7 replies to this topic

[Sjorpha]

I'm ok with the UI layout and the general design.

I don't like how unrelated skills are required to unlock other skills, it doesn't have to be 100% linear the progression should always make intuitive sense, you should be able to think "ok it makes sense you need Y to unlock X"

Balance suffers horribly from the skill tree. IS becomes much worse compared to Clan, and the gap between good and bad mechs in both factions also increases. This is bad to the point of being game breaking and creating long term damage to the game, especially for Faction Warfare which is already hanging by a thread. There are a number of reasons for this. The IS was already much worse than clan before, now it loses quirks and get's insufficient compensation. Competitive metamechs get the opportunity to boost their roles more focused, makeing them stand out even more. The extra module slots some of the IS mechs had are not considered and gets no compensation.

Skills are very unbalanced in power level but still cost the same, entire trees like JJ tree sucks and won't be used. Putting useless skills as requirements to unlock good ones is a bad solution, it would be much better to balance them either by making them cost differently according to power level, or to actually make them more equal in strength.

Boating is heavily encouraged. This is because it's cheaper in skill points to focus a weapon system and boat it than to diversify. This could be addressed for example by making skills more expensive at the top end, so that you can afford for example 10% in two weapons for the same price as 15% in one.

For the same reason plus price build experimentation is heavily discouraged. It's expensive to respec and the skills lock in weapons systems. This will make people meta even harder than now and never change their build unless a new competitive meta demands it. This pushes the game more into tryhard mode and away from creativity/experimentation. Very bad. This could be solved by making the weapons skills general rather than weapons specific. So you could focus on cooldown or heat etc and it would apply to all weapons, allowing you to try out different builds. Alternativly you could have three categories: energy, missiles, ballistics, allowing you to at least focus towards a category of weapons rather than a specific weapon.

I don't like jam chance skills. I beleive UAC jam chance should be set to where it balances out well against the non-ultra ACs, and it's not a good idea to have skills for that since it will force PGI to balance either against the skilled or the unskilled version, making the weapons either too weak or too strong in either case. Jam reduction is better suited as a flavor perk to specific mechs and the skill tree should only have the general ballistic quirks.

The skill tree is almost the same for all mechs. Big opportunity missed to give each chassis it's own individual tree to emphasize it's role and lore. Enormous opportunity missed, facepalm worthy.

Redundant skills should not exist. Arm agility skills on mechs with no arm hardpoints? It's the pinpoint skill all over again.

Grinding is severely increased. People have said you should count all the grind from the 3 variants as equal to 1 since that requirement is gone. But that disregards the possibility that you might actually WANT to master all variants of a chassis. I usually enjoy getting into all the variants and I want them all skilled up. My grind shouldn't be trippled.

Refunding related to the new costs will strike very differenty against players depending on whether they bought modules for all mechs or switched modules around.

All in all, this is not ready for release. I can accept it as an early draft/brainstorm kinda thing.

At a minimum this should happen before going live:
Trees needs to be individualized per mech to emphasize role and lore.
Mech balance needs to improve.
Faction balance needs to improve, IMPORTANT!
Balance between skills needs to improve or be balanced by cost.
Skill progression needs to make more sense, logical intuitive progression.
The things that encourage boating and discourage build experimentation needs to be reworked to achieve the opposite effect.
Grind must be reduced to current levels.

You're welcome.

Edited by Sjorpha, 09 February 2017 - 02:25 PM.

[Sjorpha]

Addition: Omnimechs.

Locking in weapon specific and other very specialized skills goes very much against the concept of omnimechs. Omnimechs should only have more general skills that encourages switching around the omnipods for different builds. They are supposed to be flexible and somewhat impersonal, and that is both their strength and their weakness. Skilling them very specialized the same way as battlemechs feels very lackluster and anti lore.

[Gamrick]

I don't see the need for a skill tree. The skill of the player (pilot) is his skill.

All of the skills in the skill tree system seem to reflect more the upgrades to a particular piece of tech.

I propose that you make a single piece of tech upgradeable, within reason of coarse, and give the winners of matches all salvage rights. And, give them salvage upgradeable tech to their standard tech. You could give levels of tech like basic or standard or advanced tech upgrades. Advanced being more rare to have.

