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[Blood Mage Reaver]

One of the most debated changes made in DAI was removing the ability of players to decide how they would distribute their attribute points, while it's arguable that most players would just dump points into their class's strongest attributes, limiting character attributes to just passives and equipment wasn't the best way to do it.
 
It creates two problems: one is that passives consume the same ability points you use to purchase your special attacks and spells, the other is that it forces players to devote enormous amouts of time to gather resouces in order to craft equipment suited for their customized characters.
 
Studying the rights and wrongs brought by each game in the DA franchise, I came up with a new system allowing for more flexible character building less dependable on equipment and which also doesn't forces the player to sacrifice combat abilities for the sake of passive changes to gameplay.
 
The new system is called "Skills and Abilities":
 
Basically, instead of having passive and active abilities using the same in-game points, passives become skills which utilize different points and serve as the main source of attribute building with benefits.
 
To better explain I created two fan-made trees as an example of the new system in works:

 

Spirit Skill Tree:

Spoiler

Starting from the top we have:

 

-Spiritual Attunement:

Through meditation and study of the Fade you have become attuned to it's denizens, you regenerate mana faster and your spirit abilities cool down faster. 

Mana Regeneration Bonus: 10%

Spirit Tree Cooldown Bonus: 10%

Willpower on Unlock: +3

Constitution on Unlock: +3

 

Left side:

 

-Peaceful Aura:

Your aura of tranquillity makes enemies less likely to attack you in battle, even when you damage them.

Threat Reduction: 50%

Willpower on Unlock: +3

 

-Rejuvenating Barrier:

When you or your allies have an active barrier, the beneficial energy invigorates them and helps the recover mana or stamina more quickly.

Mana Regeneration: 35%

Constitution on Unlock: +3

 

-Inner Spirit:

Your connection to spirits of the Fade is so strong that they manifest their support through you, when you or your allies have an active barrier they regenerate health.

Health Regeneration: 2% per second

Constitution on Unlock: +5

 

Right side:

 

-Guardian Spirit:

A protective barrier springs into place around you automatically when you are badly injured.

Barrier: 100%

Cooldown Time: 60 seconds

Constitution on Unlock: +3

 

-Strength of Spirits:

Your barriers draw on the magic of the fade to absorb more energy before depleting.

Barrier Bonus: 50%

Willpower on Unlock: +3

 

-Reinforced Barrier:

Casting Barrier on a target also gives them a bonus to damage resistance. 

Damage Resistence: 30%

Willpower on Unlock: +5

 

Spirit Ability Tree:

Spoiler

Right side:

 

-Dispel:

You remove hostile magic and status effects from allies while stripping beneficial effects from enemies.

Size: 5m 

Activation: 35 mana 

Cooldown Time: 8s

Upgrades:

-Transmute Magic:

Dispelling magic and status effects increases your owns spells' damage and barrier generation for a brief duration. 

Barrier: 50%

Damage Bonus: 25%

Duration 10s

 

-Destroy Magic:

You break your enemies spell, turning the raw magic back at the caster to deal damage.

Spirit Damage: 500% weapon damage

 

-Heal:

The mage imbues an ally with restorative energy from the Fade, knitting flesh and mending bone.

Activation: 65 mana

Cooldown Time: 45s

Health Regeneration: 40%

Upgrades:

-Full Heal:

Spirits of the Fade heed to your call and strengthen your heal to fully restore your allies.

Health Regeneration: +60%

 

-Emergency Healing:

Staying alive beats the perfect treatment, Heal now costs less mana and has a shorter cooldown.

Cost Reduction: 25 mana

Cooldown Reduction: 15 seconds

 

-Glyph of Paralysis:

The mage inscribes a glyph on the ground that paralyzes most foes who cross its bounds.

Size: 5m

Activation: 25 mana

Cooldown Time: 24s

Enemies Paralyzed: 2

Paralyze Duration: 6 seconds

Upgrades:

-Glyph of Binding:

Glyph of Paralysis is now stronger, paralyzing more enemies for longer.

Size Bonus: +3 meters

Additional Enemies Paralyzed: +6

Paralyze Duration Bonus: +4 seconds

 

-Paralyzing Array:

You now create multiple glyphs directly in front of you.

 

-Revival:

You summon spirits to heal fallen allies in the area, getting them back on their feet and fighting again.

Size: 2 meters

Activation: 85 mana

Cooldown Time: 60 seconds

Health Regeneration: 20%

Upgrades:

-Life Ward:

Spirits now protect your allies for a short time, reducing incoming damage and reviving them if they fall unconscious.

Damage resistance: 25%

Duration: 15s

 

-Desperation:

Revival is easier to cast, but no longer revives allies permanently. Instead, allies who are already unconscious fight with great power for a few seconds before falling again.

Damage Bonus: 200%

Attack Speed Bonus: 50%

Duration: 10 seconds

Cost Reduction: 55 mana

Cooldown Reduction: 30 seconds

 

Left Side:

 

-Mind Blast:

You send enemies staggering with a explosion of Willpower that drives them back and less likely to target you again.

Size: 5 meters

Activation: 20 mana

Cooldown Time: 8 seconds

Upgrades:

-Fotifying Blast:

Each time you strike with Mind Bast increases your protective barrier as you turn their pain into your power.

Barrier: 10%

 

-Stunning Blast:

Mind Blast becomes a sweeping torrent of energy that can stun opponents as well.

Size Bonus: +3 meters

 

-Heroic Aura:

You summon spirits of valor to you, emitting an aura that enhances you and your allies aptitude in battle.

Size: 8 meters

Activation: 5 mana per second

Cooldown Time: 24 seconds

Attack Bonus: +20% for all party members

Armor Bonus: +20% for all party members

Upgrades:

-Valiant Aura:

Heroic Aura becomes a beacon of destructive power focused on damage.

Attack Bonus: +20% for all party members

Critical Chance: +20% for all party members

 

-Defiant Aura:

Heroic Aura further enhances the armor of all allies it touches making them harder to fall.

Armor Bonus +40% for all party members

 

-Haste:

The mage imbues the party with speed for a short time.

Activation: 50 mana

Cooldonw Time: 60 seconds

Attack Speed Bonus: 50%

Duration: 10 seconds

Upgrades:

-Great Haste:

Haste now lasts significantly longer.

Duration: +10 seconds

 

-All or Nothing:

For the duration of Haste none of your abilities have a cooldown.

 

Bottom:

 

-Resurgence:

You call on benign spirits to restore you and your allies for continuing the fight. All party members are healed to full health, including those who have fallen unconscious, and a glyph around you provides ongoing healing and barrier to the party for the spell's duration. This ability consumes and is powered by focus.

