oldradagast, on 04 March 2017 - 06:35 AM, said:
The skill maze is simply unacceptable. It is GRIND, not CHOICE, and it is confusing and wrapped in a sub-par user interface, to boot.
Forcing people to take mountains of trash skills just to get to the few good ones nearly all mechs need is GRIND, not CHOICE.
Forcing people to waste time struggling to find what they want in the skill maze is just another form of GRIND, in that it wastes time for no reason but to give the illusion of content and progress.
The skill maze should be scrapped and replaced with ROLES: my suggestion was: Brawler, Scout, Skirmisher, and Fire Support.
Those ROLES then have about 20 skills each, none of them gated behind other ones, and once a skill is unlocked, you have it forever with no respect cost. But you can only have 1 role and 12 skills in it active at one time on a mech. Then, display what role people have on their current mech on your team when you press "TAB" in game, and you're done.
You get a simple system to use and understand, a form of role warefare, and more info about your team's strengths and weaknesses. This is far better than 91 shades of grind, which is what we have now.
Personally I believe this system has been designed for the expert user, with lot of XP so that he can make choices and respec. I cannot begin to fathom how a beginner is going to be able to make a choice basically you need around 30 points to get any valuable effect or else it is all in the noise and then the trade offs become even more daunting.
For example I looked at the situation where I had only played for a night, I use these figures as I would think I am at about an average player and pretty much historically I am at 1100 Xp and 130K C bills per match. so a good hours play would net around say 6 games so weekday evening of 2 hours would net me 13.2K XP 1.56M C bills
So the good news is I run out of Xp before I run out of C bills but at best I am shy of 17 SP
So what do I go for as a noob/potato?
Well there are strategies I could go for:
1. I could spread the points understanding what I needed such that each was raised incrementally
2. I could binge on what I think is most important at the time
3. I could pick such that I can make thing more flexible until I have a clue as to what I want tout of the mech
Now I have done a skill tree for the following mechs
ACH-C(C)
BSW-X1
WHM-6R
KDK-3
For ACH I have the standard build small laser build, and I would push mobility over everything else at the start but basicaly it comes down to 4 things on that tree kinetic burst, hard brake, anchor turn and speed tweak, you are not going to be torso twisting damage away if you can help it and if you did you'd not be lasting very long in a light you'd go go with speed and information is life so
To get 5% KB and 5% HB take 3 SPs
I would also like to be able to scout better so that means have a better radar and also better target acquisition so I reckon I dip into the sensor tree and take 14% SR and 7% TIG 3 SP
Then it get tricky I would then actually go for an extra consumable slot so I can have a UAV, coolshot and ARTY and then for the UAV I would hit the duration since this would bank me more C bills for detection and if there are LRM boats I get C bills for the damage so on a good match they can almost pay for themselves. The coolshot help when I brawling other lights or need to keep the DPS going so I spend 3 SP on miscellaneous
Now the problem is that for a light you are going to have to give up something so looking at the Armour and operations trees to get to cool run and heat containment and the armour buffs is really expensive at 3 SP each to hit the first in each tree and if you want to have ay improvement in weapons laser duration coming down some you still end up spending 3 skill points so essentially I chose 2 of the three to put 3 skill point in
I also take the first JJ skill as again improving heat whist try to escape is again important
Now having walked through the choices if you just clicked on one of everything I reckon the difference in performance is marginal so in m mind one could argue that the skill tree effect is being over played. I think the biggest thing I'd notice is actually the extra consumable slot. Another example is that taking the choice of artemis and 66% reduction in spread and spend XP and C bills on trying to get 4.5% reduction in spread. I know where I would put the effort.. Basically I ask myself would I notice 4.5% range increase 1% heat reduction 4% missile spread reduction and the answer is no and htese are the final values of a mastered mech
When I look at structure and armour yes I would notice end point but the intermediate point will be hard to feel and therefore it actually becomes a hard judgement call to pick the SP
Which lead me to my next point which is that the quirk upgrades are not massive buffs all told and I think that is where people are getting confused. My belief is that PGI is using the skill tree to basically nerf the power in the game and basically what we have had is an over complicated approach to do this.
I'd contend that they are doing three things:
1. Increasing time to kill by lowering heat capacity and cooldown buffs and generic armour ans structure buffs
2. Making hit registration better by slowing acceleration and deceleration so the network code works better
3. Using the skill tree as an attempt to even out the performance of weapons between the Clan and IS
To my mind having gone through the exercise is the skill tree the best way of doing this?
Well when I look at the Mobility for the ACH-PRIME(C) I have, of the 33 SP I take on mobility for example 8 are just stuff that pretty much does not really help in game which means you are using them to navigate to the things you want. I accept that this was also true of the old system but I think it is even worse here.
If you have just 16 points to play with you could actually spend more points on stuff you don't want to unlock than stuff you do. Thus to me is why I think the system fails. It is OK when you have the skill points( XP/C bills ) to pick and choose but not when you have not enough to make the choice valid. Indeed I can see people making different choices now based on lots of different things
For example I changed some builds to take more heat sinks since that is cheaper and easier than having heat containment increase and then reassess when you have a more XP/C bills to make the changes. it means that the skill tree is now intimately connected to your build much more than it was before. Which mean more choice but also more confusion.
That said I have attempted to try out an unmastered BSW-X1 versus a mastered one. On a hot map like Tourmaline Desert, the active heat at max speed hits 1% more on the heat scale, Adding Artimis make more of a difference than maxing out the skill tree missile options, If you shut down is a bad spot the quick ignition does save your arse it is very noticeable but in truth other than mechs being harder to down with the armour buffs, and the acceleration nerfs I don't see the skill tree as set up being a game changer for good or bad for me it is still meh.
The bad bits such as pick crap nodes is balanced out by the good bits such as the miscellaneous tree to my mind and for the beginner it seems to me to add to the confusion in the game which is not well documented (not that anyone reads these days) but also not as intuitive as many other games on the market.
Lastly the UI has take a step back it is not clear what you have chosen and it would be useful to know what currency you have used to buy things the unlock colour should change and the edge colour should represent what currency you have used to unlock it. Just this show how little testing they have done and even asked the likes of the people that are close to them such as NGNG would have highlighted that issue.
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