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[New Skills] Making Every Point Worthwhile
nikeix
Member Posts: 3,972 Arc User
So far I'm liking the new skill system, but I do see a couple places where it's breaking down.
The 5-points Tactical bonus only give a benefit if you either have a cloak or hanger bays. I suggest swapping the position of the Starship Stealth option with the 5-point Science bonus' Starship Perception. This would create a situation where Tactical captains are choosing between carrier ops or increased vigilance (quite appropriate to the tactical mindset - you might even rename it "Starship Vigilance" to fully disassociate it from the Science bonuses) while Science would be choosing between enhanced stealth or control resistance (with fine tuning your cloak to reducing exotic emissions being thematically sound for science-minded builds). It would also ensure no captain is ever unable to 'dance around' the bonuses that only work for very specialized ship types.
Tactical Captains are being hamstrung again when they try to achieve the fully enhanced Focused Frenzy. To maximize this ability you need to spend 28 points in the Tactical lines. With there being only thirty nodes you can only skip 2 nodes... which means you MUST take Coordination Protocols even if you don't have hanger bays. The best solution for this would appear to be to add additional nodes to each career line so that when taking 28 skills you have more options what to skip over.
Finally, Long Range Targeting Sensor breaks the clear and consistent 50/85/100 pattern of diminishing returns seen in all other linear skill groups. Standardizing it would change the max drop off from the current 40/30/20 to 35/24.5/20.
The 5-points Tactical bonus only give a benefit if you either have a cloak or hanger bays. I suggest swapping the position of the Starship Stealth option with the 5-point Science bonus' Starship Perception. This would create a situation where Tactical captains are choosing between carrier ops or increased vigilance (quite appropriate to the tactical mindset - you might even rename it "Starship Vigilance" to fully disassociate it from the Science bonuses) while Science would be choosing between enhanced stealth or control resistance (with fine tuning your cloak to reducing exotic emissions being thematically sound for science-minded builds). It would also ensure no captain is ever unable to 'dance around' the bonuses that only work for very specialized ship types.
Tactical Captains are being hamstrung again when they try to achieve the fully enhanced Focused Frenzy. To maximize this ability you need to spend 28 points in the Tactical lines. With there being only thirty nodes you can only skip 2 nodes... which means you MUST take Coordination Protocols even if you don't have hanger bays. The best solution for this would appear to be to add additional nodes to each career line so that when taking 28 skills you have more options what to skip over.
Finally, Long Range Targeting Sensor breaks the clear and consistent 50/85/100 pattern of diminishing returns seen in all other linear skill groups. Standardizing it would change the max drop off from the current 40/30/20 to 35/24.5/20.
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Comments
I might agree a tax is a valid design strategy... if it were true for all three career paths. But its not. It's an artifact of the this being an early design and it's relatively easy to fix.
Others have mentioned swapping any decision gates involving hanger pets to a higher slot since we don't gain access to carriers until late game. Great suggestion. Likewise a decision gate that buffs transwarp probably doesn't need to come up before we have transwarp
Having to choose between a cloak you don't have and pets you don't have is NOT good. I don't mind having to choose where to cut corners, and where to max out, but having to choose skills that have absolutely no bearing on a character's build will make a lot of people(including me) mad. I'd also like to see more than 10 points for ground even if it was just couple, but not sure how that would work. I'll be curious to see how this effects my current builds being as I spent over 500k dilithium at last weeks upgrade weekend, but so far overall it looks pretty good. I thought it would be more restrictive than what Ive seen so far.
Suggestion: Drop the requirement for for the fully enhanced 28 point bonus's like focus frenzy to 27 points. This would prevent tac captains from being forced into dropping skill points into a skill they have no use for just to get the fully enhanced bonus as stated above.
Suggestion: I think we should be choosing Starship Perception or Hangar Weaponry at the 5 point tactical bonus as stated above. Putting Stealth on this slot makes for useless bonus's in a lot of cases.
Suggestion: As stated above we should be choosine Starship Stealth or Control resistance.
Thanks to the Devs for getting out the 2nd patch today which fixed the issue's I was having with tribble earlier today.
Transwarp actually comes up pretty early on and the sector space bonus might be nice when flying around at warp 5. Also while I agree that the pets shouldn't come to soon, just cant let them come too late either. Putting them above the 15 point bonus would restrict carrier builds severely IMO.
IDK...Im also confused as to why we're only able to use 45 Points rather than the 50 that any other game with a similar Skill Tree would present us. I get that they want us to make choices here but it seems like a silly way of going about it.
Yeah, I don't quite understand this either. I played through the tutorial on tribble last night, just up to the level 5 where I could spend my first points.
not gettting any skipp points at all for the first 4 levels seems weird.
I could understand those points not being rewarded while playing the tutorial, but it would be nice if the game rewards a bundle of 5 points when reaching level 5, so the player can actually take a good look at the skills and swap around his first points a bit before locking them in by clicking purchase.
With an in depth skill point text tutorial about this coming up that helps with the point distribution.
They're already doing demonstrations where they're replicating current builds with 4-6 points left over. We're getting a huge buff with the revamp... we don't need 4-5 more points
They could easily lock out remaining ultimates once you unlock one.
While we don't have hanger pets at level 9 when this choice first becomes available, that's not why it's positioned so early in the path. By requiring only 5 points in Tatical skill choices, it's placed to allow predominantly Engineering or Science-based carrier captains to reach this benefit with only a tiny investment into tactical skills.
Carriers come in all flavors. If you have to go deep into Tactical skill choices to get this basic carrier benefit, we lose a lot of potential for engineering-ish and science-y carrier builds.
It not all about where you're at for half an hour of play down at level 15 (or whatever). Some design choices must respect that the majority of a your play time in a build comes after reaching the skill cap.
I would agree that those skills need to stay at a lower level, but I think someone suggested to swap the abilities (possibly with a rename) around to another career, so every track as a generalist option to choose from as well at every stage.