Radius: 10 meters

Duration: 10 seconds

Tier 1: Glyph heals 5% and generates 5% barrier per second.

Tier 2: Glyph heals 10% and generates 10% barrier per second.

Tier 3: Glyph heals 25% and generates 25% barrier per second.

 

Upon creation a character chooses 3 basic skills and each level grants one skill point aswell as one ability point. This way you can build your character's attributes with more flexibility while still preventing redundant point dumping because skills also improve your gameplay.

 

Another change I'd make is to give each school tree a focus ability of it's own rather than limit that to specializations, having more limit breaks would make the focus mechanic far more interesting than a one trick pony of destruction.

 

Just try to picture the trees in the spoilers multiplied by some 6 basic schools, 4 specializations for each class and a 50 level cap and we can start drooling over some dream Dragon Age game.

 

PS: Making Haste and Rally into focus abilities was a cheap and dumb move, Necromancers should summon undead armies and Templars/Seekers should do some explosive thing with lyrium. Also Firestorm should be the focus spell of the Inferno Tree while Rift Mages should do something like Death Cloud from Origins.

 

PPS: The horizontal lines means  you can switch tracks between the sides of the tree.

[PapaCharlie9]

Nitpicks: I think you switched "left" and "right" in describing the ability tree.

 

Overall I like what you are trying to do. Particularly for the Spirit tree, which is basically the other tree's ugly little brother that nobody likes to have around. For example, moving Haste into the Spirit tree makes a lot of sense to me.

 

Glyph of Paralysis is awesome, but I suspect is OP as heck. It also seems a strange place for it to be on the tree. Every mage will want that ability, which forces them to have Heal also? Was that intentional?

 

How about fixing Mind Blast while you are at it? Actually, if you add paralysis as a status effect for Mind Blast, you could dump the Glyph. Or maybe convert the Glyph in to a Life Drain function, which would make much more sense in the "healing" side of the tree. Enemies that step on the glyph lose health and the party/caster gains a like amount, or something like that.

 

I'm not sure I like the dual point system. Seems kind of confusing. I mean, I kind of get the idea, skills are "who you are" and who you are gets better as you level up, while abilities are "what you do" and you do more as you level up. But what does it really buy you? Faster acquisition of abilities, I guess?

 

How about doing something like the Fallout 3 perk progression? You get a skill point on odd numbered XP levels and an ability point on even numbered XP levels? Or put another way, there is only one point system, but what you can spend the point on is limited by which level you are at.

 

Or ... another idea. I kind of like the way DAI makes Attribute leveling a side-effect of buying abilities. Why not flip that around? When you level up, you get a point to spend on Attributes. When you hit a threshold for a given Attribute, you automatically get a new Skill (using your terms). The same point can also be spent on an Ability. It's effectively a two-point system, but you structure it in such a way that you never think about having two points, you just spend it on an Attribute and an Ability.

[Blood Mage Reaver]

Nitpicks: I think you switched "left" and "right" in describing the ability tree.

Overall I like what you are trying to do. Particularly for the Spirit tree, which is basically the other tree's ugly little brother that nobody likes to have around. For example, moving Haste into the Spirit tree makes a lot of sense to me.

Glyph of Paralysis is awesome, but I suspect is OP as heck. It also seems a strange place for it to be on the tree. Every mage will want that ability, which forces them to have Heal also? Was that intentional?

How about fixing Mind Blast while you are at it? Actually, if you add paralysis as a status effect for Mind Blast, you could dump the Glyph. Or maybe convert the Glyph in to a Life Drain function, which would make much more sense in the "healing" side of the tree. Enemies that step on the glyph lose health and the party/caster gains a like amount, or something like that.

I'm not sure I like the dual point system. Seems kind of confusing. I mean, I kind of get the idea, skills are "who you are" and who you are gets better as you level up, while abilities are "what you do" and you do more as you level up. But what does it really buy you? Faster acquisition of abilities, I guess?

How about doing something like the Fallout 3 perk progression? You get a skill point on odd numbered XP levels and an ability point on even numbered XP levels? Or put another way, there is only one point system, but what you can spend the point on is limited by which level you are at.

Or ... another idea. I kind of like the way DAI makes Attribute leveling a side-effect of buying abilities. Why not flip that around? When you level up, you get a point to spend on Attributes. When you hit a threshold for a given Attribute, you automatically get a new Skill (using your terms). The same point can also be spent on an Ability. It's effectively a two-point system, but you structure it in such a way that you never think about having two points, you just spend it on an Attribute and an Ability.

The Spirit Tree in question is just an example, the point is having two different coins for two completely different aspects of gameplay.

Gaining a skill point on alternating levels is a possibility, it already happened in Origins but we had far fewer skills to deal with.

The only problem with this mechanic is the level cap, Fallout 4 let's you grind towards the heaven while DA have us stuck at a very low hard cap.

We have some 28 passives in DAI for each class, of which only 20 are accessible in a single play.

This translates into some 60 attribute points for a level 27 character versus the 88 held by Hawke and the Warden at the same level with the old mechanics.

They also had each some 27 active abilities besides their attributes which makes the Inquisitor feel nerfed hard by comparison.

In my view we need a system which doesn't force us to choose between how powerful our character can be versus how many powers we can have.

[AlanC9]

It creates two problems: one is that passives consume the same ability points you use to purchase your special attacks and spells, the other is that it forces players to devote enormous amouts of time to gather resouces in order to craft equipment suited for their customized characters.

I don't think this is a sensible way to describe the cause-and-effect for either phenomenon. DA:O warrior and rogue trees were maybe 50% activated abilities, with the rest being sustains and passives. And if Utility slots went away DAI crafting wouldn't get any simpler or require less mats; you'd have to remove the offense and defense slots too.

This isn't a substantive objection to the proposal. I'm just pointing out that the factors which caused these elements of the DAI design would still exist no matter what happens with ability points
 
As for the proposal, I'm something of a skeptic on the basic concept. I don't see the issue with having abilities, whether active or otherwise, and stats draw from the same point pool. All my favorite PnP systems work that way. What problem are you trying to solve?

[Blood Mage Reaver]

I don't think this is a sensible way to describe the cause-and-effect for either phenomenon. DA:O warrior and rogue trees were maybe 50% activated abilities, with the rest being sustains and passives. And if Utility slots went away DAI crafting wouldn't get any simpler or require less mats; you'd have to remove the offense and defense slots too.

This isn't a substantive objection to the proposal. I'm just pointing out that the factors which caused these elements of the DAI design would still exist no matter what happens with ability points

As for the proposal, I'm something of a skeptic on the basic concept. I don't see the issue with having abilities, whether active or otherwise, and stats draw from the same point pool. All my favorite PnP systems work that way. What problem are you trying to solve?

