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We've all seen it, all come across it, but the core issue from all previous Skilltree PTS remains standing: We cannot pick the skills we want, but have to march through nodes we don't care about. I understand that PGI wants to force players into commitment, but that commitment is a false sense of choice.
What is actually happening is, that we are forced to pick up things we deliberately did not equip/choose before. Hill climb, speed retention, targeting decay on non-LRM mechs, shock absorbance for falling damage. And more things that we don't want. Laser Duration when we boat PPCs. Etc. etc.
All these things result in us losing the things that made our mechs what they were good at - you lose on speed on your light, you lose on missile performance on your medium brawler, etc. The skill tree might represent a theoretical equivalent to what we used to have, but only if you give value to the things we have to pick up on the way to were we wanna go. And that is not the case.
Let me give some examples.
- Fall damage? How about not falling. I am in complete control off whether I take fall damage or not. This is a dead skill node.
- Radar Dep used to be a mandatory module, is now buried under crap I could not care less about. My 4xASRM6 Hunchie gives no hoot about sensor range. I can see enemies with my eyes and my reticule has a rangefinder.
- Arm pitch for my Pirate's Bane, with all weapons in the STS. Great bargain, right there. Can I have another?
- Capture Assist in Misc on the way to improving my coolshot. Real great value for Skirmish, Assault, Incursion, Domination, Escort ... uhm ... anything but Conquest, really. And don't tell me speedcapping is the new meta in Assault.
- And so on.
But the current system forces us to make suboptimal or outright dead choices that would either only help if we make suboptimal or plain bad choices, and does not allow us to sacrifice those benefits in those dead/bad areas to amplify or strengths according to chassis.
This tree is, and will remain if unchanged, a step back from the value we had before. I never spent a dime on Speed Retention or Hiull Climb, and I have to do that now if I want to get to where I was before.
And that's crap. From a psychological standpoint, you give players a limited resource and then ask them to waste that resource. You wanted to give players a more smooth feeling of impactful progression, yet you ask them to pick up crap they don't want, that has no or little benefit to their play experience, and you ask them to do so at the expense of their time and effort. This artificially increases the price of desired nodes and artificially decreases the potential custom-tailoring of 'mechs. It also reduces their potential performance below the previous levels.
I am certain this won't change, as PGI seems to be adamant about forcing us to pick up those dead nodes, but feedback's been asked for, and here feedback is.
