Telleth
DUST University
Ivy League
5
   |
Posted - 2013.05.14 07:01:00 -
[1] - Quote
So while reading the millionth post about the lack of PG for vehicles, I started giving serious thought about some of the vehicle skills. Currently there is little diversity in the skills. While specializing in the vehicle of your choice, HAV personally, is a massive SP sink, there is very little variety in what you are getting.
You have your basic vehicle command skills. These don't generally give any bonuses, just unlock your vehicle, not much motivation to go past lvl1 once you have unlocked it.
The vehicle upgrade skills. These realistically break down into fitting and tanking skills. You max your fitting (the nerf is for other posts). Choose your flavor, either shield or armor, and do what you can to max everything but remote repping, because none but the very daring(optimistic) currently see that as viable. Then move on.
Then there are the turret skills. This is where I see the most room for improvement. You have large or small, hybrid or missile, and then turret upgrade and operation.
These all have very decently high training modifiers which has turned my skill leveling into "level something, then wait several weeks for the next 450k SP to get the next 3% boost to armor tanking. The game hasn't been released and I feel like I'm getting to late-game skill progression.
My thoughts on fixing this would include a mix of a variety of skills and a few slightly tweaked tanks.
As far as vehicle command skills go, I would do something similar to eve, nobody likes an unlock only skill, put a bonus to torque or even top speed (something minor)per level. I would also add content, currently there is what I feel like a huge gap between a militia and standard vehicle(my experience is mostly with tanks). Adding small steps between a militia tank and a madrugar/gunloggi would go a long way in both balancing and encouraging newer players to try a vehicle. It would also add a point to levels 2 through 5 of your standard vehicle of choice. Enforcers are not just proto tanks, logi and scout lav's are not proto lav's, and assault dropships are not proto dropships. These are are all just specialized versions of their counterparts. Forget enforcers for right now, it's like trying to put stealth bombers into eve on launch day. Give us 3 different versions of a vehicle with slightly tweaked base stats favoring future specializations that may be released in the mid to distant future (speed, damage resistance, and dps or as you have planned) per race.
Vehicle upgrade skills are fairly close (aside from vehicle engineering debacle) to what I would expect around launch. There is some room for skills that reduce CPU/PG usage of certain modules, or improve the effectiveness of others, but a lot of those would take balancing against which vehicles and modules have been implemented. Otherwise I would add more into ancillary skills such as scanning, speed, and damage resistance.
Turrets... This is what made it easy for me to notice the lack of diversity of skills. There are 6 skills that encompass all of the weapon options of lav's, hav's, and dropships. There is tons of potential here for support skills such as reducing CPU/PG usage, reducing heat buildup, faster missile speed, or enhanced tracking speed. It hardly takes any imagination to come up with ideas for this.
With all these skills adding potential stats to modules, I would expect to see a lot of the base stats decreased to compensate, and letting the skills compensate for that decrease. This would also require the skill training modifiers to be decreased seeing as a players Xmil SP would be spread out over more than the 5 or so skills that currently make a difference. An added bonus would be making it easier for a new player to get into vehicles. Currently militia vehicles are about as useful as a noob ship in eve, it'll get you from point A to B quickly, as long as you aren't shot at on your way there. The sp and Isk investment are quite steep and sudden to get to a standard vehicle that may or may not blow up against someone running a militia swarm fit.
This is quite a lot of suggestions, but the important part is the model. It should allow for easier growth on both the developersPart of what makes eve so special and long lasting is its ability to expand and grow, from before the first battleship had been built, to now with capital fleets duking it out in null sec. I want to look back in ten years and say, yeah I remember before cloaky lav's, spider tanked tanks, and heavy dropships. |