You are jumping the gun here, I never said we should ditch crafting in the first place, I am saying that we shouldn't have to rely almost exclusively on it to improve our attributes as making a decent set of armor for you and your companions takes an ungodly amount of time wasted on farming rather than fighting.

DAO and DA2 had passives but they were major status buffers rather than point consuming roadblocks on your ability tree.

In DAO a passive granted you a raw +10 attribute points when taken and in DA2 it gave some +25% damage bonus or resistance to all abilities of the entire tree.

Compare that to Pyromancer in DAI which gives a measle 25% to burning duration and +3 Willpower but is mandatory to get Fire Mine, the most damaging spell in the game.

Compare that to needing two points wasted on circumstacial passives in order to get Horn of Valor which is one of the best abilities in the entire game.

We are forced to waste points on passives we won't need most of the time just to get the active abilities we want and they sometimes not even benefit from said passives.

My point is that passives should be choosen for the benefits they grant rather than just the ability which comes after them in the tree.

By making them a separate tree with it's own separate points you pay for what you want rather than being forced to pay for what you don't need.

You may argue that this still leaves useless active abilities in the way of good ones but those already exists with passives inbetween and without those you'd have more points to use for good abilities.

[PapaCharlie9]

We are forced to waste points on passives we won't need most of the time just to get the active abilities we want and they sometimes not even benefit from said passives.

My point is that passives should be choosen for the benefits they grant rather than just the ability which comes after them in the tree.

In game mechanics, often what players perceive as problems are intentionally put there for balance.

Let's analyze your system for balance. But first, what rate of XP leveling do you intend? Same as DAI, faster, or slower? Also, will you still have a 8 slot active limit, or unlimited ability access? A skill system can't be evaluated in a vacuum, other mechanics have to be considered.

DAI levels very quickly, relative to other games I've played. That might have been an MVP goal--the game can't ship without that feature. Players like fast leveling, particularly when content is accessible only to higher levels, so Bioware intentionally designed for fast leveling. So if you assume fast leveling, you have to control for balance by adding "duds" in the skill progression. Otherwise, players will be OP by XP level 8.

Your ability system adds actives to the character at close to double the rate of DAI. If the XP leveling rate is the same, you'll have to do something about players being OP at relatively low level. Maybe add some dud actives?

If you also do away with the 8 slot limit, there's not need to balance skills against each other. No trade-offs over this or that because they don't all fit. Which means there is no way to manipulate the difficulty of a particular quest by adding immunity to popular abilities and vulnerability to unpopular. Trespasser is an example of this. Lots of enemies have Cold and Physical resistances, rendering the most popular CC abilities near useless. Since players can draw from the full ability catalog, you have to give enemies rage-inducing super immunities to balance things, like unique powers that drain all mana/stamina from the party, or incurable poisons, or debuffs on a timer (like in the JoH penultimate boss fight that everyone hates).

[AlanC9]

You are jumping the gun here, I never said we should ditch crafting in the first place, I am saying that we shouldn't have to rely almost exclusively on it to improve our attributes as making a decent set of armor for you and your companions takes an ungodly amount of time wasted on farming rather than fighting.

Well, what you actually said was "the other is that it forces players to devote enormous amouts of time to gather resouces in order to craft equipment suited for their customized characters." You didn't say anything about this only being a problem WRT stats on the equipment. Takes stats off the equipment and we're still forcing "players to devote enormous amouts of time to gather resouces in order to craft equipment suited for their customized characters."

Unless "customized" is doing all the work there? Do you maybe mean "customized" to refer to a particular set of stats that a player is targeting because he's looking for those stats in themselves, rather than as a way to achieve particular in-game effects?

 

DAO and DA2 had passives but they were major status buffers rather than point consuming roadblocks on your ability tree.

This is a silly way to describe DAI passives. My builds rely on stuff from the passives. Yeah, you can cherry-pick passives to make one game look better than the other, but that's not a serious argument.
 
 

By making them a separate tree with it's own separate points you pay for what you want rather than being forced to pay for what you don't need.

That depends on the arrangement of the trees, not on what type of abilities are in the tree. I could end up taking a junk active ability on the way to a good active ability, for instance. (See PapaCharlie9's third paragraph above.) In DAI I've taken junk active abilities to get to useful passives.

[Blood Mage Reaver]

Well...

In game mechanics, often what players perceive as problems are intentionally put there for balance.

Let's analyze your system for balance. But first, what rate of XP leveling do you intend? Same as DAI, faster, or slower? Also, will you still have a 8 slot active limit, or unlimited ability access? A skill system can't be evaluated in a vacuum, other mechanics have to be considered.

DAI levels very quickly, relative to other games I've played. That might have been an MVP goal--the game can't ship without that feature. Players like fast leveling, particularly when content is accessible only to higher levels, so Bioware intentionally designed for fast leveling. So if you assume fast leveling, you have to control for balance by adding "duds" in the skill progression. Otherwise, players will be OP by XP level 8.

Your ability system adds actives to the character at close to double the rate of DAI. If the XP leveling rate is the same, you'll have to do something about players being OP at relatively low level. Maybe add some dud actives?

If you also do away with the 8 slot limit, there's not need to balance skills against each other. No trade-offs over this or that because they don't all fit. Which means there is no way to manipulate the difficulty of a particular quest by adding immunity to popular abilities and vulnerability to unpopular. Trespasser is an example of this. Lots of enemies have Cold and Physical resistances, rendering the most popular CC abilities near useless. Since players can draw from the full ability catalog, you have to give enemies rage-inducing super immunities to balance things, like unique powers that drain all mana/stamina from the party, or incurable poisons, or debuffs on a timer (like in the JoH penultimate boss fight that everyone hates).

I found DAI to be far easier than DAO and DA2 to be honest, they made the game so that people could just drop in, pick bread and butter abilities and steamroll enemies who don't pose much of a challenge after you get decent equipment.

 

DAO had you actually think how to engage an enemy before a fight and Nightmare many times forced you to sike a boss after a constantly running character while the rest of the party bombed it with ranged weapons, unless you were an arcane warrior the game could hardly be soloed at all.

 

DA2 forced you to fall back at encounters when blood mages or multiple assassins showed up.

 

DAI rarely pulls the same amount of difficulty, the main game has nothing in story on the level of the Pride Abomination from the Circle Tower or the Spirit Apparatus from the deep roads. Gaxxkang, Flemeth and the High Dragon are leagues above even the DLC bosses of DAI.

 

My idea of balance is having stronger enemies in larger numbers while also bringing back the limited encounter mechanics, that was a great balancing system which got ditched for the sake of farming.

