test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Options
Suggestion for future enhancement - Skill Templates
stobg2015
Member Posts: 800 Arc User
I would like to suggest a future QoL enhancement to the new skill tree system.
The new system might be a bit more user-friendly than the old one, but not by a whole lot. The best thing I can say for it is that it brings the skill tree and the specializations more in line with each other and does away with spending X points on each skill.
What would make it really user-friendly is a bit of "show-and-tell" in the form of Skill Templates.
Skill Templates would be...
#1 - A suggested path for skill progression for a certain type of build.
#2 - A fast way to respec a character with suggested skills for a certain type of build.
You could think of it being something similar to Champions Archetypes, except that Skill Templates would not be mandatory. More of a suggestion.
In the UI, you would select a Skill Template and it would highlight all of the skills that belong in that template in yellow. It would also show progression on the 3 bonus bars on the bottom in yellow, so you can see exactly what you'd get.
Say for example we had a template called "Control Freak" that optimized toward control-type powers on a science vessel. Selecting it would highlight a recommended set of skills in Engineering, Science, and Tactical on each Tier and show which set of training manuals would be unlocked.
With the click of a mouse, you could see how your current skill tree build compares to that template.
For the impatient, there would be a new option that would allow you to respec your build to match the selected template. This would also help to facilitate rapid testing where multiple respecs might be required.
Now, since I am well aware that Cryptic would probably rather not get into the business of developing a lot of Skill Templates beyond perhaps 3 base templates -- one for each career -- I would further suggest that these would be exportable and importable on a per-character basis so that the community can develop its own templates. Aside from the base templates, each character could load one custom skill template at a time.
This would have huge advantages for the testing community, to be able to share Skill Templates and accelerate testing along specific lines. It would also let people "back up" their skill trees prior to a respec. If the export file were editable text like a bind file, people could even pre-design their characters' skill trees and load them instantly (with a respec).
The template import would specifically ignore any lines that were incorrectly formatted or listed a non-existent skill, probably fail to load altogether.
Now imagine if we extended the template design to include specialization trees as well.
I believe this would also be an aid to the Design and QA teams at Cryptic. It would help to standardize on common, popular skill templates for testing code changes and have a really good idea whether a proposed change might impact a large number of players. On the QA side, it would help to reproduce bugs.
I'm realistic enough to recognize that this would be a lot of work to implement and therefore perhaps unlikely. But I think it's an idea worth considering.
The new system might be a bit more user-friendly than the old one, but not by a whole lot. The best thing I can say for it is that it brings the skill tree and the specializations more in line with each other and does away with spending X points on each skill.
What would make it really user-friendly is a bit of "show-and-tell" in the form of Skill Templates.
Skill Templates would be...
#1 - A suggested path for skill progression for a certain type of build.
#2 - A fast way to respec a character with suggested skills for a certain type of build.
You could think of it being something similar to Champions Archetypes, except that Skill Templates would not be mandatory. More of a suggestion.
In the UI, you would select a Skill Template and it would highlight all of the skills that belong in that template in yellow. It would also show progression on the 3 bonus bars on the bottom in yellow, so you can see exactly what you'd get.
Say for example we had a template called "Control Freak" that optimized toward control-type powers on a science vessel. Selecting it would highlight a recommended set of skills in Engineering, Science, and Tactical on each Tier and show which set of training manuals would be unlocked.
With the click of a mouse, you could see how your current skill tree build compares to that template.
For the impatient, there would be a new option that would allow you to respec your build to match the selected template. This would also help to facilitate rapid testing where multiple respecs might be required.
Now, since I am well aware that Cryptic would probably rather not get into the business of developing a lot of Skill Templates beyond perhaps 3 base templates -- one for each career -- I would further suggest that these would be exportable and importable on a per-character basis so that the community can develop its own templates. Aside from the base templates, each character could load one custom skill template at a time.
This would have huge advantages for the testing community, to be able to share Skill Templates and accelerate testing along specific lines. It would also let people "back up" their skill trees prior to a respec. If the export file were editable text like a bind file, people could even pre-design their characters' skill trees and load them instantly (with a respec).
The template import would specifically ignore any lines that were incorrectly formatted or listed a non-existent skill, probably fail to load altogether.
Now imagine if we extended the template design to include specialization trees as well.
I believe this would also be an aid to the Design and QA teams at Cryptic. It would help to standardize on common, popular skill templates for testing code changes and have a really good idea whether a proposed change might impact a large number of players. On the QA side, it would help to reproduce bugs.
I'm realistic enough to recognize that this would be a lot of work to implement and therefore perhaps unlikely. But I think it's an idea worth considering.
(The Guy Formerly And Still Known As Bluegeek)
0
Comments
Defending The Galaxy By Breaking One Starfleet Regulation After The Next.
These proposed "Skill Templates" would go along way towards helping anybody choose what path would be preferable to them (again, a pure DPS associated path would be the main choice for quite a few players), although there's nothing to say that the DPS Template would be any better/worse than the path chosen by the community.
EDIT: I've been kinda waffling on a bit, so until I remember what I was wanting to get across, that'll be all for now.
My engineer is defensively built with gobtons of HP, poor damage, and a lot of generators and team buffs.
My tac focuses mostly on Team dps buffs and self damage buffs.
this kind of thing could be made easier by the OPs suggestion so I support it.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
My character Tsin'xing
If they make the templates bad enough they will.
Please, let them finish breaking fixing it before giving suggestions. Put it in the suggestion box for Skill Tree v.4.
The complexity and changeability is exactly the reason why I think it's a good idea.
This suggestion is not intended to help trailblazers constantly creating cutting-edge builds, except as a means of sharing those builds with other people for testing purposes. Even for those people, the ability to easily save a previous version of a build would be very valuable.
This suggestion is intended to help people who are looking at the steep learning curve of this game and have very little idea of what a good build is. By outsourcing the creation of templates to the Community, Cryptic can continue to change things and not worry that the players can't keep up.
This suggestion is also intended to help Cryptic QA. They would be able to pull metrics about popular templates to find out how the game is doing and identify potential balance issues. They would be able to easily replicate and adapt a bug tester's build when investigating a bug report. They would know in advance what builds their next change is likely to break and test them in QA ahead of time.
What do we do right now? We have to take a bunch of screen shots or write everything out by hand so we can plug it into a third-party skill planner that we have to wait to update for anything new. And then somebody else has to do the work of manually plugging all that back in in-game. Wouldn't it be better to be able to say, "here's my skill template" ...?
That's a huge win for QoL, in my opinion.
I'm making my suggestion now because it's the only hope that it will ever be considered for a future enhancement.
You know the lead time on this kind of stuff as well as I do. This particular iteration of the skill system has probably been on their roadmap for more than a year and they've probably spent a good 3-6 months planning for it. Once they decide it's "good enough" they won't touch it again for another 3-5 years except to make little changes. If they ever do decide to revisit it, I won't find out about it until it's too late. Also programmer time is at a premium over there and I'm confident implementing a skill template will involve programmer time.
So, way in advance or probably never.
For the record, I'm realistic about this and figure it will never see the light of day. It's just a suggestion. I'm happy to discuss it, but I don't see any reason to aggressively defend it from naysayers who are probably right.
I likes the idea actually