37 replies to this topic

[FupDup]

I'm playing around with the updated Skill Tree in the second PTS update, and so far the problem of being forced to get crappy skills just to get good skills is still rampant.

Mobility: Arm skills are forced to get the full accel/decell/torso quirks, and you can't access Speed Tweak at all without getting two arm skills. What if your mech literally doesn't have any arm hardpoints, or not enough arm hardpoints to mount your primary weaponry?

Operations: Hill Climb and Improved Gyros everywhere. Both of these are useless.

Survival: AMS skills forced on you even if your mech doesn't use AMS. Shock Absorbance is forced even if you don't take Jump Jets (the only time you'd ever consider it).

Firepower: You need to get cooldown to get at things like laser duration and heat generation. Cooldown is fine in and of itself, but the values are so low that you can't notice any kind of difference. On the right half of the tree, velocity poses the same problem. What if my mech doesn't have any projectile weapons? Then I can't get the full range, heat, or cooldown bonuses. Cooldown 7 requires missile spread, but what if I don't HAVE any missiles? And full cooldown is still really weak (7.15% on my Mist Lynx) by the way.


One of the slogans you used to market the Skill Tree 1.0 to us was that it would empower players with choice and customization to tweak their mech to their liking. Forced "placeholder" skills directly conflict with that. You can't choose to skip over skills you don't want, unless you also want to forfeit any of the bonuses that are locked behind those placeholders.

Something that every broad skill category (survival, mobility, etc) needs to have is a linear skill setup where each different item (torso twist, range, etc.) has its own completely isolated column for all of its skill levels.


Are you worried about people not taking certain skills? Well then, make those skills stronger instead of removing player choice.

Hill Climb just needs to be fully reworked because it's an inherently flawed mechanic. Decreasing the deceleration rate a little bit does nothing, because you're still going to come to a complete stop pretty fast. What Hill Climb SHOULD do is increase your minimum slowdown angle. That would make HC have a legitimate impact on your maneuvering around terrain.

Speed Retention shouldn't even have the 50 kph cap, otherwise you're going to die very quickly even with maxed out SR.

Improved Gyros can't have a use unless cockpit shaking becomes a major part of the game. Best you could do is try to merge something like Shock Absorption with it.

Edited by FupDup, 01 March 2017 - 07:22 PM.

[Shrike32]

AMEN

[Amsro]

Yes so far this is the first thing that came to mind when looking at the new trees, need more linear choices but with fewer skill points available. IMO

[l33tworks]

What do you mean still. Its MUCH worse than before. Its mind boggling that players were asking for more player choice but after revision you get less.

[Maurice Thorez]

I might be mistaken, but I think this actually might be the intent of the new skill tree design. To be specific, that if you want to focus on skills for only one type of weapon, there will be less useful or useless skills you will have to take in the process to optimise your build.

This could very well be one of their attempts to fix one of the criticisms from the first PTS run, that it favoured boating a single type of weapon. With the new changes, it does appear that if you want to optimise around something such as lasers and maximise your heat generation reduction, you will have to invest in more skill nodes than before. By requiring you to take nodes for other weapon groups as well, the designers might think it would tempt players to diversify their builds a bit more too.

All that said, I am not sure how successful this new design will be at encouraging more diverse builds(assuming that is the intent). It would take some time on the live server with a larger population to better see how it will play out than the deceptive picture the PTS with its' limited player sample and time could provide.

Edited by Maurice Thorez, 01 March 2017 - 09:20 PM.

[MischiefSC]

You know my opinion Fuppy.

Wet rag.

WHACK!

[Snazzy Dragon]

first skill tree you had to take -40% fall damage at least to max all survival skills

now you have to take -50%

nice hidden tax

hidden taxes everywhere :/

[Zergling]

Just ditch the trees altogether.

Instead have a system listing all bonuses, and let players allocate points as they wish to whatever points they want, up to the limit of each bonus.

Pretty much just a copy of Diablo 3's paragon system:


Examples:

Each point into Acceleration would be worth 5% bonus, up to a maximum of 5 points / 25% bonus
Each point into Heat Generation would be worth 1% bonus, up to a maximum of 5 points / 5% bonus
Each point into UAC Jam Chance would be 3% bonus, up to a maximum of 5 points / 15% bonus
Each point into Seismic Sensor would be 40 meters, up to a maximum of 5 points / 200 meters





They could even segregate it like the Paragon system does, by allowing only a certain number of points towards firepower or mobility bonuses.


Eg, a maximum of 30 points could be applied in firepower bonuses.

They could even segregate it like the Paragon system does, by allowing only a certain number of points towards firepower or mobility bonuses.

Edited by Zergling, 01 March 2017 - 09:36 PM.

[Skribs]

This is why I say they should just:

1) Remove Rule of 3 and just let you elite/master a Mech no matter whether or not you have 3 variants basic/elite
2) Change Pinpoint to a 10% armor buff
3) Uh...that's it.

The system we have has a few problems that can be fixed without breaking everything else.

[Queen of England]

One of the most annoying thing about the old skill system was that one of the skills (convergence) didn't do anything. In the new system, you end up taking many skills that don't do anything. That's a step backwards.

Update: After playing around a bit, I'd estimate that about 1/4 to 1/3 of your skills will literally do nothing (either applying to systems you can't equip or features you can't use) and a significant chunk of the remaining skills technically do something, but they're not skills any reasonable person would actually chose to take given the choice. This is deeply anti-fun. Also, the bonuses from many of the good skills are so small on a per-node basis that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference before and after taking that node even with a stopwatch. After you have all 5 the effect is significant, but you'll probably end up adding 15+ nodes to the skill tree before you notice anything changing due to the weak per-node effects and massive number of filler skill nodes.