And, make tech destroyable, so that they lose all of their upgrades. But, at the same time, have them retain the stock tech without the upgrades. So, basically put all of the upgrades in jeopardy every battle and if destroyed your left with the stock component.

Also, I think it would be neat to be able to hire tech and engineer staff to be able to tweak mech components, but you could say that attempting to do so could destroy the upgrades on the tech or even the stock component.

Just my thoughts, happy mech hunting.

[ingramli]

I just feel that almost the whole idea is screwed up beyond repair, my view with the current implementation are as follows,

Pros:
- Have some sort of control in allocating the "point" in picking upgrades,

Cons:

- It cost (way) too much xp and C-Bills to unlock an upgrade,

- It cost (too much) to "disable" an upgrade, and cost to "enable" something you already "unlocked" but "disabled" before, this really hurts people who want to try different loadout on omnimech which are doable in many configuration.

- It forces people to unlock and waste upgrade points on what they dont want to get want they want which are located at the bottom of the tree, i rather make it cost more to enable further upgrades on a unlocked module (For instance, it can took 5,000 xp to unlock the basic Seismic sensors, but 15,000 xp to bring it up to the advanced level), by that way people have incentive to spend some upgrade points on something else that they still consider useful (may be 2nd or 3rd priority), rather than having unlocks that they are not interested at all (hill climb? Advanced Gyro? who cares!)

- upgrade points cap should not be equal on every mech, less popular/inferior mech should have a higher cap as a means to balance, letting all mech have the same just make the OP mech become even more OP, such as the KDK-3,

- IS mech should not lose ANY quirks available to them as the skill trees is available to EVERY MECH in the game,the new skill tree has almost nothing to do with the faction balance, if not making the Clans every more overpowered.

- the modules (such as Radar Deprivation and Seismic Sensor) should be WAY cheaper than they were in the old skill system if they are not interchangeable between mechs. Dont forget the fact that people needs to grind for the same upgrade (both xp and C-Bills) EVERY TIME they buy a new mech, which they didnt have to in the past.

[Tier5 Kerensky]

Okay my feedback.

I really like it!

The floating UI with skill selection is a bit weird at first, but once you pick the skills for few mechs, it becomes easy enough for it's purprose. After all with most mechs you do that stuff mainly once and then forget it ever existed.

The selection of if you use GXP or mech XP is about okay, but after you pick one skill, I think it would be more clear if the colour of the selected skill is different depending on if you are using mech XP or GXP. Imagine if you pick all skills, then when you're about to apply them, you realise you've accidentally used GXP while you intended to use only mech XP. You then would have to void the changes and go through them all again. And also, the mech XP should be default choise, since the mech XP can only be used to those skills. Since you can't have any reason not to use mech XP, it should not be possible to use it until you have none left. Referring strictkly mech XP not historical XP which can be used on several same variants.

Price of skills. About okay, I think it's okay price for full 91 skills to cost 9.1 million cbills. For many mechs that's cheaper than current system where you'd have to buy useless variants you don't want to, just to master the one/s you want. But granted I think it's' also going to be expensive to some players.

Some mechs I could see it's fairly easy to pick right kind of skills for them, like simple light mechs with just one weapon type.

For some assults or heavies it might be more difficult to figure out the most optimal way, because you have many weapon systems that you just can't grab about all you want, not even close. For myself I expect I will have to waste quite some C-Bills to fine tune them for my brawlers, unselecting wrong skills.

Omnimechs as referred above, this new skill tree does effect omnimechs little different than battlemechs, specially for the ones you currently have.
However one of the advantages of omnimechs currently is, ignoring all the advantages of unlocked elite skills and the one module master gives you, omnimechs allow you to buy one mech and run most of it's configurations with small additional price of omnipods. That advantage is not effected.
But to effectively run any configuration which produces a lot of heat, which many Clan weapons do, you'd need to buy 3 variants of the same mech to get the elite and master skills. So for the same price, you have have 3 different skill configurations. That should be about enough for everyone, there's no real change in this new system.


I'm not too happy about LRM5 getting LRM10 spread, I think the change would be okay for many mechs which have few to some LRMs, but LRM boats which have high number of missile hardpoints are going to be nerfed because of that, because LRM5 is currently so much better when you have the hardpoints required to boat them.