 

The respawning engine in DAI is broken, it just keeps throwing more and more enemies out of nowhere at you until your level makes fighting them entirely pointless and that's only because the game wants to give you an unlimited supply of randomly generated crafting materials.

 

High levels should be a reward from completing as many side quests as possible over a long game, in DAO you could rarely reach the hard cap of 25 without exploits, doing every side quest in one of the main levels neat you some 3+ levels at best.

 

In DAI you can reach level 12 just in the Hinterlands alone and doing every quest on Fallow Mire and pre-Haven storm coast allows you to reach level 14~15 depending on the perks you take. It's just too coddling.

 

So, to answear your first question, XP rate should be slower than DAI.

 

 

As for the eight slot limit and innability to swap weapons, I say we should get rid of both. Creating fake difficulty by dropping enemies with random immunities to an arbitrarily limited build in the middle of the battle is not the way to make the experience more challenging.

 

DAO was difficult without elemental immunities getting in the way, you went on a quest full of demons and undead and it was still satisfying even if you had a back up weapon just for the sake of dealing increased damage to different types of enemies.

 

It didn't need to give enemies rage inducing immunities because just their health, armor and damage were enough to give you pause.

 

So, for your second question, larger mobs with thoughter enemies are better than smaller ones with immunities to a small set of abilities.

 

As for having no trade-offs without the slot limit, I disagree, DAO and DA2 didn't have slot limits and still prevented overhaxing by limiting at which level you had to be or how many other points from the tree you had purchased before taking the top abilities.

 

I like how you proposed having a minimum amount of determined skills before being able to purchase higher abilties, it works as a plausible justification of how much you must learn from a certain area before using the most powerful abilties from it's corresponding tree.

 

Like, Dispel and Barrier require no points, Heal and Mindblast unlock at one point, Glyph of Paralysis and Heroic Aura unlocks at two points, Haste and Revive unlocks at three points and ressurgence unlocks at four.

 

Comparing to Fallout 4 the Skills would be your S.P.E.C.I.A.L and the abilities would be your perks, you must first raise your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. before unlocking the perks associated with it but with the added benefit of greater flexibility.

 

I mean, you can choose which Skill better suits your progression while still having an Ability point to purchase the abilities you unlocked.

 

That way you can even make the even numbered levels work with one Skill every two levels against one Ability at every level. If every full tree gives some 28 attribute points for 7 skills, maybe more in especialization ones, you could theoreticallly have some 112 attribute points at level 50 which is more than the Warden had at a level 35 cap.

[Blood Mage Reaver]

Well, what you actually said was "the other is that it forces players to devote enormous amouts of time to gather resouces in order to craft equipment suited for their customized characters." You didn't say anything about this only being a problem WRT stats on the equipment. Takes stats off the equipment and we're still forcing "players to devote enormous amouts of time to gather resouces in order to craft equipment suited for their customized characters."

Unless "customized" is doing all the work there? Do you maybe mean "customized" to refer to a particular set of stats that a player is targeting because he's looking for those stats in themselves, rather than as a way to achieve particular in-game effects?

The crafting system needs a revamp of it's own, search for "DAI needs more wood" for specifics.
 

This is a silly way to describe DAI passives. My builds rely on stuff from the passives. Yeah, you can cherry-pick passives to make one game look better than the other, but that's not a serious argument.

 
Some passives are indeed game breakers but most of them aren't. 
 

That depends on the arrangement of the trees, not on what type of abilities are in the tree. I could end up taking a junk active ability on the way to a good active ability, for instance. (See PapaCharlie9's third paragraph above.) In DAI I've taken junk active abilities to get to useful passives.

But you are still wasting more points than you would if they were separated, in the old system you must spent tree ability points. One for a junk active ability, another for a useful active ability and another for the passive you want. That means hours of gameplay wasted to progress three levels for the benefit of only two.

In the new system, even with a junk active ability in the way, you only need two levels to receive both the active ability and the passive you want. You are having a neat gain of one level to purchase other abilities which you may find more useful.

[PapaCharlie9]

Fair enough. You answered my questions, which I appreciate. Slower leveling would be more balanced, but I'm not sure the majority audience of players are going to like that. I also means players are stuck with a smaller catalog of abilities in the early game, which could lead to boredom.

What would you think of a system that gave more starting points, like 6, to players, and arrange for the low end of each skill tree to be pretty weak? Players would get more variety in the early game, but the effects aren't as powerful. Like having Basic Immolate for 1 point, but you have to go 3 or 4 deep in the tree before you can get Advance Immolate with double the damage, or something like that.

Personally, I'd love for better enemy spawning, mob sizing and leveling, but I'm not sure that's going to be enough to balance the mid to late game, when people have the majority of powerful abilities under their belts.

BTW, I'm all for allowing weapon swapping in combat. How about making dual wield an option for all classes? Make it a skill you get with high Dexterity or something? DW's get it earlier, since they prioritize Dex, but everyone could get it if they wanted too.

Clarification:
 

I like how you proposed having a minimum amount of determined skills before being able to purchase higher abilties, it works as a plausible justification of how much you must learn from a certain area before using the most powerful abilties from it's corresponding tree.

That's not exactly what I proposed, but it's a reasonable alternative. What I meant was you buy Attributes, like Dexterity, and automatically level up Skills as a side-effect. I didn't make a connection to Abilities. You can certainly combine my idea with yours to set Ability requirements for certain powerful Abilities.

[AlanC9]

The crafting system needs a revamp of it's own, search for "DAI needs more wood" for specifics.

No need to. My point was that the skill discussion is irrelevant to the crafting system, remember, so there isn't a disagreement here. I was saying that your skill system wouldn't change crafting.

Some passives are indeed game breakers but most of them aren't.

That's true for active abilities too. It's true for every ability in every game. My point was that there's no difference in this regard between passive and actives. Although a new active ability will obviously be more fun than a new passive.

But you are still wasting more points than you would if they were separated, in the old system you must spent tree ability points. One for a junk active ability, another for a useful active ability and another for the passive you want. That means hours of gameplay wasted to progress three levels for the benefit of only two.In the new system, even with a junk active ability in the way, you only need two levels to receive both the active ability and the passive you want. You are having a neat gain of one level to purchase other abilities which you may find more useful.

But, again, what does this have to do with the types of abilities? Break stuff into more trees and of course you'll have less prereqs for the higher abilities.

That "three levels for the benefit of two" bit is not very rational. The reason that good ability is three poins deep rather than two points deep is because it's been deliberately put deeper in the tree. It's supposed to take longer to reach, and require a tradeoff to reach. Similarly, nothing's being "wasted;" the points are being used to get stuff I really want, or get to stuff I really want.

