Ability Tree Design

[BadYeti]

I'm evaluating the demo, and really love the writing, setting, characters and combat system so far.

 

That said, I don't really understand the ability tree design.

 

So far as I can tell (and please correct me if I'm wrong), most of the abilities (other than the two bottom-tier ones that are not prerequisities for any other abilities) can be improved between ranks one and eight. Further, it's my understanding that abilities can not be ranked beyond the level of their prerequisites. And finally, it looks like two ability points are gained per level after level one, which starts with three ability points pre-assigned, leaving a total of 61 points (3+2x29) at the level cap of 30.

 

Does this mean that it's impossible to ever max out any of the top-tier talents? So far as I can tell, it looks like players have to pick which of the two top-tier talents they prefer, then max out all three first-tier talents (whether they like them or not), then max out the full middle column (again, whether or not those are talents the player cares about), and finally max out the outside column corresponding to their top-tier talent of choice. Only then would their top-tier talent of choice be fully unlocked. Yet, at that point, they would only have enough points left over to take it to rank five. And that's assuming they put no additional points into the two abilities that aren't tied into the prerequisite tree.

 

Am I misunderstanding something?

 

This seems like a really bizarre design choice for a skill tree. The whole idea of a skill tree is to allow players to customize their builds to suit their own playstyle or character concept. The prerequisite web is so tight in this design, the player really only makes one choice: Does the player want to "specialize" in the right and center column or in the left and center column. Deciding how many points to allocate to specific talents is obviated by the need to keep everything in two columns (plus a third first-tier talent) at the same high level in order to permit any of the higher-tier abilities to be ranked up.

 

It just seems to me like there's hardly any customization or decision-making for the player to participate in, unless I'm misunderstanding the design (which I certainly could be). You may as well just have a binary decision at character creation on which of the two paths you'd prefer, and have the game auto-level it since you're pretty much locked into all the selections in order to unlock the higher tiers.

 

So, am I misunderstanding the design or can anyone help me understand the benefit of such a non-customizable design if I'm not misunderstanding it?

 

Thanks, and again, I do really like the game other than the ability tree design.

[jlsgaladriel]

BadYeti, I do think these skill trees allow much less customization than any previous spiderweb game. I think Jeff wanted so badly to make sure that casual gamers couldn't design unplayable characters, that he took quite a bit away from those of us who like playing with character design. I'm quite sure he did it on purpose, on the theory that folks like me will buy his games anyways, but it takes away part of the pleasure of the game for me.

 

That said, the choice is perhaps a bit more than binary. There are 58 skill points available to spend over the course of 30 levels, and over 100 possible places to put those points. I'm only on my first playthrough, now, and I'm playing on "hard" rather than on "torment," but at more than 3/4 of the way through I'm seriously considering not investing any points at all in a top-tier ability for my shaman. I suppose the beta testers can tell me if there's some point at which I'll struggle, but so far I'm not really salivating over either salamander summoning nor earthquakes.

 

(Admittedly, some classes might be more of a strict binary choice, as I think perhaps the top of the blademaster tree is tastier.)

 

 

[Randomizer]

Part of the problem is that Jeff changed the meaning of getting to level 7 and 8 for skills during testing to make it more meaningful for the lower level skills. Originally getting to 6 in all skills for one top tier skill was more important than having stuff all the way to 8. Plus some items help increase that top tier skill even if you don't have enough skill points left to get there.

 

Now it just isn't really worth it to go all the way to the top, especially at torment difficulty. We did ask for more skill points to get more skills, but Jeff had decided on level 30 for this game. The next game may go higher.

[Spidweb]

This discussion is, frankly, making it sound like the system gives a lot of choice. You can take a valued skill to level 8, giving it a big bonus, or you can use those points to go deeper into the tree and get more abilities.

 

I've seen a lot of saved games and a lot of builds over the last few months, and there is a HUGE variety in the parties people build. I think that giving meaningful choices that result is character that play very differently from each other is the opposite of dumbing down.

