First. I love the skills tress in LE but they have a few problems im starting to realize. I’m going to be using all of my examples based on elemental nova as its the closest skill tree to what im looking for.
all damaging skills should have more than 1 way to spec and be viable. Alot of skill trees do have this and for those ones there great. Like rive on sentinels. Elemental nova on sorcerer, entangling roots on primalist, aura of decay on acylote(although damage on this skill is now horrible). They all offer more than 1 way to play the skill which keeps you coming back. Also they do enough damage or synergize with your build that there’s always room for them In it. But even with these skills once you’ve hit level 20 there done. And alot of us can hit lvl 20 skills by level 60. So what about the next 40 levels of character progression where mobs still get harder?
Skills should be capped at level 30 not 20 and level 30 should happen around level 85-90. Skill trees should be changed where you really have to build into a direction woth them and all the good stuff is at the end. For instance elemental nova. This skill breaks into 3 different pathways from the get go. Awesome. Love this. But they should reconnect at the end. I.e. channeling should be further into the tree say around 15 points. But it should also connect all 3 trees so that no matter which tree you took at 15 points they all have the option to channel. Same with targeting channel. All 3 should have the option around 20 points. If all skills were made this way it would really diversify builds so people all using the same 5 skills might actually have 3 different synergies going on. Yes it requires alot of balance, but it would also bring more specialization to the end game.
This is hard to explain it sounds better in my head. Feel free to change it up and add your thoughts.
Edit: I will add that the reason for this post is that most skills feel like youve already tapped them out within the first 15 points. Nothing game changing the last 5 points. I.e. focus. If you use focus for mana regen, just 4 points in youve already done its biggest advantage. By 8 points there isnt much more to gain for mana regen. Now its just add a little ignite chance or ward retention. You lose interest. You need some game changing stiff at around 25 points. Like at the emd of a pathway having a node 10% global CD while chammeling focus. So other skills cd faster. Something excited for going that far into the tree
I think it’s not just about skill scaling to match mobs difficulty but also character building satisfaction.
Like I mainly played two builds so far, Shield Throw Pally and Meteor Sorc. And generally, like you said, once my shield throw and meteor capped out. The playstyle and option feels mostly set in stone. This probably happens around level 40 - 50? I thought that’s a little too low, and having a build feel complete at mid-high 80s sound about right.
I also like the suggestion to have skills capped out at 30 rather than 20 to solve this problem rather than have the 20 skill points spread out all the way to level 80s. The skill progression pace feels good now, and I suspect spacing 20 skill points that far out will feel really bad. I also like the idea that we can go deeper specialisation in a skill tree.
Yeah glad I got exactly what I am thinking into words for people to understand. And even if 30 points is to hard to balance I mean can just slowly increase maybe just try 25 points first. If we stay at 20 points then I think lowering the amount of points in some nodes is necessary. I.e. marrow shards. You need 7 points in this node to get 98% double cast. Thats to many points that almost half the entire specialization for 1 effect and its nit even guarenteed. If we only get 20 points then each point should truely build the skill
I agree 20 points seem a bit short because you main skills are already almost max out when you start the end game.
25 points sounds about right or maybe another end game system to customise your character a bit more, like enchantement/gems with some passive abilities to level up
Because right now, just level up the main mastery tree feel a bit unsatisfying
Skills are maxed long before your character - no progression skill wise
By maxing skills the important nodes are rushed so the climax is not at the end of skilling, but somewhere in the middle
I remember a similar discussion here, but could not find it anymore.
If the stretch to 30 points is a viable solution I am not sure. Balancing could be really hard and if the progression rate is decreased releveling of a skill will get hard. What about capping the max achievable skill level on your character level? 1 max level increase every 5 levels. So at level 15 all your skills could have only max level 3. Would be hard for leveling. Perhaps let the cap be higher at lower levels and decrease the rate the higher your character level goes.