[Blood Mage Reaver]

hat "three levels for the benefit of two" bit is not very rational. The reason that good ability is three poins deep rather than two points deep is because it's been deliberately put deeper in the tree. It's supposed to take longer to reach, and require a tradeoff to reach. Similarly, nothing's being "wasted;" the points are being used to get stuff I really want, or get to stuff I really want.

 

The problem is that we have very few points in the game to begin with which makes wasting points on useless skills not rewarding for stronger skills but arbitrary and boring.

They capped the number of abilties you can map to 8 just for the sake of fitting to console format and then decided to cramp in a load of passives because even with a low hard cap of 27 players would still wind up with an overload of abilities they couldn't access.

It is also the reason we've had a steady reduction from the number of ability trees in every game, DAO allowed for 44 talents/spells without upgrades, DA2 allowed for 35 talents/spells without upgrades but DAI only allows for 16 abilities without upgrades because the rest is wasted on passives of which barely 4 or 5 are really useful.

I don't like the idea of balance being nerfing every gameplay feature for the sake of creating fake difficulty, I'd rather they threw more enemies at me than making my charater weaker than story implies him/her to be.

We shouldn't limit mapped abilities to just 8, that would make less useful abilities at least acessible when they are needed but most importantly would allow us more space for useful abities to stock up.

My solution to this problem and console interface would be to add an ability menu shortcut accessible by holding those buttons down.
 
Quite simply, if you give just a tap to the button it activates the mapped ability but if you hold it down then it opens the ability menu letting you switch which ability is assigned to that buttom.
 
Computer players on the other hand can just use their extended command bar beyond abilities mapped to keys.

[ottffsse]

Most game mechanics are secondary to a quality story which engages the player. If they make another open world thing with a cartoon save the world or just kill whatever plot sure they should revamp the combat, enemy ai and placement, yeah but dark souls does that.

 

That being said I find your general argument valid and point on and I think your skill tree layouts make more sense than what is currently in DAI. They do look like DA2 more however, which is fine, that system worked and is probably better than DAI. 

 

Pillars of Eternity for instance, though on a way smaller budget did many things right in that direction by allowing every class to use any weapon they want, and any item/ armor, though a fighter say would have eventually more class abilities to use melee weapons very well than say a mage who gets bonus abilities and perks to certain wand attacks. Plus there was a whole group of "general" talents/ perks which any class could choose. It is not an ideal either as there the "in" class specific abilities were sometimes too few. But in general in that game one can design a more broad variety of builds. 

 

Yeah and the Fallout games (I've only played New Vegas) have a perk system miles ahead of Dragon Age really in the variety and uniqueness of the available perks, because they subtly buff your character but are also connected to the whole post-apocalyptic environment of the setting in their flavour theme and mechanic. But they have it easier in a way because there are no "classes" in that game, just ability SPECIAL attributes and perks. And skills. But since all abilities and skills there are "open" it also allows for a greater variety of  the characters and personalities.

 

What is most effective for fantasy rpgs like DA though is an ability class system tied to the story progression: you complete quests on say a mercenary fighter path, you gain training as a fighter, whichever way you want (two handed etc), you join a thief guild and do their quests, you improve those skills, if you start as an apprentice of a mage, you can learn spells and magy spells and can later gain new ones and improve that AND gain specializations by completing appropriate training quests. Role-playing/ joining certain orders and factions to acquire those skills would block you off from joining other factions that way as some may get mad at you and you can't learn everything that way. The fact that you have a "set" of identical skill trees from the start of the game is artificial and makes for standardized characters. The problem with mages in DAI for instance: there is a set of 6 abilitites and a few passives that almost every mage takes, then insert walking bomb/ or fade cloak / or pota and you have your typical DAI mage (granted rift mages at least use all their 3 abilities most of the time while the other two use 1-2 specialization abilities most of the time, but the other 5-6 abilities? always the same in a optimal build: there is only one 1600% damage spell). 

 

DW Rogue? sure you have different passives of the different specs but they generally come down to very similar type of playing, the action is always the same: stealth, throw blades, hack hack, flank attack/restealth continue etc (I am omitting the flask mechanic and cooldown reduction which the tempest/ artificer use here, and the damage boost passives the assassins have in compensation vis a vis the artificers/tempests here to outline the general way any dw rogue is played). There is no option to say play an illusionist mage/rogue, who can use cc spells to temporary disable weaker enemies and a deadly single target attacks with an assassinate like ability. To balance out such a class in this example, such a class would be strong aoe cc but weak aoe damage, good single target cc, and great single target damage. There can be other examples I am sure. But you could "make" such a character if the system was tied to story/ character progression as described above. 

[Blood Mage Reaver]

 

Most game mechanics are secondary to a quality story which engages the player. If they make another open world thing with a cartoon save the world or just kill whatever plot sure they should revamp the combat, enemy ai and placement, yeah but dark souls does that.

 

That being said I find your general argument valid and point on and I think your skill tree layouts make more sense than what is currently in DAI. They do look like DA2 more however, which is fine, that system worked and is probably better than DAI. 

 

Pillars of Eternity for instance, though on a way smaller budget did many things right in that direction by allowing every class to use any weapon they want, and any item/ armor, though a fighter say would have eventually more class abilities to use melee weapons very well than say a mage who gets bonus abilities and perks to certain wand attacks. Plus there was a whole group of "general" talents/ perks which any class could choose. It is not an ideal either as there the "in" class specific abilities were sometimes too few. But in general in that game one can design a more broad variety of builds. 

 

Yeah and the Fallout games (I've only played New Vegas) have a perk system miles ahead of Dragon Age really in the variety and uniqueness of the available perks, because they subtly buff your character but are also connected to the whole post-apocalyptic environment of the setting in their flavour theme and mechanic. But they have it easier in a way because there are no "classes" in that game, just ability SPECIAL attributes and perks. And skills. But since all abilities and skills there are "open" it also allows for a greater variety of  the characters and personalities.

 

What is most effective for fantasy rpgs like DA though is an ability class system tied to the story progression: you complete quests on say a mercenary fighter path, you gain training as a fighter, whichever way you want (two handed etc), you join a thief guild and do their quests, you improve those skills, if you start as an apprentice of a mage, you can learn spells and magy spells and can later gain new ones and improve that AND gain specializations by completing appropriate training quests. Role-playing/ joining certain orders and factions to acquire those skills would block you off from joining other factions that way as some may get mad at you and you can't learn everything that way. The fact that you have a "set" of identical skill trees from the start of the game is artificial and makes for standardized characters. The problem with mages in DAI for instance: there is a set of 6 abilitites and a few passives that almost every mage takes, then insert walking bomb/ or fade cloak / or pota and you have your typical DAI mage (granted rift mages at least use all their 3 abilities most of the time while the other two use 1-2 specialization abilities most of the time, but the other 5-6 abilities? always the same in a optimal build: there is only one 1600% damage spell). 