 

Now, if there is a set of skills for a specific character class that is completely non-viable even on Normal difficulty, I would love to hear about it and I can work on that. I think all of the skills are useful, though I may be wrong.

 

And if playing on Torment really restricts the number of viable builds, that is unavoidable. But I am not seeing evidence that this is a problem for the vast majority of players.

 

- Jeff Vogel

[VCH]

Does increasing the skill beyond 8 with items etc do anything for that skill's effectiveness? Or should I just stop putting points into it if I have for example 6 points and a +2 bonus?

[jlsgaladriel]

Quote:

This discussion is, frankly, making it sound like the system gives a lot of choice. You can take a valued skill to level 8, giving it a big bonus, or you can use those points to go deeper into the tree and get more abilities.

I think you're right, Jeff, in that there's a lot more choice than one might think at first glance. Many games with skill trees pretty much require that one "optimize" one's character by focussing on one thing, and I think you've made things more interesting by allowing viable builds which don't follow that path.

Still, most of your earlier games certainly allowed even *more* customization, which made many of us happy.

Thank you for another excellent game.

[Slawbug]

Originally Posted By: jlsgaladriel

Still, most of your earlier games certainly allowed even *more* customization, which made many of us happy.

More possibilities, yes -- but so many of the possibilities were seriously sub-optimal that I'm not sure anything was to lose. The set of skills that were important for a given character focus was pretty black-and-white: You might decide to have a character just focus on mage spells, or also pick up priest spells or a weapon, but either way the mage spells skills were pretty set. Warriors had a lot of special skills to choose from but some were just better than others and at high levels, a few points here or there made very little difference to any build.

I think Avadon is an improvement.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: VCH

Does increasing the skill beyond 8 with items etc do anything for that skill's effectiveness? Or should I just stop putting points into it if I have for example 6 points and a +2 bonus?

For weapon and spell skills, going beyond 8 gives +4 levels of damage/per skill level and a to hit bonus that doesn't really change anything since you should have only a 5% chance of missing.

[Alorael at Large]

Yes, skills keep getting better as the numbers go up. I believe going past the 6 threshold makes them get a whole lot better, but I didn't put a lot of effort into testing it.

 

—Alorael, who varied his builds quite a lot, and who happily used the retrain command to test out tough fights. He's not sure there are optimal builds in Avadon. Optimal for styles, perhaps, but it also depends on synergies between characters, and what your immediate needs are. He found that the top-tier skills were in fact far less helpful to him than other things, but for some characters he maximized the left column, for some the right, and for some the middle. And he's not positive that any of those were inevitable choices.

[*i]

I would say that I like the new branching system. Granted, there is less short-term flexibility, but there is more emphasis on long-term development of the character. Since the choices are linked, where you allocate your skills earlier impacts how you should invest later. Sometimes it is better to go deeper and get to level 6 on a skill if you're already at level 4 or unlock a new one farther down the chain than it is to diversify. It really is a neat system.

 

Also equally nice is a non-cheating way to retrain your character if you mess up too much. I know I made use of that when I later realized certain decisions I made earlier were suboptimal.

[cremornagainagain]

I personally would not say non-customisable, in fact, just the opposite. If you want your character to be good at hitting and shooting things, you can load up the left column. If you want your character to be good at magic, load up the right (just be aware that the +1+2 bonuses apply to existing skills, they don't seem to unlock new ones (?)). This is available to magic, and non-magic-focused character alike, which is a great flexibility. At the same time, I'm not sure it's possible to create a build that really sucks, and I'm sure I've done that in previous games. Plus you can load in a scarab to offset some perceived skill-lack as you go along. So my favorite build for a blademaster leader was to give him a strong right tree for a lot of blessing - but then all the battle scarabs he could carry. I almost never made use of retrain, and when I did, I changed back after:-) Though a noted scatterbrain, I was able to carry a clear idea of build all the way through, without feeling like I was locked in to anything, or missing out.