I really hope you can get this released in February patch, it doesn't have to be perfect on first release. Trying them out in 4/4 PTS is a bit limited and boring.

[Duke Nedo]

Pgi, listen to this man, got it all right! Nothing to add really... Perhaps that we also lost most flavor from heavily quirked bad mechs with niche use..

[Saint Atlas and the Commando Elf]

I was on the PTS when you announced ED and I was on the PTS when you announced InfoTech. I am still disappointed, that you gave up on these ones. So, third time lucky?

The skill system is not bad at all, with a bit of tweaking it should be ready to go.
Rather than repeating stuff that others have pointed out before, I will focus on a couple of specific points.

Costs

I am not complaining about the 9.1 million cbills here. I am actually fine with that. Most veteran players have a lot of cbills anyway. Also the whiners should keep in mind that with the new skill system, mechs will have more armor+structure, which leads to more damage needed to bring them down, which leads to a higher reward in cbills.

Weapon quirks vs defensive quirks

I believe it is still your goal to bring TTK up, right? Well, you achieved that, but the downside is that the armor and structure branch is almost mandatory to max out. I'd suggest to cut it down a bit.

Node grids in general

The different skill trees are not flexible enough. If I want to go down to the final skill, I can probably jump one or two nodes out of 20. I understand that you want to prevent "cherry picking" here, but the way it is now does not provide enough flexibility (if any). The grid needs to be a bit less tight (meaning less dependencies). I know that you probably don't want to redo that much of your initial work, but you should seriously consider that.
A lot of the MWO players like to play around with their loadouts and love to try out new builds and stuff. That makes them happy.
And for this reason alone, the skill tree should provide flexibility.

Issue of boating

Like others have said, boating will be an issue and I agree with them. However there is a rather simple solution to this.

First, increase the Boni from the skill branch to a healthy value (30%ish).
Second, divide the Boni by the number of weapons that is used in the actual build. (For example, If the skill branch gives me 30% energy range and I run 6 Lasers on my mech, I would end up with a 5% bonus. If I should later decide to run 2 lasers on the same mech, I get 15% energy range bonus without respec or anything).

Balance

Well I know you are thinking about this a lot, so I will not try to add much thinking on my own here. Just a quick one:
Kodiak and Vindicator should not have the same amount of skill nodes. You can't even hope to level that out.

Being a scout

... is no longer an option, because it would require at least 150 nodes (I know that a scout could skip the armor tree, but again the benefits are just to great to ignore) to max everything out that is relevant. I don't know if you intentionally did that, but you severly hampered role warfare. A quick fix could be, to offer a role specific package of nodes, that gives a greater total benefit at the cost of having no flexibility.

UI

I don't really care about this. I grew up when Computers had 4 colors, so UI is fine for me as it is.

Mobility branch

Weakest part of the whole system. This basically needs a complete rethink. This time with effort, please.
JJ tree is simply superfluous.
Lower chassis tree is mandatory for almost every mech. Kinetic burst + hard brake are too powerful and need to be halved at least.
Upper chassis: One only needs torso speed. The rest is (almost) useless.

Noobs vs Vets

This is a tough one. The game was hard enough for new players even before this. It will be worse with the new skill system in place. And on top of that, you would need a working matchmaker to seperate the different tiers.

So have fun sorting this one out. If you don't, this has the potential to kill the game imho.

[Lionheart2012]

Cooldown nodes should be increased to 2% or 3% per node.

Fewer dependencies in Operations, Mobility, Survival, and InfoTech trees, and no irrelevant dependencies (e.g. laser duration required before laser range) in the Firepower tree.

Increase base SPs to 100 for all mechs and reduce costs to 1,250 XP and 90,000 Cbills per node. Reduce SPs for Mechs based on performance metrics in the game. Higher damage and kills means greater proportional reduction in SPs.

Provide customized values in the skill trees for specific variants to accentuate the specific roles for which they are designed (e.g. Catapult C1: enhanced values for LRMs, Awesome 8Q: enhanced values for PPCs, Rifleman 3N: enhance values for ACs, etc.)

Good start, though