Edited by Queen of England, 01 March 2017 - 09:53 PM.

[Andi Nagasia]

all skills do something but some times we dont need the ones we get,
i just want to make a SHC with -8%Heat so i can run slightly cooler PPCs,
and i end up spending 25 nodes and get everything from LBX spread to LRM Crit,
will test if more so and give my feed back, not liking this part though,

[Pyed]

Queen of England, on 01 March 2017 - 09:33 PM, said:

One of the most annoying thing about the old skill system was that one of the skills (convergence) didn't do anything. In the new system, you end up taking many skills that don't do anything. That's a step backwards.

Thing is taking convergence doesn't use a point that you could have spent elsewhere. It's basically "double basic skills" for a few thousand xp now.

[Weepy Wanebow]

Im not understanding why this is still an issue. It had to have been the second most voice complaint from the last play test.

1. Too expensive
2. Useless tax nodes are junk amd make no sense, less nodes and more direct trees or the same nodes, more direct teees, with more dynamic options have both been suggested as better options
3. The current weapons tree system promotes boating
4. Nodes aren't impactful enough and some are obvioisly superior choices to others. Scrapping the junk nodes and making new nodes unlike current option would be better

Im pretty sure those were the top complaints in order of most to least frequent....

After reading the forums im not even sure that I'm going to tackle Play test 2.0. The hope that PGI was listening seems so foolish now

[Oberost]

To get a +10.5% range (7 nodes, useful for all weapons of course) in my laser boat MAD BH2 I have to pick 16 nodes...

This includes ammo increasing nodes (wow), missile crit chance nodes (no missile hardpoints, thanks...), weapon speed nodes (no ballistic weapons mounted) and finally some duration, cooldown and heat generation nodes (at least some useful ones).

I mean...



One step forward and two backwards?

[WolvesX]

There shouldn't be LINKs between the nodes!

[WolvesX]

Disclaimer: I like the basic idea of a skill system, the system right now just means you have to buy 3 chassis and master them to be on par. Sorry for my english, I learned it though an other sec. language of mine.

---

BUT in STv2 there are still problems:

1) IF take away quirks from mechs like the Orion or the Awesome. You didn't took something away from the HBK-IIC (has no quirks) lets say, so you buffed the HBK-IIC and nerfed the Orion, the Awesome and the Vindicator.

2) You are forced to you buy you don't want. Why do the nodes have to be linked? Balancing skills would be way more easy without a link between them. LIKE: NO one takes the skill? Needs to be stronger etc.

3) The costs are perfectly fine now, in fact its even more crazy cheap for those of us how mastered our mechs before (skills + modules).

4) To remove the engine linkage to agility is a great idea, but needs a lot of tweeking to make lights and meds work.

5) There is no incentive to play on the test server, so the population is so low that you only can live test things with friends.

Edited by WolvesX, 02 March 2017 - 07:30 AM.

[Cy Mitchell]

I do not really have an issue with them forcing nodes on us that we do not really need or want for a particular build in order to get the benefits that we do want because they give us way to many Skill Points in the first place, If we did not have to work through undesirable nodes and make pathing choices then 91 SP would allow us all to make uber Mechs and thus negatively impact the game by making Mechs even more powerful and probably decreasing TTK even more.

If they make the ST more linear so that you can pick just the best skills for your build then they need to reduce SP down to around 70 per Mech. The problem is that they have to make a ST that applies to every Mech in the game so what may not be useful for you may be exactly what someone else wants. There is no way they are going to be able to make custom ST for every variant in the game.

[Gagis]

You are wrong. Linked skill tree with suboptimal skills in between is a good thing. Having to seek the cheapest path to reach all of the nodes you really want is a great way to balance different properties and to force us to balance the costs and benefits of different branches.

You are complaining about the great advantage of a skill tree system.

[The Lost Boy]

Ams nodes are not needed to get the rest of that tree out. Shock absorbance while not useless is nice to have even if you dont have jump jets. The cooldowns were at best 5% max on the first version, this is still the norm, except now cool downs appy to ALL your weapon types(nice!). Velocity buff applies to all missiles/ballistic(nice!). You get REALLY nice perks to missiles(HE baby!). Most mechs will be not as fast on the top end due to the large agility tree(-2 kph). Most will not be as good with the turns either. Consumables got buffed! Super coolshot, , extra uav, extra strike! 6 max! The are now 60,000 cbills a pop tho! Hill climb nice to have, never used it before.

You guys DIDNT want to encourage boating so this is what you got.
You cant have it both ways.
They gave the gauss rifle love with the EASY path to extended charge time.

Most mechs will be buffed max on armor and structure, have reduced top speed and agility, slightly better sensors, and maybe stupid amounts of consumables. Weapons will still NOT cool down as fast as the current system, nor have quite as long range. More ammo and missiles can be carried to make up for the structure/armor buffs, but IMO the High Explosive missile buff will far outpace the longer time to kill from the armor and structure buffs. SRM with Artemis and max velocity and max high explosive and max spread reduction will be a beast.

LRMS may be very nasty with those maxed out as well.

Missile mechs like the catapult that have decent LRM and SRM builds can probably find a sweet spot and be able to switch back and forth for you frugal players.

Theres lots to like ablout these trees too.

The incentive to play on the pts server is you get to play ANY mech, with ANY loadout, and figure it out before you spend your own cbills, mcs.

Theres lots of supernova owners regretting purchases right now who wish they could have had a test run.

Edited by Lemming of the BDA, 02 March 2017 - 08:27 AM.

[Amsro]

WolvesX, on 02 March 2017 - 07:14 AM, said:

There shouldn't be LINKs between the nodes!

That is the simplest fix at this point.

Give us less skill points to play with if need be.