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[Duke78]

Okay, here my few cents after looking into the new skill tree system. I think the idea is good and has the potential to greatly improve the game, but as you can see below, there are a lot of points that really hinder it to bring the fun it is supposed to bring (in my opinion).

What I like:

- The ability to customize my mechs even more to my playstyle or to their specific builds (Long Range, Brawler etc.).

- No need to grind out XPs for Skills I mostly don´t need (Pinpoint, Arm Reflex, Quick Ignition). Sadly this point is negated mostly (see "Dislikes")

- No need to buy three chassis any more, even if I only want one to play with.

- With the new defensive skills, time to kill seems to be increased by a good amount. I think this is great for the game. It improves the feeling of big stompy strong machines tearing each other apart slowly on the battlefield. Right now it´s really strange to see some mechs chew threw an assault mech with a few shots.

What I don´t like:

- The current structure of the skill trees: I have to spend XP and C-Bills on nodes I absolutely don´t want or need and am hindered in my ability to max out the ones I really want (e.g. to get to radar dep or speed tweak). In some cases, I even don´t see the logic why I have to unlock a certain node to get to another one (e.g. what do Target Info Gathering or Target Decay have to do with Radar Deprivation or ECM effectivity? From my perspective, these are two completely different technologies). So every time I want to customize a mech to my needs, I have to spend about 20-30% of my XPs and c-bills on nodes I don´t want at all, blowing them out for nothing. --> frustrating!

- Capping of the skill points: It is a good idea and a good way to prevent people to improve their mechs into nirvana, but being forced to spend skill points on nodes I don´t want and therefore not being able to spend them on more interesting things is really frustrating.

- Respec costs: I really like to play around with my builds. Adding and removing weapons, changing the main weapon loadout from ballistic to missile to energy and back (yes not possible with all builds, but I hope you get what I mean). The horrendous respec costs greatly hinder me in doing so. If not remove, they at least greatly inhibit a feature I totally like about this game. And if I paid the respec costs (to remove nodes) I have to pay for the new ones. So for each respec, I will lose a c-bill amount in the millions. Sorry, I don´t get it.

- The pricing system in general: Yes, maxing out a mech for 9 million c-bills roughly resembles fitting out this mech with three modules. But I was able to swap my modules around for nothing. I was completely fine with the 5 Radar Deprivation modules and all the single laser/AC/missile range/cooldown modules I owned. Now it is like I have to buy and bind these modules/skills/nodes to every single mech. Including the respec costs I fear the game will degrade into a grind party.

- Nerfs to the mechs with really good cooldown/heatgen/jam chance/range quirks. For example the Centurion CN9-D: Okay forget this one for now. I just saw that basic quirks are still effective and by maxing out the corresponding skill tree, the mechs should get back roughly into the area before the skill tree system.

So now this got a lot longer than I expected. I hope someone reads this and shares my opinion. And I hope PGI is going to do some tuning to the skill tree system, which is a really good idea in principle, before its released.

Best whishes.

[Duke78]

Some other points I came across:

- Incorporation of UAV effectivity into the skill tree and deletion of cool shot 9 by 9:
Both very useful general skills that didn´t take up a slot and applied only to the consumables. And I think sooner or later everyone unlocked these skills to make use of them for all their mechs. Now UAV effectivity has to be unlocked for every single mech chassis and cool shot 9 by 9 doesn´t exist any more. Proposed solution: Bring these back in form of special (maybe slightly more expensive) consumables or upgrade the current UAV and cool shot 9 to the values of the improved UAV and cool shot 9 by 9. Or add a skill system for consumables which applies for all consumables for all mechs. Wasting points on each chassis for UAV effectivity does not seem right.

-Cooldown nodes:
Right now the cooldown nodes for all weapon system only add up to 4-5%. This is not even near the effectivity of the former cooldown modules even if purchasing the whole skill tree. Combined with the fast fire skill of the former system this added up to 17.5% if I remember correctly. So effectively the efficiency of the cooldown modules is gone completely and only the fast fire bonus remains, which is to unlock for each weapon system separately. So I would propose to increase the efficiency of the cooldown nodes or incorporating a general cooldown skill which applies to all weapon systems.

-Another note on the structure of the skill trees:
Being forced to use valuable skill points on skills you don´t need (e.g. lower torso or sensors skill trees), prevents me from optimizing weapon loadouts on multiple weapon class mechs (Laser, AC, Missile). This promotes weapon boating even more compared to the current system. Multiple weapon mechs and loadouts might disappear almost completely from the game, which would take away a lot of the fun.

-Another note on the pricing and XP consumption: After doing the math I came to the conclusion that I am not even near to be able to remaster all the mechs which I have mastered right now, even if I only go for the skills of the former system. While XP consumption seems to be okay in that regard, the amount of C-Bills I will have to spent is ridiculous. I still propose to drop the C-Bill costs to unlock each node.

Edited by Duke78, 09 February 2017 - 11:56 PM.