Alternatively lock specific (mighty) skillnodes behind a level cap. There could be 4 zones. In the middle you have all nodes available from the start. With level 25 you can progress to the next zone, with 50 to the 3rd, above 75 you gain access to the rest.
The different skillnodes could be locked behind a minimum number of skillpoints that you need to invest into a skill. So for obtaining skillnode x you do need the previous nodes in the tree and at least 15 skillpoints in the tree in summary.
Hmm… so there’s a lot of “locking” within my ideas. I guess this wouldn’t feel very good.
Haha yeah I feel like locking that much down would make it feel really slow progression. As fir being able to balance a skill with 30 points instead of 20. I feel like this really wouldnt be to difficult as you could put all the really good powerful stuff say every 10 points? So you could have more than 3 super powerful effects on a skill at once. For instance look at elemental nova. You invest 5 points into lightning nova and get channeling. 5 points into fire nova and you get targeting. If for balancing you didn’t want everyone to have both you could just out both of the at 16 points down there own path. Idk
The problem i see here is to clarify what ‘‘mighty’’ skillnodes are (ex. Hammer Throw). Most of the players want to rebuild the classic hammerdin build. But the node making the hammers orbit you is not really mighty or powerful in a way of dmg increasing, it’s more QoL improvement. Raising the required level to play this certain node can demotivate players leveling for this particular build. Imagine playing the original Hammerdin build once you reach lvl 75. Personally i would never have fun leveling my char to exactly this node, if i am a new player to LE and want to rebuild this.
I get your point and i think locking certain skill might be a good way of balancing, but sometimes it can be frustrating to level until a certain point.
Really hard to balance i guess, but an interesting topic.
Your absolutely right. And what you mention is the big advantage of the current system. You can build your preferred style early on. Downside is that the excitement doesn’t scale with skill level.
I don’t know if it even is possible to have a system that has both - freedom of building like we have now and the climax of excitement at the end of the skill progression.
Tbh, i think skill Progression is fine, i really like “just” having 20 skill Points. Making the skill cap at 30 and Maybe add more nodes to the skill trees will be very overwhelming and the overview will be alot harder(especially for new Players).
I really like that you have a pretty “defined” build relativly early(midgame) and from that Point just perfect your gear and maybe Play around with some of your secondary/utilitiy skills.
But i agree that we could just use another layer of further optimizing/specializing.
Not sure if devs have planned any System that could occupy that place.
The first idea that comes to my mind would be a little more advanced passive skill tree.
Maybe give the passive skill tree some more “game-changing/game-breaking” nodes.
Cool idea would be to introduce every 10 or 15 Points into the passive skill tree from each advanced classes “big” passive nodes that exclude each other (so you can only take one).
Here is an example of my idea if my text was not clear. https://imgur.com/a/7GnwT4a
Not sure if this is a Little bit to Deep and off-topic but sometimes because of posts like this my creativity flows
Your nodes are 50% bigger than the normal nodes! So they must be better Yeah maybe 30 points isnt needed and when every skill is updated and finished maybe it will just feel better. maybe more endgame systems/sockets/some other sort of specilization will fill the void that im feeling lvl 70+. There was a post for having a 2nd class mastery, say after you put 50 points into your mastered class it unlocks a 2nd even more power ful master passive. Of course this would really hurt the builds that spec into all 3 classes as its unlikely to put 50 points in just the main mastery. IDK.
Yeah i also took part in that post. Having more ways to specialize a build is always nice in any form or shape.
I guess we all agree that we just want additional layers of customization. Be it through a more advanced passive skill tree, a more advanced mastery System or Maybe another totally new/different System.
Well i think that putting several dozen points in different masteries should be a very specific choice and not mandatory. So if People(like me) want a very very specializied build and wanna put almost all points into one mastery, there should be always that option.
Balancing the tree so that it would never make sense to put all your Points in one mastery should be not a thing.
