Current thread: Mythic forums > Strategy & Advice > The new skill system
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Legion
4/21/2011 11:32:02 AM | A major change has happened today to skills. It should be more or less straightforward and obvious, but let me go over the key points here.
From now on, you will know some skills at level 0. This has a unique meaning. You do not actually have any benefit from these skills since you have not spent skill points on them. What you do have is an opporunity to learn the skill and an awareness of how difficult it will be. That is, you can see the number of skill points required to learn the skill at level 1. This is a big advantage since you can see your aptitude for each skill before allocating any points to it. No more wasting 50 skill points on weapons: sword only to discover you're so bad at it that you'll never improve it to a usable level.
Not all skills are available to each character. This is the trade-off for the advantage described above. From now on you may only learn skills you already know, although "already know" includes those you have a level 0 awareness of (see above). A starting character will usually have around 5 skills available, and as you improve your skills and gain levels, more and more level 0 skills will be added to your list.
Skill aptitude (or multipliers) can improve. As you gain levels in each skill, as well as actual class levels, your multipliers will improve. For example, say you have weapons: sword listed at level 0, needing 40 skill points to improve it to level 1. As you go up levels this number may drop, and learning related skills such as light weapons or weapons: knife will often decrease it as well. This is another huge benefit for players, since high level skills will be much cheaper than they used to be given all the synergy bonuses you'll gain as you go up levels.
Broad overview skills have been added, that are very easy for everyone to learn. These are skills that confer no direct benefit, but improve access and multipliers to related subskills. Note that unlike other skills, the cost of these skills is not related to class. A barbarian can study supernatural magic theory just as easily as a wizard. However, this comes with two qualifiers. First, some classes will gain access to overview skills more readily than others. The aforementioned wizard will probably have access to every magic overview skill by level 5 or so, while the barbarian may not even have access to one magic overview skill by then. Secondly, the subskill multipliers are highly class dependent. Just because the barbarian studied supernatural magic theory and learned about the magic: demon skill, doesn't mean it will be affordable. He might discover it as a 200 point skill, while the wizard who has an opportunity to study magic: demon might find that it will only cost him 20 points.
Deciding whether to spend points in actual skills that do something, versus overview skills that reduce the cost of related skills, is a difficult choice. The overview skills are cheap, but this does not mean they are always your best choices. As always, every character is unique and skill choices are difficult. A simple strategy for jack-of-all-trades characters would be to always study the cheapest skills, but that may not pay dividends until very high levels as the first few levels would primarily be spent on overview skills.
As of now, this is very much a work in progress. The relative availability and cost of all skills for every class are subject to change, as is the web of interconnectivity that dictates which skills improve the multipliers of which other skills. Ongoing efforts will be made to keep all classes consistent and balanced. |
Legion
4/21/2011 2:56:55 PM | After a lot of experimenting, I've found that it's actually a pretty bad idea to just blindly select the cheapest skills each time. This particularly applies to general skills, which are usually very cheap but confer dimishing benefits at higher levels. The best strategy may be to put a few points in desirable general skill to identify cheap and useful skills, then focus your skill points where they will do the most good. |
4/23/2011 5:21:18 AM | What will happen with current characters?
Will there be an option to reset and repick skills? Or is that more work than its worth? |
Legion
4/24/2011 7:29:15 AM | I compared a lot of new sample characters to existing characters of various classes and levels and it was unclear to me which, if any, had the advantage. Under the old system every skill point was spent on useful skills. Under the new system, many points are "wasted" on general skills, but as a result, the "useful" skills selected are much cheaper and no points get lost on high-mult skills without a future. The results seemed to indicate that there was no clear winner as far as character power. Accordingly, existing people should generally be just as viable as before and need no changes. |