 

DW Rogue? sure you have different passives of the different specs but they generally come down to very similar type of playing, the action is always the same: stealth, throw blades, hack hack, flank attack/restealth continue etc (I am omitting the flask mechanic and cooldown reduction which the tempest/ artificer use here, and the damage boost passives the assassins have in compensation vis a vis the artificers/tempests here to outline the general way any dw rogue is played). There is no option to say play an illusionist mage/rogue, who can use cc spells to temporary disable weaker enemies and a deadly single target attacks with an assassinate like ability. To balance out such a class in this example, such a class would be strong aoe cc but weak aoe damage, good single target cc, and great single target damage. There can be other examples I am sure. But you could "make" such a character if the system was tied to story/ character progression as described above. 

 

 

Talking about debuffs, I really miss Hexing the crap out of bosses, feels like every mage on DAI is under heavy Chantry censorship stopping them from doing the old good stuff from the previous games.

 

A really stupid decision they made, which nerfed mages more than anyone else, was removing redundant spells we had in DAI.

 

It may feel silly that your mage can throw cones of different flavours (Ice, Fire and Lightning) but having different spells dealing high damage of different types is essential to have a balanced gameplay.

 

The Winter Tree of DAI doesn't do frost damage so much as it serves for casting Ice Armor or bailing out with Fade Step, it's egregious that Ice Mine freezes enemies with absolutely no damage and only a Rift Mage can exploit that for a combo because even Winter's Ruin attack just a single target.

 

Even in DA2 where we had only 2 cold spells we could deal damage with them instead of sitting down waiting for another class to shatter them.

 

Like my example, every ability tree should be divided into active abilties which represent different aspects of that particular theme.

 

Spirit should be divided into healing and buffing, Inferno should be divided into explosive abilities (like Fireball or Firemine) and burning abilities (like Cone of Fire or Firewall), Winter should be divided into CC close range (like Ice Mine and Cone of Cold) and long range AoE (like Blizzard and Winter Blast).

 

We also need trees devoted to dealing physical damage (like Fist of the Maker and Crushing Prison) and spirit damage/debuffs (like Hex of Torment or Curse of Mortality), Fade Step should belong to the latter one since it sounds more like a spirit thing than a winter thing.

 

Whoever thought that limiting spirit damage to specializations was a good idea should be punched in the face.

[AlanC9]

The problem is that we have very few points in the game to begin with which makes wasting points on useless skills not rewarding for stronger skills but arbitrary and boring.

At some point this is just going to reduce to personal taste. We might be there now, since I simply haven't found this to be the case myself. At every level before 20 or so I've found myself able to either take an ability I really want to take (whether that ability is active or passive, again, is irrelevant), or an ability which I want less but which will open up the path to an ability I want more than the ones I can have right now. I like having to make those choices. But YMMV.

In the late game, of course, the "take now" part drops off a bit since I've got all that stuff already, and I'm reduced to hunting for passives which aren't all that important to the character. Unless it's the Inquisitor, who gets a couple of new places to spend points in the DLCs.

They capped the number of abilties you can map to 8 just for the sake of fitting to console format and then decided to cramp in a load of passives because even with a low hard cap of 27 players would still wind up with an overload of abilities they couldn't access.

Again, this doesn't make sense as an explanation of the design, since DA:O warrior and rogue trees had about the same ratio of activated to non-activated abilities without any cap on the amount of active abilities which can be used simultaneously.

I don't like the idea of balance being nerfing every gameplay feature for the sake of creating fake difficulty, I'd rather they threw more enemies at me than making my charater weaker than story implies him/her to be.

This whole question is way OT, isn't it? Any ability system can make the PC awesomely powerful if the designers want to do that. Just plug in different numbers for the abilities.

This is an area where console limitations really would have come into play, since weak systems would have trouble with many enemies.

[Blood Mage Reaver]

At some point this is just going to reduce to personal taste. We might be there now, since I simply haven't found this to be the case myself. At every level before 20 or so I've found myself able to either take an ability I really want to take (whether that ability is active or passive, again, is irrelevant), or an ability which I want less but which will open up the path to an ability I want more than the ones I can have right now. I like having to make those choices. But YMMV.

In the late game, of course, the "take now" part drops off a bit since I've got all that stuff already, and I'm reduced to hunting for passives which aren't all that important to the character. Unless it's the Inquisitor, who gets a couple of new places to spend points in the DLCs.

Again, this doesn't make sense as an explanation of the design, since DA:O warrior and rogue trees had about the same ratio of activated to non-activated abilities without any cap on the amount of active abilities which can be used simultaneously.

This whole question is way OT, isn't it? Any ability system can make the PC awesomely powerful if the designers want to do that. Just plug in different numbers for the abilities.

This is an area where console limitations really would have come into play, since weak systems would have trouble with many enemies.

The problem isn't just passives, it's how they were turned into the sole way to increase attributes outside equipment and that most of them are useless outside of offering a measle +3 increase in attributes.

DAO had separate attributes, skills and talents each with their own points and on top of that had several small trees in parallel enabling greater flexibility of starting abilities to make your builds.

Passives weren't mandatory to get mandatory abilities and they all offered massive boosts in attributes which really made them worth it. Now they act just as bottlenecks to Fire Mine or Horn of Valor.

Attributes were always the core of the character, they are what defined your strenghts and weaknesses. By removing attribute progression and relying primarily on crafted clothing from farming BioWare turned a D&D based game into a Harvest Moon with swords.

They steadily nerfed our characters but especially our mages whose major source of damage and flexibility was their variety of spells.

Warriors and rogues can live on with just basic attacks and a lot of passives but mages can't and they also need a lot of attribute points to be effective.

They took away their AoE in DA2 with a camera that barely panned over our shoulders, then in DAI they took away their ability to heal or curse and capped the number of spells they could use to just 8. Is it any wonder many players just quit being mages to become rogues?

Economically speaking, were we once had +3 attribute points and one ability point at every level besides another skill point every two levels we now have just a single ability point to choose between attributes or abilities at every level, it's a complete ripoff.

Either give us more points each level to get more abilities and passives but run the risk of players just upgrading every active spell very quickly or give them separate currencies and return attribute restrictions to the active abilities you can purchase.

As for gameplay balance, nerfing the players is a lazy ass way to create fake difficulty.

I didn't step into the shoes of a medieval superhuman or magic warrior for the sake of fighting on mundane terms, story wise we are the most powerful characters of the continent fighting against demi-gods.

Real difficulty is fighting mobs of over 50+ enemies or giant enemies who take a lot of punishment and debuffs to go down.

