Ideas for generalist buffs and preventing buff bloat

Lash

Steven often talks about the systems in the game giving out small buffs. Such as a tavern giving out a proximity buff or owning a castle giving a guild a buff. Small buffs can be pretty rewarding but you have to be careful because players can and will stack them.

My idea for both balancing and consolidating these small buffs is a buff skill tree system. You could have a passive buff tree where a player selects a path along the tree. When the game wants to reward a player with a buff they could automatically give the player a passive along the preselected tree. For example being in a small guild could give out 5 buff passives instead of having a larger guild size if they choose. Some food buffs could give out buff passives. Killing a boss in a siege could reward a buff passive for the rest of the fight. You could make the tree fairly sprawling and full of options to let players customize their buffs to fit their build. This does not have to replace other buffs being given out but it would serve to equalize them across the classes and would prevent issues with buff stacking very specific over powered buffs before fighting a raid boss. It would also help a dev that wants to give out a small temporary buff as a reward but does not want to break balance.

Lash

Here is a super rough mock up of what I was thinking.

neuroguy

This is a very elegant system you describe, but I think only for passive buffs that the world gives you (i.e. being a node citizen, or guild member etc). I think that there is still definitely a place for the more classic, actively applied buffs (via player skills) alongside this. Giving party/raid members or even random players buffs is a nice human connection part of MMOs that I do like. Furthermore I really like the alternative buff choices (like paladin blessings in WoW) that should be easy to switch on the fly and not require a whole passive window to interact with.

What you propose could consolidate and personalize buffs that are ~always active, if personalizing them is what AoC would want. However it really is only warranted if there are indeed enough sources of 'passive' buffs that are always active/active for long periods of time/active in a particular geographic location. Perhaps you can re/set them at taverns?

To hijack your diagram though, I think this would be a brilliant way to set up cooking or alchemy where certain ingredient families would compound to enhance the buff to some particular stat/type of stat and could be visualized like this. For example, fruits would enhance agility which would be the left-most branch and you'd be able to slot in a bunch of different fruits in those passives and get their respective agility buff, while meats could only go in the right most branch for str. This would be open to more complexity by having each fruit give a different agility-related buff (e.g. crit chance, or crit dmg) instead of just simple agility. So if you went to a tavern and wanted to order food, you would get this interface, then select the size of the meal (the number of passive nodes you can fill up), then fill up the buff path you want (based on the ingredients the tavern has available) and voila you've customized your meal for the buff(s) you want... which sounds a bit like monster hunter world I guess. Alternatively tavern owners can create their own dishes with this interface (with their given ingredients) and have up for sale for travelers. But I don't want to hijack your post :P

Lash

Yeah I did not envision this replacing class buffs. I really like class buffs in general. The only reason I would consider a system like this is because Steven often talks about the world giving out buffs. It might become a balance nightmare if it was not managed correctly.

I really do hope they go all out on professions like that. I would rather see them being overly complicated than not having enough depth.

Noaani

As the forums general skeptic/party pooper, I actually kind of like this idea.

If nothing else, it enables Intrepid to add in slightly more powerful buffs than they would otherwise, knowing that players aren't going to be able to double-dip with any one stat.

Basically, it gives the developers a single buff tree to balance rather than a hundred individual buffs.

There are some things that would need to be worked through though. An example may be that if I have 13 points to spend, I may want a specific buff on a specific tree, but if I only have 12, I may want to spend them on a totally different tree. Since many of the buffs will be temporary, there should be a way of saying "if I have 13 points, spend them like this, if I have 12, spend them this other way".