 

Of course, my favorite item in the whole game was the blinking pants. It affects ability tree design because I gave them to Nathalie and found that she never really left attack range, and yet always blinked out of trouble - so no need for extra endurance, and thus more points to spend on blowing things up.

[Jerakeen]

Originally Posted By: cremornagainagain

Of course, my favorite item in the whole game was the blinking pants. It affects ability tree design because I gave them to Nathalie and found that she never really left attack range, and yet always blinked out of trouble - so no need for extra endurance, and thus more points to spend on blowing things up.

Really? I gave them to her too at first, but then I worried that she'd end up right next to the big baddies at a bad moment, so I tossed them.

[RogueGypsy47]

I got about halfway through the game with Mad Jenny – my pyromanic sorceress who had an unhealthy obsession with rocks and alcoholic beverages – before an accidental misclick during retraining made me realize that I could specialize in the same thing more than once. At first I went, "Wow! This makes things so much easier!", but then I realized that no.. no it didn't.

 

If we could only take each specialization once, as I initially and erroneously believed, the decision is only in what order do you take them. With being able to train multiple times, however... Well, Mad Jenny ran around for another quarter of the game with +2 in the right-hand column, which gave her level three arcane blessing and curse for a minimal skill point investment!

 

I found my mind whirling for days at work trying to imagine what the most effective combination of skill points and specializations might be for my characters. For Mad Jenny, I tended to stick her with Shima and Jenell from the get-go and this prompted me to go for the 4th Tier abilities for all of the characters. Summon Drake is nice, as is Shima's Steel Tornado and Mad Jenny's Corrupting Cloud... but I think my next play-through will involve more variation with the skill choices. Maybe forgoing the T4 stuff and focussing more on pumping up the lower tier skills to higher levels.

 

I'd like to get my specializations out of the middle column where they all ended up (all of them.. on all characters.. I like passive buffs, I think). I'm torn on if it's more useful to use specializations to make a character really awesome at doing one thing, or to prop up their weakest column. On the one hand, I really missed Shima's teleporting and Mad Jenny's de/buffs in the last chapter, but on the other... their damage outputs and survivability were amazing.

 

I'm sure other people will have a lot more fun working out the nuts and bolts than I will, but I enjoyed being able to roll on Hard for nearly all of the game. I had to drop down to Normal for some of the boss fights and even Casual once! Mad Jenny, all by her lonesome, versus three nasty shadowalker types? Yeah... she's a fragile little thing.. her with the no points put into Endurance.

 

Next time, Hard all the way, baby!

 

~RG

 

 

For those interested, I ended with 444 rocks, 68 ale, and 82 wine, as well as 103 iron, 171 paper, and 214 bags of meal...

 

...I may have a problem, since I like to do this in all Spidweb games with a weightless inventory. >.>;; In fact, I'm sure I missed some.. Clearly a replay is in order!

[Spidweb]

The blinking pants were meant to be a very useful item.

 

Until they aren't. :-)

 

- Jeff Vogel

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Spidweb

The blinking pants were meant to be a very useful item.

Until they aren't. :-)

- Jeff Vogel

I figured they were just an evil little joke. Like the rat tails. If only those had sell values.

[madrigan]

I really like the item that causes stone blocks to appear in your pack -- The Reproducing Bulwark?. It took me a while to figure out what was happening.

[Randomizer]

Some of the items are useful depending on your playing style.

 

Summoning useless monsters and sending them out to lure in foes to cluster around them makes it easier to use area attacks and keeps them pinned there for another round.

 

Blinking pants works to get away from melee foes without wasting an action.

[Serene Tempest]

After doing one playthrough, I can't think of any skill set for any of the characters that I'd call nonviable. But there were some skills that I trained and never really used purely to unlock higher skills. Most notable Arcane Curse and War Cry. Shadowalker Focus and Triumphant Roar were worth it for the Haste, but I found the War Blessing to be underwhelming as well. And, as Randomizer pointed out in his class analysis topic, these abilities can be largely replaced by potions/scrolls/crystals. I think if these abilities provided somewhat stronger blessings and curses than items it would make them much more attractive.