Killing small gangs with arbitrary immunities to certain attacks is dumb because it throws lore out of the window, Origins had the perfect setting of story and gameplay integration with enemies showing weakness and resistance based on their species rather than a random mercenary somehow shrugging off being set ablaze.

Make our characters powerful again and give them enemies to match their strenght rather than bringing everything down to the lowest common denominator.

The new system aims for just that, having your characters not feel artificially forced to make decisions limiting their potential for the sake of preventing enemies from becoming too weak to bother them.

[AlanC9]

The problem isn't just passives, it's how they were turned into the sole way to increase attributes outside equipment and that most of them are useless outside of offering a measle +3 increase in attributes.

Well, again, I don't find the ratio of useful to useless abilities to be much higher for active abilities than for passive abilities, so I don't find that part of the argument convincing.

It's actually still a bit vague why raising stats via passives is a problem in itself. If you think the passives aren't worth taking, then the problem is that they aren't raising stats enough, isn't it?

Passives weren't mandatory to get mandatory abilities and they all offered massive boosts in attributes which really made them worth it. Now they act just as bottlenecks to Fire Mine or Horn of Valor.

That's not true for all of the trees. Anyway, all the force in this argument cones from not thinking that the passives are worth taking in their own right. I don't see the DAI passives that way, as I said.

They steadily nerfed our characters but especially our mages whose major source of damage and flexibility was their variety of spells. Warriors and rogues can live on with just basic attacks and a lot of passives but mages can't and they also need a lot of attribute points to be effective.

They took away their AoE in DA2 with a camera that barely panned over our shoulders, then in DAI they took away their ability to heal or curse and capped the number of spells they could use to just 8.

Is it any wonder many players just quit being mages to become rogues?

It's starting to sound like what you really want is for mages to be more powerful in DAI, and this proposal is merely a way to get there. I thought those proposed abilities looked a bit OP, come to think of it.

Economically speaking, were we once had +3 attribute points and one ability point at every level besides another skill point every two levels we now have just a single ability point to choose between attributes or abilities at every level, it's a complete ripoff.

Comparing attribute points and skill points between two different designs is not a really meaningful exercise. Should AD&D players complain that their characters don't get any attribute points after character creation? Should DA:O players complain that their characters don't get the dozens of attribute points that Morrowind characters do?

As for gameplay balance, nerfing the players is a lazy ass way to create fake difficulty.I didn't step into the shoes of a medieval superhuman or magic warrior for the sake of fighting on mundane terms, story wise we are the most powerful characters of the continent fighting against demi-gods.

This is getting a bit silly. A high-level DAI character is quite powerful. Ever been overlevelled for a zone? You blow right through stuff. Really, DAI is enough of a power fantasy as it is.

Real difficulty is fighting mobs of over 50+ enemies or giant enemies who take a lot of punishment and debuffs to go down.

Well, DAI's got plenty of the latter. As for groups of 50+ enemies, like I said, the old consoles couldn't have handled that. Anyway, what on earth does this have to do with attribute points and talents? It would be idiotic to think that Bio designed a talent system and then adjusted the enemy numbers to fit it.

[Gya]

Interesting idea.
To my mind, the auto-allocation of attributes on levelling, with most additional boosts coming frim crafting, is an attempt to keep the game beginner-friendly, while maintaining flexibility for min-maxers.
I would disagree that passives are a significant source of attributes at all in Imquisition,; a piddling +3 from a passive is a nice bonus if I was already going to take it, but I wouldn't waste skill points to get a passive I don't want for such a small return. The bonuses are also somewhat limited, tied to the stats that the devs think are important for that class, eg constitution and strength for warriors. That's fine in and of itself, but for example say you need to increase your crit chance on your warrior. You either have to take the reaver spec and get the tiny return from those passives, or you craft for it. As you mentioned, this involves finding the right schematic and harvesting the required materials, which is much more hassle than simply allocating points on levelling up. And on first playthroughs, given how expensive the best schematics are, it can take a long time to get your build how you want it.

That said, I don't mind the crafting system too much. My personal preference for DA4 would be, should they again decide to use the auto-allocation of attributes on levelling, to keep crafting as the main source of stat and bonus boosts. Tying those purely to passives would severely limit build creativity, which is one of the main draws of dragon age games for me, and what allows so much replay potential.

[Blood Mage Reaver]

Well...

Well, again, I don't find the ratio of useful to useless abilities to be much higher for active abilities than for passive abilities, so I don't find that part of the argument convincing.

It's actually still a bit vague why raising stats via passives is a problem in itself. If you think the passives aren't worth taking, then the problem is that they aren't raising stats enough, isn't it?


That's not true for all of the trees. Anyway, all the force in this argument cones from not thinking that the passives are worth taking in their own right. I don't see the DAI passives that way, as I said.


It's starting to sound like what you really want is for mages to be more powerful in DAI, and this proposal is merely a way to get there. I thought those proposed abilities looked a bit OP, come to think of it.


Comparing attribute points and skill points between two different designs is not a really meaningful exercise. Should AD&D players complain that their characters don't get any attribute points after character creation? Should DA:O players complain that their characters don't get the dozens of attribute points that Morrowind characters do?


This is getting a bit silly. A high-level DAI character is quite powerful. Ever been overlevelled for a zone? You blow right through stuff. Really, DAI is enough of a power fantasy as it is.


Well, DAI's got plenty of the latter. As for groups of 50+ enemies, like I said, the old consoles couldn't have handled that. Anyway, what on earth does this have to do with attribute points and talents? It would be idiotic to think that Bio designed a talent system and then adjusted the enemy numbers to fit it.

Let me rephrase my point, the problems with the current system are:

 

1) It denies direct customization of character attributes, which are a core aspect of gameplay, to the player. You cannot increase some of your most basic stats (attack, defense or critical chance) the way you want unless you own the right schematics and go on tedious farming sprees to collect the desired craft materials for it.

 

Unless you play solo, crafting equipment for all 9 companions takes several hours wasted on mining ore, hunting the same prey or fighting the same type of enemy instead of progressing your quests which should be the focus of the game.

 

Most players just ditch farming to buy things on the Black Emporium but it only releases good craft at lvl 16+ at high prices and no chance of getting Masterwork materials.

 

The crafting system has several problems of it's own which need to be fixed in DA4 but taking attribute customization away from players and centralizing it on the clothing they wear was a stupid measure that did far more harm than good in controlling reckless attribute distribution by inexperienced players.

 

2) The way ability trees are arranged create stupid and unnecessary choke points that consume our precious ability points on junk passives which doesn't relate with the ability they lead down the line.

 

A junk active ability has minor uses of it's own, you can live having Immolate, Poisoned Weapons or Grappling Chain in the way of Fire Mine, Toxic Cloud or Horn of Valor because they deal damage or stop enemies but Pyromancer, Explosive Toxic and Crippling Blows offer little to no benefit at all.

