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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Detailed Analysis Follows in Spoiler (or skip for TLDR version)
"The number of skills on the action bar will be contained (fewer than 30)"
Which to me indicates that either one of these 2 outcomes is highly probable:
- a) You will end up with (fewer than 30) total skills available (in spellbook etc) and (pretty much all of them) on action bars, or
- b) You will end up with many more than (fewer than 30) total skills available (in spellbook etc) and a selection of (fewer than 30) available on hot bars.
because any sort of middle ground would be a bit pointless.Now, given that page also says that:
"You only get active skills from your primary class"
and that further down the page the examples given from Apoc show pretty consistently 15-17 skills for the primary classes that we have skills for.
Then unless the number of skills from Apoc to MMO Launch is going to at least triple (which is possible but I think unlikely), then it would seem we're very much in Scenario a) land, ie (fewer than 30) total skills available and pretty much all of them able to be on hot bars.
We also know from that same page that:
"Players are not given skills as they level up, they must choose what skills they take.
Players receive skill points as they level. These can be used to level up skills within their skill tree.
It will not be possible to max all skills in a skill tree"
And the current skill tree has skills going up to Rank 3. This means that unless that changes, the total maximum number of skill points available to a char at level cap must be less than (fewer than 30) x 3.
If (fewer than 30) ends up being in the same vicinity as current values (ie 15-17), then that would mean the number of skill points must be less than about 50, which has also been touted as the likely level cap at launch.
In which case, reasonable hypotheses might be:
It wouldn't really make sense to have less skill points than that I don't think as even at the current rate of skills that wouldn't let you have them all at rank 1, or 3 or 4 at max rank, and I think that would be way too few. So I think we have 3 main scenarios hypothesized.
Much supposition here of course, all of this could be completely wrong, but it would be a reasonable model.
For me, any of those models could work, but #3 feels a bit stingy to me. It would mean you could get all skills to rank 1, but no higher. Or 5 skills at max rank, and 1 at rank 1. Or somewhere in between. To me that makes it pretty tight to have enough build diversity or to utilize & explore the capabilities of the class.
I personally would love #1. It would mean you could get all skills to rank 2, or 10 to rank 3, 10 to rank 2, and maybe half a dozen or so to rank 1. This would personally hit my sweet spot, but honestly I think it might be hoping for a bit much.
#2 is obviously in the middle. This would allow people to have about half a dozen skills to rank 2 and all the rest to rank 1. Or 5 skills to rank 3, and 5 skills to rank 2. Or 4 skills to rank 3, 4 skills to rank 2, and 5 skills to rank 1.
Remember also that over time with expansions the level would cap would go up which would allow people to have a few more skills raised up or buy a few new ones that come out.
Therefore while I think if there was a poll going, I would vote for #1, but I think if I was to put a wager somewhere on which one I thought was the most likely to eventuate, it would probably be on #2.
IMHO, the 3 most likely scenarios on number of skills & skill points being available at launch are:
- that there will be some more (10-ish?) skills added, and that you will gain 1 skill point per level.
- there will not be many more skills added (maybe a few), and you will gain 1 skill point per 2 levels.
- there will be no more skills added at all, and you will gain 1 skill point per 3 levels.
With all skills being available on hotbars (ie no need to have a larger list in a spellbook and only choose a few you can use at any one time).My vote for personal preference is #1, but my prediction of most likely is #2. I really hope it's not #3.
What's everyone else think ?
There's a thought, should we do a poll on those 3 ?
It's hard to discuss in detail, since we have so little confirmed information on the system, and what we do know could easily be changed. But yeah, you're analysis seems about as solid as we can get. Something between #1 and #2 sounds reasonable to me. Like 20 skill options with 30 skill points to split between them.
That would be limited enough to create many tough choices (and therefore diverse build options), but still allow players to get every skill and have a few at max rank if they prefer the jack-of-all-trades route.