 

For context, I like the game to push back at me enough so I have to think about what I'm doing, but I'm more interested in the story than repeating battles a dozen times to finally win them. I usually peruse the forms to see what the consensus on character builds is and loosely follow it. I started out the game on Hard, and ended up lowering the difficulty to Normal about 3/4 of the way through and to Casual at the very end.

[UniversalWolf]

Here's what I'd do with the skill trees: hide the top two tiers until they're activated by spending points, and make the skills change depending on what kind of morality the player pursues. Evil flavor versus good flavor, for example. Or more than flavor, if possible.

[madrigan]

Originally Posted By: UniversalWolf

Here's what I'd do with the skill trees: hide the top two tiers until they're activated by spending points, and make the skills change depending on what kind of morality the player pursues. Evil flavor versus good flavor, for example. Or more than flavor, if possible.

The moral choices in Avadon often come down to two or three equally imperfect options. I just finished Sevilin's find-the-bandit quest and all of the paths to resolution were wrong in some way, but also right. The game does not have an alignment system.

As a representative of an amoral (at best) government agency charged with maintaining order at all costs, I'd say all the characters are morally compromised from the beginning. It would take something really extreme -- like slaughtering an entire town for personal reasons -- to make the character really evil-evil. I don't think the game offers anything -- at least not up to this point -- that would make my character really superpaladin good.

[Slawbug]

Since making that G4 reputation guide, I twitch whenever I see a moral choice in Jeff's games. It is relieving in Avadon to see that most choices have no consequence and adjust no SDFs, but it will take a while for my twitch to stop.

[Synergy]

The moral decisions may still make your stomach churn, however.

 

-S-

[madrigan]

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES

Since making that G4 reputation guide, I twitch whenever I see a moral choice in Jeff's games. It is relieving in Avadon to see that most choices have no consequence and adjust no SDFs, but it will take a while for my twitch to stop.

In the Gear Diary review Jeff recently mentioned on FB, the author says:

"So it is a breath of fresh air that you truly make changes and choices in Avadon. Make no mistake, since the main quest-line is linear as I said earlier you are headed on the same path to the same final confrontation, but as you make more and more choices in one direction or the other they add up, your reputation is altered and the world before you subtly shifts."

Is that just totally wrong?

[Ceiling Durkheim]

It's not as if the moral choices in Avadon don't have effects on dialogue and endings. Knowing G4, I would guess that the main point here is that they don't have major effects on gameplay. In G4, it was possible to get just about all quests and loyalty rewards from both Shapers and rebels for the majority of the game. You just had to be extremely, twitch-inducingly careful about what decisions you made, and the order in which you made them.

[Slawbug]

Many of the moral choices, which in any Geneforge game would nudge your primary rebel/shaper SDF one way or the other, do not affect any SDF at all.

 

Maybe it is just because I am still early in the game, but I keep finding that to be the case.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

As far as I can tell, Avadon doesn't have an alignment system like Geneforge. Instead, certain major actions and choices affect the game's ending, a la A4-6. Unsurprisingly, these mostly come in the latter part of the game, since the player characters are more powerful and important later on.

[madrigan]

I suppose I should make sure I know what an SDF is. What's an SDF?

[Randomizer]

sdf = stuff done flag

A system to keep track of what has happened with various events. It starts at 0 for never happened, then 1 when you first encounter it, and higher numbers depending upon what you do.

[Jerakeen]

Stuff Done Flag.

 

The game can use them to keep track of just about anything: quests, dialogue choices, actions, reputation.

 

Example:

 

Click to reveal..

If you rob the alchemist in the Dhorla Woods, the game sets flag 11, 28 (grid coordinates) to 1.

 

When you try to buy potions from her, the game checks that flag first; if it's not zero, she'll refuse to help you on the grounds that you're a thief.

 

 

Edit: sniped.

[madrigan]

Thanks all.