 

Immolate can be a very useful early game ability and with the right upgrade can become a machinegun for Rift Mages with Restorative Veil but Pyromancer just increases burning by 2 seconds when Fire Mine itself already deals 1600% front damage without burning. Searing Glyph already deals 1600% front damage and another 1600% burning damage over 8 seconds so why am I being forced to add 400% burning damage to it before I have even purchased that ability and why do I even need it if I will use Flaming Array instead?

 

Exploding into a toxic mist sound that deals damage sound cool but isn't it basically what Toxic Cloud does already? YO DAUGH, I HEARD YOU LIKE TOXIC CLOUD SO I WILL PUT A TOXIC MIST IN YOUR TOXIC CLOUD SO YOU CAN POISON WHILE YOU POISON!

 

Cripping blows is basically like "Hey, you can randomly inflict a condition which benefits a completely different class but that absolutely mandatory knowledge in order to blow a horn!"

 

Natch, let me make this clearer. BioWare capped us to 8 mapped slots because console players and their 14 buttom controllers make it too difficult to manage anything higher than that so let's throw in more useless passives to fill space so everyone don't complain about having too many abilities they can't use.

 

The only conventional passives worth over an active ability are Guardian Spirit, Flashpoint, Clean Burn, Ice Armor, Flow of Battle, Bear Mawls the Wolves, Turn the Bolt, Deep Reserves, Sneak Attack, First Blood, Pincushion, Looked Like It Hurt, Cheap Shot and Ambush.

 

Only 14 out of 64 passives give you a truly meaningful boost in terms of combat advantage, the rest is basically just there to consume space and give you a measle +3 increase to a certain attribute point.

 

Specializations don't give many meaningful passives either, the only ones worth over an active ability are Restorative Veil, Death Syphon, Simulacrum, Fade Shield, Knife in the Shadows, Gaps in the Armor, Fury of the Storm, Killer's Alchemy, Tricks of the Trade, Unyielding, Blood Frenzy, Fervor and The Last Sacrifice.

 

Only 13 out of 36 passives makes you or your party better in combat besides marginal gains in some attribute or resistance.

 

By contrast, every passive in DAO served to systematically improve the combat capabilities of that particular class, their proficiency with a particular weapon or upgraded an active ability preceding them in the tree.

 

Above that, like I said before, mages in DAO seldom used passives, they had a huge range of spells which gave them flexibility for every kind of situation. Warriors and Rogues can live of just basic attacks with a lot of passives to boost them but limiting the amount of spells a mage can use to 8 and force him to take several passives which seldom benefit him/her completely discaracterizes the class.

 

Interesting idea.
To my mind, the auto-allocation of attributes on levelling, with most additional boosts coming frim crafting, is an attempt to keep the game beginner-friendly, while maintaining flexibility for min-maxers.
I would disagree that passives are a significant source of attributes at all in Imquisition,; a piddling +3 from a passive is a nice bonus if I was already going to take it, but I wouldn't waste skill points to get a passive I don't want for such a small return. The bonuses are also somewhat limited, tied to the stats that the devs think are important for that class, eg constitution and strength for warriors. That's fine in and of itself, but for example say you need to increase your crit chance on your warrior. You either have to take the reaver spec and get the tiny return from those passives, or you craft for it. As you mentioned, this involves finding the right schematic and harvesting the required materials, which is much more hassle than simply allocating points on levelling up. And on first playthroughs, given how expensive the best schematics are, it can take a long time to get your build how you want it.

That said, I don't mind the crafting system too much. My personal preference for DA4 would be, should they again decide to use the auto-allocation of attributes on levelling, to keep crafting as the main source of stat and bonus boosts. Tying those purely to passives would severely limit build creativity, which is one of the main draws of dragon age games for me, and what allows so much replay potential.

 

Exactly, passives as they are give minimal boosts in stats because most of them aren't worth their weight alone and being forced to craft custom tailored equipment just to get stats in the way you need them is too much time consuming and outright booring.

 

BioWare's allegation for auto-allocation of attributes was that most players would just dump point on the main stats benefiting their class (i.e. mage players just max out Willpower and Magic) so let us remove their ability to choose since it only makes noobs rage quit when they don't understand how to distribute their attributes.

 

If the problem was inexperienced players not knowing how to distribute points to improve their combat prowess, then why not make attribute progression tied to the ability trees which the players are pursuing?

 

Take my example, since the Spirit Tree focuses on healing, buffing and defence then shouldn't players pursuing this tree logically increase their Constitution (Health and Melee Defence) and Willpower (Magic Defense) exponencially?

 

If the goal was making attribute distribution idiot proof then wouldn't it be more usefull to offer attributes in "packages" benefiting the player's pursued type of gameplay rather than giving them the middle finger and deciding for a "one size fits all" approach?

 

Worse than that, crafted equipment from each class only increase the attributes of that particular class. If you want a Knight-Enchanter to improve it's Heatlh and Ranged Defense then you must craft a warrior restricted armor with Silverite or if you want a Two-Handed Battlemaster to improve it's Critical Chance and Critical Damage then you must craft a rogue restricted armor with Snoufleur Skin.

 

They actually made the attribute system more complicated than it was and forced players to rely on a clumsy crafting system to make up for it, what an epic fail.

 

My new system is a sketch of how to make a more flexible attribute system while still placing restrictions to prevent noobs from messing up with their attributes and rage quitting for it.

 

Passives become the main source of attribute points, each passive tree gives an attribute increase related to and directly benefiting their respective active tree while also doubling as skill requirements to purchase better abilities in said tree.

 

For example:

 

Entropy passives increase Cunning and Dexterity because curses and hexes are supposed to reduce effectiveness (make enemies miss thus increase Ranged Defense), increase their vulnerabilites (give them bad luck thus increase critical chance) and send them earlier to the grave (make them suffer more damage thus increase critical damage).

 

Inferno passives increase Magic and Dexterity because they are supposed to focus on maximum damage and critical damage.

 

Winter passives increase Willpower and Magic because ice can serve both offense and defense.

 

Storm passives increase Magic and Cunning because lightning is supposed to stike the enemies of lucky players for massive damage, especially to reduce the likelihood of them being knocked out by enemy snipers.

 

Force passives increase Constitution and Strength because a mage who specializes in telekinesis must withstand great physical blows and deal massive damage against physical defenses like guard.

 

 

This way, a Mage still focuses on Willpower and Magic but it can go melee by investing point in Force or it can go fiendish by spending points in Entropy.

 

Build flexibility is still there but it only favours attributes which help the player on the path they choose rather than becoming counter-productive.