If you've looked at a hotbar-heavy MMO and thought "most of these skills are useless/I don't use them" then you've been playing poorly. A lot of available skills = more options = higher skillcap. Restricting skill use leads to BiS builds that trivialize other skills until they get buffed. Having a lot of accessible skills means classes get their own established identity, rather than letting players define what those classes are capable of.
My point is, in a game where there's bound to be a few "optimal" builds and several "viable" builds, followed by a bunch of sub-par "for-fun" builds, it doesn't hurt to have some actual garbage skills. And those skills can act as a lower-bound/book-end/sign-post for the theorycrafters. More importantly they can act as easily explainable examples of what "bad" skills look like for newbie theorycrafters.
Of course, I'd much rather have more skills that all get balanced properly. But I don't think it's as problematic as you might think if the extra skills are Cool But Weak. (As long as players have a way to refund or reset skill points, of course.) They can still be fun to play with/figure out. And who knows, maybe they can be strong in extremely rare circumstances.
I suppose the more tricky part of balance comes at the top-end though, especially regarding synergistic skills. The more skills there are the more likely it is that a certain combination breaks the game. That definitely takes more work to balance, but I think it's not too difficult. To me it seems worth it, for the kind of game Intrepid is trying to create, with lots of horizontal progression.
I think the primary limiting factor, when it comes to number of skill options, is just originality. Eventually they're just going to run out of ideas for novel abilities.
1) It hurts immersion when your character knows how to do something, but can't because... what? They're not placing enough mental resources into keeping it in the front of their mind?
2) You can't plan for everything, obviously. So while you're out grinding monsters, you're not equipped to handle PK, and you'll die because of the imaginary limitation. On the flip side, you're ready for PK and can't farm efficiently. Feels bad.
3) Having access to all of your skills allows situational play and counter-play. If you're stuck with only a fraction of your arsenal, countering will rarely happen and make combat feel less intelligent as you're stuck having to use subpar abilities, regardless of the situation. Player just jumped you, and you want to defend yourself? Nope. You're not outfitted to deal with that atm, better to let them go corrupt if they kill you.
4) Learning how to counter-play others in PvP will be nearly impossible unless a class is basic (ie rogues stab, mages cast and that's all you need to know). If not, you'd still need full knowledge of what a class can do, but whether or not they'll do it will boil down to luck or Meta. They may counter, they may not counter, you'll never know. Countering is inefficient now, and even if you knew what they had after a skirmish, you're out of luck because you can't do anything about it with your current skills.
5) You can counter that it's multiplayer, and you should be covering each other's weak points, but the fact is it feels incredibly limiting and annoying when you CAN do something, but not right now.
I get that it's intimidating and confusing when you have 50 skills/spells/items on your hot bars, but dumbing it down is insulting and frustrating, limiting any potential countering you were physically unable to prepare for.
Preparation and strategy are important, there's no doubt about it, but it should be physically possible for a player to do both of these, and not be limited and hindered to only being able to counter a minimal amount of situations when their class can handle many more.
If I'm out hunting monsters, and I encounter a PK'er that my class can beat, only to lose because I was unable to have the right skills available, then it's not my fault. It's not my lack of planning that made me lose; it was the system. You can't plan for anything with limited skill slots except the task you're setting out to complete. The system just told me; "Too bad you didn't plan for that to happen!", while at the same time telling me "You can't plan for it". I'd tell that system to go to hell, and stop playing.
If you're still able to counter and beat that class... was it really engaging? How could it be? You just used your monster hunting skills to kill a player. You didn't need a new strategy, you didn't need to think any differently than it was a monster. It's boring.
I'm all for hard limits to what players can do, but limiting our own skill kit of 50 down to 10 is ****.
I am with shoklen having a good pool of abilities to choose from is really cool. We could even have a choice between 2-3 different Ultimate abilities.
It gives the player the chance to run a certain setup for specific situations and use their brain. So a toon could use one setup on one boss fight and change it another boss fight.
Assuming Intrepid don't pull a Blizzard on us and not let us change spells, etc when we need it.