Why are skills designed this way?

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Hi everyone,

I’m on my first character - lvl 77 sorcerer. Having fun but starting to feel that LE has limited potential. It’s mainly because of how the passive and specialization skills are presented.

Passives
For the mage/sorc at least, the passives only grant static increases to various attributes (health, crit%, resists, etc). And as you gain levels you get to pick a whopping 5 skills out of 17 to use. Not much diversity here.

Skills/Augments
The way skill specializations are presented feels driven by a sense that every arpg needs a skill tree so EHG strung together a random set of linked augments for each skill and called it a day.

How both sets of skills are handled limit the appeal of LE. The passives are uninspired stat boosts that do little to change gameplay.

The real problem though is the arbitrary arrangement of skill augments and how build-limiting it is having them all linked together. There does seem to be some purpose behind it, with aoe abilities focused to one side of the tree, crit% and dmg grouped on another. However beyond this not much makes sense. For ex:

  • Meteor: why do I need to spend a point to have a 20% chance to stun before I can invest points to make meteor cast faster?
  • Volcanic Orb: why do I need to invest 3 points in cd reduction before getting a damage boost?

Why force players into such restrictive paths? Is there something in the lore I’m missing? Some skills even do the same thing - eg. Rapid Descent and Celestial Celerity.

None of the augments have build-defining modifiers either. You would think the more you invest in a particular direction of a skill, the better the augments become. But instead it’s just more boring stat increases - flat dmg %, more crit %, more aoe, etc. Some even come with a mana cost penalty.

So why the forced, somewhat arbitrary linking of augments? The augments could have easily been presented individually, each with their own base cost plus 1 for each further point invested. The set of rigid connections make it more difficult for new augments to be added to the game since every time a change is made, the entire series of links needs to be considered.

Again I’m only level 77 and only have one character, so perhaps there is a tier of gear that diversifies how skills behave, or maybe the sorcerer is just particularly bland. Regardless, I’m left with the impression that LE is an uninspired mix of Grim Dawn and D3. I guess I was hopingfor more of a PoE flavour given the positive coverage PoE streamers have given LE.

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Welcome to the LE Forums!

Generally speaking the disparity between passives trees and skill spec trees, on how well designed and exciting they are is pretty huge, depending on how new or old the skill/mastery is.

Your examples with Sorcerer and Meteor are both pretty old and not up to the new standard of things like Void Knight, Druid or both Rogue Masteries.

Passive trees will probably never add much game breaking or game changing stuff, but even Mage, Sorcerer and Spellblade have some pretty cool stuff I would say.
There are even skill conversions and passives requring you to use and chain specific abilities to gain it’s benefits. (Like using different elemental skills or using high mana cost skills)
I would say, that this is always a little bit more than just plain stat boosts.

Regarding skill spec trees, Meteor is pretty old and just received a small overhaul a couple of patches ago.

Regarding, having individual nodes being relient on each other and put behind certain other nodes, that comes down do opportunity costs and balancing.
This way, the devs can make some really meaningful nodes, that do have high opportunity costs, before you are able to take them.
If you could simply choose all the nodes you want, individual nodes would need to be a lot weaker.

Also some nodes having down sides comes down to opportunity costs and making meaningful choices.

I would highly suggest checking out other classes skill spec trees as well.
Right now, as a whole package I would argue that Rogue is best designed class right now, both Marksman and Bladedancer. lots of synergies between skills.

Hopefully EHG will bring all other masteries and classes as a whole on the same level.

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Like I said - each skill can stand on its own and simply have a higher base cost. That addresses the balancing. You also wouldn’t be able to get all the augments you wanted due to the base costs. It makes no sense to make augments gated by other augments for otherwise arbitrary reasons.

So maybe Meteor was a bad example (and sorcerer a bad choice overall), but I see the same assortment of bland skill modifiers with Volcanic Orb, Fireball, etc. There are some interesting interactions sure - like regaining mana via Cycle of Fire, but these are few and far between and again limited by needlessly linking augments.

I’ll try a void knight next I guess, once I farm up some twink gear. The Lich/Necromancer specializations appeal to what I look for in fantasy games as well, so hopefully their respective skill trees are more interesting.

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The Sorc’s skills are on the older side, compared to some of the Primalist’s, Sentinel’s and Rogue’s. But the passives are supposed to be more generic and appeal to a wider array of builds.

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The Void Knight is one of the most complete masteries currently.
Acolyte is a nice class, but it needs some more work. Necromancer needs a small review, Lich is rather old and could use an overall. But are fun though.

Void Knight is a very good choice if you want to know what EHG is preparing. It is a consistent mastery, well built, with strong synergies.

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That is exactly how it is, probably the simplest and strongest piece of feedback but this is how the game is designed

Try playing it for 2years, you will want some of the skills deleted as you seen them so much. Devouring Orb for example is so boring now.

