build but I just found out that I have 35 levels left on my character but only 2 more levels on my skills!!
This is such a dealbreaker for me. Why is the level cap on skills so low? I would think that progression is the mother of all addiction in arpg games so if you take that away so early in the progress it just feels bad.

Sorry about the rant!

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You can get up to +4 from a skill-specific affix (t7, +3 on a t6 & +2 on a t5) then some skills will also be able to benefit from some other +skills on uniques.

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Ive also often argued that 20 is not enough and redistribution of the exp required by them to spread out 20 levels to be closer to level 90 would make it feel way worse.

Hopefully they have time down the road to rework skill trees balance them and perhaps raise the cap to 30-40.

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Yeah, I kinda would like the skills to be rebalanced to higher numbers of skill points because it makes the progression more granular & they can spread it out for longer, but on the other hand each point becomes less “impactful” (& some of them are already +5% more damage on some of the older skill trees).

I’m not sure where I stand on this which is why I didn’t disagree with the OP.

Though it’s ironic that he left PoE that has lvl 20 gems (21 if corrupted). But hey, it’s just a number.

Well, with any diluting the taste will of course become less impactful, but its always possible to add a little sugar here and there to sweeten things up.

It is possible to rework skill trees and have many “uniquely impactful” nodes hidden behind more “filler” nodes and allow for more points to be granularly added.

1 example being: Instead of adding a +5 Flat damage node as the First connecter and allowing 5 points into it. Spread out that node into several different spots and inbetween add some interesting effects and/or conversions. The creativity is there and some of the newer skills already have more than enough nodes in them to get this done. There are plenty of skill trees out there where 20 points is just not enough and even if it had 30 in its current form it wouldnt be OP but it would be more impactful (IM staring at you hungering souls)

Another thought I had, you could entirely rework things so that you get 10 times the points but the value of each node is 1/10 and the “travel requirements” are x10 the current values so you wouldn’t be able to access more nodes, but you have more points.

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LOL

Llama8 i know as an accountant you know that all that does is create more click bait…

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I’m just saying that asking for more skill points by itself won’t necessarily change much. I’m also saying that I don’t know what I’d like it to change to, if anything, ignoring that some skills have old trees and need them revamping.

I don’t even entirely disagree with the OP.

I tend to agree with you (and OP), but 30-40 would feel like too much to me, in the sense that I feel like it would take out a lot of the “specialization” aspect (I think you could pretty much grab every node that is interesting to your build). But keeping the current XP progression up to level 20, and allowing levels up to 25-30, might be a very nice change in my opinion as well.

It’s only my experience, but in most of my builds, I often find myself wishing I had more points for my main skill, but I feel like I would reach a point where my skill is “full” or optimal with 5 to 10 more points (10 more points being a bit extreme, most often in cases where there are nodes that are very powerful but have a high number of maximum allocated points in them).

Of course there would need to be some rebalancing involved, but I do like the idea of having more skill points for one, and having the maximum level being reached a bit later for two.

One solution would be to grant the last skill point at level 100 and the 19th at level 90 and up to 18 until level 80. Usually the last two points are not build defining so it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

That said, this alone would not necessarily be incentive enough for me to reach for higher levels.

Regarding more skill points, I am not a fan. That would just end up with rebalancing and nerfing and I like that I am forced to make difficult decisions now.

Stretching out the skill points like that feels bad. You’ll need to trust me on this.

The addition of the +skills on gear is an attempt to increase the number of points you can get for a skill.

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I trust you on this. I wouldn’t really like it myself. It’s like playing a story based game and you get the best gear in the last chapter and a couple of hours later you finish the game and got not much out of it.

It was just one way to implement skill points in the level progression.

I personally would be more motivated to reach level 100 by a season reward cosmetic or something like that than by another skill point.

What about allowing players to sacrifice specalization slot for skill points? Like I personally never use more than 3-4 skills in any build so if I could say at lvl 80 sac a specialization slot for skill points in the other skills and again at lvl 90 for even more skill points?

Guys, Can I ask 1 question about abilities?
I like the Ground slam and Earthquake gems in POE and I can’t find anything similar in LE… Just 1 - Erasing strike, but this Void Knight is absolutely umplayable with my 2H phys DMG Mace that doesn’t have void damage (and btw the default damage with weapon is physical) … why don’t these 15 classes have such skills for phys dmg? Why not?

or… why can’t we convert all our base phys dmg from weapons into void?? why not?
I can’t understand this game, my mind is blowing every time when I 'm trying to play somehow

There is Earthquake for the Primalist.

