Skill augment system sounds like a developer nightmare

ArchivedUser

My understanding of the system is each class has 8 possibly secondary classes. So if a class ships with 10 skills (which is not a lot), there need to be 8 variations of all of those skills. 10 * 8 * 8 = 640. 

Now, say an expansion comes out with a new class. Now there are 9 primary and secondary classes. 10 * 9 * 9 = 810, so the addition of one new class adds 170 skill augments. 

Am I misunderstanding something? Also, it’s not clear to me how prototypical skills like an elementalist meteor shower are going to do 8 different things. 

ArchivedUser

Your premise is flawed. They have never said that every primary skill will have 8 possible augments from the secondary. The last quote given said each may have 3-4 possible including society, racial, and others. So still a big number, but not what you are imagining. As to number of skills, at "max level" they have said you will have around 30-40 active skills, but only able to "skill into" around 8-10. You will have a limited amount of skill points to allocate into your desired skills. You will not have everything available to easily swap out "on-the-fly" If the developers at POE could come up with theirs with the limited team they had in the beginning, just imagine what a team over over 100 working on a game can do. Granted they all aren't all working on skill allocation, but we haven't seen Akil in a few streams, he is probably deep in the trenches handling his responsibilities making it all shiny.

ArchivedUser

UnknownSystemError said:

Your premise is flawed. They have never said that every primary skill will have 8 possible augments from the secondary. The last quote given said each may have 3-4 possible including society, racial, and others. So still a big number, but not what you are imagining. As to number of skills, at "max level" they have said you will have around 30-40 active skills, but only able to "skill into" around 8-10. You will have a limited amount of skill points to allocate into your desired skills. You will not have everything available to easily swap out "on-the-fly" If the developers at POE could come up with theirs with the limited team they had in the beginning, just imagine what a team over over 100 working on a game can do. Granted they all aren't all working on skill allocation, but we haven't seen Akil in a few streams, he is probably deep in the trenches handling his responsibilities making it all shiny.

I was under the impression that every skill behaved differently depending on the secondary class. So if an elementalist has a meteor shower, that meteor shower will be different depending on if the secondary is a tank, bard, etc. I’m happy to be wrong, I’m still catching up on all the info. Is there more in depth information on the augment system?

ArchivedUser

The idea is that every primary class ability CAN behave differently if you so choose. You could choose to not augment an ability. Or as you unlock different horizontal augment progression from you secondary class, new augments to that primary skill will become available. Does this mean as a cleric secondary you would be able to add a heal to every single one of your primary abilities? No. Specific augments will be able to be applied to specific skills. Think of each primary skill like fireball having 3 "slots". Two of the slots could be specific augment unlocks from the secondary class, while the 3rd augment option may only be a racial or social organization augment. In any case you would have to choose which of those 3 that would "flavor" the primary fireball. While some may change how the primary ability will work, others may only add cosmetic effects, or larger aoe radius for example. No one not directly involved with the development team has any idea for sure, just snippets glimpsed over the last year. Once the remaining 4 classes are fleshed out and released prior to A2, there should be much more information on those systems and details.

TL;DR limited info at this time, stay tuned.