Vaux Karn
The Mercenary Collective
82
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Posted - 2014.05.10 11:17:00 -
[1] - Quote
I would like to come right out and suggest this before any mistakes are made in regards to skills and their bonuses.
1. Every unlock skill should grant bonuses. No more unlock only skills, everything has bonuses.
2. The bonuses from unlock skills should be attached to the items and not the skills themselves. For people not familiar with Eve I will explain, ships in Eve get bonuses for the ship type's operation skill, these bonuses are listed on the individual ship not the skill. This allows multiple ships under the same skill to have different specialties based off of their bonuses. Which brings me to my next point.
3. Different variants of the individual items should receive different bonuses from the same skills. For example, the Rail Rifle gets a bonus to optimal range while the Assault Rail Rifle gets a bonus to rate of fire. This is just an example, not a specific request. The point is that by doing this we can have multiple variants of every item with bonuses tailored to the strengths of that particular variant.
4. Current passive only skills with no unlock component should affect a broader range of items. In Eve there are a handful of skills that grant bonuses to all hybrid turrets, or all energy turrets, or all missile turrets, etc. In Dust on the other hand, every individual weapon had a handful of skills that only affect that weapon and are ridiculously expensive SP wise (like reload skills). These became a question of "Is it worth grinding for 2 months to reload a tenth of a second faster?" Granted, I do think Rail and Blaster should be separate, but I don't think that we should have to retrain the same passive only skills for 5 different weapons of the same type, that just makes the grind horribly obvious and discouraging.
5. There should be no passive only skill without an unlock component. Introduce weapon fitting or riggings (whatever you want to call them) and allow these current passive only skills to unlock the different attachments for the weapons. This will add further customization, expand the depth of the game, expand on role specialization, and give every single one of the players coming over from Dust a raging hard on.
6. Certificates. Why this was never done in Dust is completely beyond me. This would help the NPE because it would give them a starting point to better understand the skills. Add a brief tutorial on the Certificate system, then an explanation of the strengths that are gained by each level of a certificate in its description. There NPE just got vastly improved because one of the most complicated things for newbies has now been explained and clarified.
7. If basic suits remain in the game, give them bonuses, and then give the role suits that come after them bonuses for the basic suit skill and the role skill. This will make people want to invest in both. The current set up causes one of 2 things, either they proto the basics and never advance to the roles or they never go past rank 3 in the basics and complain about worthless SP sinks. I can't blame either side as I fully understand both. Again this will also help the NPE.
8. Market skills need to be in place if the market is going to be up. These should not be required, but instead should expand on limits and abilities, similar to Eve. These skills would not be necessary for players but would still provide bonuses to those who do want them.
9. Other social skills such as agent relations should also be present as PVE will likely bring in a rather dedicated PVE playerbase. They should have skills which provide them bonuses to encourage them to stick around, such as increased standing gain or ISK gain. This kind of goes without saying that agents should be introduced as well, which again will help the NPE by providing method of presenting dedicated interactive tutorials. Again, these would not be necessary skills but would still provide bonuses to make them worthwhile.
All of these are open for discussion, but the point is we should feel like SP is wasted on overpriced "is it even worth it" skills or useless "stepping stone" skills. |