@Heavy loves Erasing Strike (though he’s probably wrong) so he might be able to help you with that.

Regarding damage conversion, each skill has a base damage (usually single digit for melee skills & a bit higher for spells), added melee damage generally doesn’t get converted unless it’s a Rogue skill with damage conversion, hopefully the other melee skills will get that as well in the future. For the moment you’ll just need to scale the base phys of the weapon & any other flat damage you have added.

For spells, the majority of the damage is adaptive spell damage which automatically converts based on the tags of the spell.

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You actually don’t need to convert all base dmg to make it a good skill already.
The flat physical dmg of your weapon still benefits from Es 300% dmg effectiveness and scales with stuff like melee dmg and attributes.

But a flat melee void dmg Prefix is definitely the best affix, if you. Wanna do full void erasing strike.
Erasing strike also has a base void dmg node on the left side. And another 4 different more multiplier nodes.

Also there are 2 more slow/expensive skills for sentinel.
Forged Strike and Smelters Wrath.

Smelters Wrath is probably the slowest but strongest single hit skill in the entire game.

If you want more specific ideas for a 2H ES VK feel free to DM me here or in discord (Heavy#0351)

While I think the skill levels are fine where they are, I think this topic gets at something deeper about the game. The drop off of real character progress in the late game. Getting to level 100 has no real reward in terms of power. Getting skills those last few levels doesn’t really matter much and getting them to 20 happens pretty early anyway. People can beat the game pretty easily and then move on to empowered timelines, which are just the same things but harder. The only real progression is gated behind RNG with blessings and gear.

I don’t have any ideas for a solution to this. I’m sure opinions will also vary wildly on the issue as well.

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I think adding more nodes with mechanical changes that may or may not be beneficial to your specific build, and making some of the travel routes slightly more complex with more ways to reach certain places, would add a lot of depth.

And a total of 30 points to spend doesn’t feel like an overwhelming amount either, at least if the trees are reworked a tad.

Some of the skill trees are just way too straight forward. The biggest offender that I’ve seen is probably Sentinel’s Shield Charge.
The void laser setup is really neat, but either you pick all those passives, or you pick the “bigger, stronger, better” passives.

Another thing with inspiration from Grim Dawn’s constellation system could be mini talent trees for each blessing (which would vary depending on the blessing itself, not which monolith it’s from).

The progression could be that each time you finish a monolith, you’re given a point which can be put in any blessing’s tree, and if you’ve filled one out, there will be a substantial, “final form” boost. The total number of points would be limited, and filling out all of your blessings would not be possible.

Yea, I have had ideas for how to work tiered trees but it wasn’t specifically for this game. I’ll try to make an example.

Imagine a fake Christmas tree. You have to put the “trunk” of the tree together because it is segmented. Think of a “skill” tree like that. The first section (the base) has a small number of branches (a small tech tree). You can then attach the next tier of trunk. To relate to that, you would have to select the node to continue the tech tree. That tier 2, would then also have a small tech tree. This continues up to tier 4.

Now take that system and say you can only have 1 tier 4, 2 tier 3, 3 tier 2, and 4 tier 1. Note that the tree that goes all the way to tier 4 would take up one from each tier to get there. (basically, you can have a 4 tier tree, a 3 tier tree, a 2 tier tree, and a 1 tier tree at once)

The points you can spend in each tier and how to get them have yet to be thought out.

You want to progress to the end on character level 100?
You want more variety in all aspects?

My suggestion would be this:
With each level-up you get the matching number of points (whether the new points should be called skill points or whatever - I call them here once “special points”).
→ So from character level 1 → 2 you get 2 of these special points, with character level 2 → 3 you get 3 of these special points… at the end you get more and more with time…with character level 99 on 100 you get 100 of these special points.

These special points can be spent, as you like, in the passive skill tree, for unlocking more skill specialization slots or for skill specializations, where everything possible is differently expensive (balancing thing).

Example Sentinel (just to make it clearer):
Putting once in Overwhelm costs maybe only one special point each, while each point put in Armour Clad costs 2 or 3 special points.

You would still have to set a yet to be determined amount of these new special points in the Sentinel Tree to be allowed to set anything in the championships later on.

Setting once on “Vengeance->Executioner” might cost 3 special points, while setting once on “Vengeance-> Blade Assault” costs only 1 special point and setting once on “Vengeance->Bolster” costs 7 special points.

And so on…

EDIT:
Thinking again: In skill trees “cap” (cut?) the maximum special points to be awarded just at the respective character level, then it fits approximately. :slight_smile:

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