So having something “exciting” at the end of each mastery passive tree(40-50 points into the mastery) would be nice. It doesn’t need to be “better” than taking 20 Points into each mastery, just something that add flavor to the mastery.
Another idea would also be that you may get some skill-altering passives at the end of a mastery tree(for example the Lich gets choices to alter Harvest and Reaper Form in some shape or form, because those are the signature ksill belonging to this mastery)
Maybe add some legendary or regent to put on your gear or even crafting - Adding +1-5 to the skill of your choice limited to one per character. that could make some build go quite far I reckon.
I was also thinking they could redo the model for leveling skills. Instead of leveling skills individually you just get your normal 5 slots all opened at there normal levels, then every time you level you get 1 passive point like normal and 1 skill points (you would collect 100 Skill points by level 100) 5 x 20 level skils = 100 so it would be the same amount of points. This model means you would have to get to level 100 in order to have 5 level 20 skills which might be to high, but this also means once your level 100 or any level that if you take a skill out of the specalization you would instantly get the points back, just like with passives. and then you put a new skill in the slot and have all the points to put back in it.
Could change the skill points around so maybe there also quest related so you get them all by level 60 or what ever is balance. But this would also solve the problem everyone complains about the respec of skills. Hope this makes sense i am tired ha.
Either it means you can cheese out your main skill really early (by character level 20), or the skills will still have other restriction before you can put points into them (e.g. can only start putting X points into meteor at Y character level) which makes the whole skilling up unnecessarily complicated.
It’s natural for most arpgs to have skills and their modifiers be mostly available before end game. I think what we are really missing is end game systems to keep us occupied and end game gear to change how skills function to round them out. Though I like the idea of some more impactful passives in the mastery trees when you reach certain levels or investment.
We should probably remember that the general majority of players that purchase the game won’t spend much time in the end game, especially if their favorite skills / playstyles are locked behind arbitrary skill level up systems to make max level “feel” more rewarding/complete.
I like the idea of going to level 30 on each skill. Just add more nodes to invest in. For the sake of ease, each skill could have 4 branches. So for the Elemental Nova in the example, you have a tree for each of the elements and you have a single node going upward for general (not element specific). It could just expand the general branch. Even now, with all 20 levels, I run out of options if I want to spec a specific element.
Just adding 10 skillpoints and “some new skillnodes” sounds simple, but I doubt it is. It’s already hard enough to balance the skills we already have with 20 nodes. There’s no symmetry in this system. Skills have different number of skillnodes, different number of routes to go. Some offer a change in mechanics, some change the damage type, some offer defensive options, some add mobility.
Every skill is absolutely unique. Not only the mechanics, even the structures of the trees differ.
Of course it would be nice to have more skillpoints availability to spend in the trees. But the key feature of this system ist to make decisions. If you wanna max out route 1 you can’t max route 2. So there’s a tradeoff. And this is what also creates that build diversity.
Adding new skillnodes along with more skillpoints only shifts the problem some levels later. Even with 30 ov even 40 points you will out level your skills long before your done. At some point you reach the top spot of character progression and you can only progress in gear. And more skillnodes makes the skills harder to balance. And think about releveling. This would be much harder. There are already people suggesting to make it easier. This goes in the opposite direction.
I think it’s too quick to dismiss with something like this. The next 5 or 10 points can be something that goes deep into the tree and impactful. It can also take twice as long to earn as each of the first 20 pts. I doubt that would translate to out leveling the skill longs before I’m done when I’m finishing my main skill currently around level 50.
Yeah maybe 30 points isnt needed and when every skill is updated and finished maybe it will just feel better. maybe more endgame systems/sockets/some other sort of specilization will fill the void that im feeling lvl 70+. There was a post for having a 2nd class mastery, say after you put 50 points into your mastered class it unlocks a 2nd even more power ful master passive. Of course this would really hurt the builds that spec into all 3 classes as its unlikely to put 50 points in just the main mastery. IDK.