The problem is the game needs about 30-40 skills per class because specialization doesnt really do that much. spending ANY points on ‘does % more damage’ isnt anything really

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Well, to me, the devs borrowed many elements from PoE, specially about mechanics, but I think they did a good job trying to get their own vision in this game.

Why in PoE you have to go through the blue part of the tree to get CI? Is just a design decision. You can argue is has more or less sense you need to master X in order to access Y, but at the end of the day, is just a design choice.
I can agree passives and skills in general can feel a bit underwhelming, I think they are getting better at it, lets not forget the game is not even released, so any criticism should be an opportunity to show different angles about the game feeling.

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Because CI is intended for int-based classes, and is actually an impactful, game-changing node in the skill tree. I’m not a PoE expert but doubt there’s many marauder builds with CI.

In LE’s case, there isn’t one skill tree for all classes, and PoE’s only covers the passives. So with the limited scope of spell augments, it would make more sense (to me at least) to not link every augment to each other.

So, yes it’s a design choice, and the point of my post. Why were skill augments designed in such a way that limits build diversity and makes adding new skill augments, or changing existing ones, more difficult for the devs?

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Because they wanted skill trees. If the skill nodes weren’t linked up in some way, you’d likely be able to put whatever points you wanted wherever you wanted & only grab all of the really powerful/effective nodes which would require them to be nerfed. It’s a similar argument to PoE’s passive tree, you put the more powerful/impactful nodes behind other less powerful nodes to act as a tax/gate for their power. This allows the player to decide how they want to build their skills rather than every build for a particular skill only taking certain nodes because they’re the best ones.

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I can’t really argument for the skilltrees as they are. Maybe some gates on certain skills make more sense than on other when you are searching for thematically similar nodes.

But in general I find the skilltrees one of the most exciting element in LE. There are some really powerful and also game changing nodes. It’s your part to choose which you want and plan a path to acquire it.

If we both would have a challenge that says “create a fire mage with fireball as main skill” we would propably have different skill loadouts and different skilltrees on skills we have in common.

The most interesting part for me are damage conversions and skills that proc other skills. I experiment a lot on this stuff even on “finished” builds.

For the passives… it’s called passive tree so I wouldn’t expect too much of game changing stuff. Its there for supporting the build you planned with your skills. With the recent update the Druid passive tree got some bonus effects when you put a certain amount of points into specific nodes. That’s spicing things up. And some trees also have nodes you can proc skills with under certain conditions (proccing Eterras blessing in Druid tree for example) or other proc effects that you only get access to with the passives (Primalist Aspects, Rogue Shrouds, Paladin healings).

I think theres a lot of stuff for you to be discovered. There’s defenitely enough depth in it for me to make it engaging and interesting.

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What if tomorrow GGG decide CI is too good and they decide to put it on the middle of the red zone to to tax players who what to play with CI? They have overhauled their systems many times, they don’t fear changes.

I don’t get it, maybe you you are trying to tell us current PoE is the gold standard and the holy grail for game systems and every other game should be like PoE?

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some more depth for the passive would be for sure sweet

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Akchchually, molten strikers are back at it with the energy shield leech + aegis aurora + block + armor stacking + CI shit going on XD if they are marauders or duelists is the other question, but yeah, definitely seen them pop out of nowhere.

Also, skilltree augments are more akin to the support gems rather passive tree of POE. You wanna play fireball for ignites? Allocate ignite nodes, but hit damage would be ass. Same as in POE once you add Deadly Ailments, you will hit for 1/5th of the original hit damage, but ignite would be 1.5 times what it was. 2nd playstyle - hit damage fireball. You stack as much more and added damage as you can, but ignite would be ass. In POE, unless certain mechanics are abused (usually cluster jewel or gear related), you pick Elemental focus and you literally cannot ignite.

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Do the math on how many combos of 5 skills you can do, including the various branches each individual skill can take. The diversity is way, way bigger than you seem to be noticing.

I mean that’s just fundamentally wrong. Again, look at all those skills and what passives can do to them. Volcanic orb can be drastically altered in how it moves, applies damage, etc. You are actively editing how the skill functions with these passives, it’s actually pretty awesome.

You are right that sometimes the paths on the trees feel like you are wasting points on something not helpful to the next point. But they are actually updating these trees with patches, so if there is specific feedback definitely point it out while they work through it. Game is still in development.

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He’s talking about the passives, not the skill trees. Most passives don’t change how a skill functions (though there are a few that do damage conversion and some give procs).

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I guess he talks about skill trees, since Cycle of Fire is skill tree node for Meteor.

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He was talking about both, but the bit about “passives only granting boring stat boosts” was about passives.

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