I think there is no one who looked at it and thought: "Oh yeah, I can see exactly which skills I want, where they are and how many points I need to get them. What a great design!"
I think the idea was to force the poeple to chose skills they may not want or need to get the ones they really want. This is to prevent most usefull skills beeing too cheap. And that is ok.
But the way people are forced to work through skills is just ridiculous.
It's not rocket science, there are enough games with skill systems that are way better.
So can you please change the system in something similar to the example below, where the skills are ordered and you just need a certain number of points to be activated in the "tree" to activate the next level?
And 16 levels is a little over the top, maybe something like 12 would be ok or you change the increase of needed SP for the next level to 1 for level 11-16.
So my example of a sorted skilltree is easy to understand and overlook. Also better to rebalance. If there is a skill no one uses, you can just reduce the levels and increase the value per level with the same overall value but less SP needed.
I would like to know what other people think, would this be better than the actual skilltree or worse? Are there any disadvantages in this example over the original tree?
And since every level adds the same value, all the skills could be independent. You could spend a point for Range 1, Cooldown 1 and then activate Heat Gen 3 without having Heat Gen 1&2. All you have to check for every level is, if there are already enough SP activated in the "tree".
If PGI wanted to force people to take more different skills you could replace the rule of "x points invested in the tree to activate level y" with "2 level 1 skills neded for a level 2, 2 level 2 or 3 level 1 skills needed for a level 3 and so on".
Edited by Tollpatsch, 17 May 2017 - 04:23 AM.