I saw some guys criticizing “teeth and firebolt are worthless on end game of D2” as if it is a problem. Well, just like a “tier based progression” with gear is important and going from a rust hammer to a magically enhanced hammer and then the legendary Mjölnir is interesting, going from low level spells like firebolt and burning hands to fireball, greater fireball and finally, fire rain, sun ray, is quite interesting.
On D&D, spells are divided by “circles” to illustrate the progression and a lot of video games also uses circles to divide the spells which casters can and cannot cast., even the casters which has a different type of progression on 3.5e has it in some ways. Warlocks invocations are divided in least, lesser, greater and dark. Shadowcasters “dark mysteries” in fundamentals up to master. Gothic and Two Worlds among tons of other games had “circles”. Diablo 1 took so much inspiration by this concept that the spells are divided by “pages” and on D1, spells are lootable content. Diablo 2 in other hands, decided to make a skill tree with the spells.
The unique difference is that “page 1” spells from D1 often appear on row 1, page 2 in row 2 and are divided among more classes.
I don’t wanna spend my entire game with the same spell selection just I don’t wanna spend the entire game with the same gear.
If you really want make firebolt viable on end game, please. Put “great heavy firebolt”, “firebot blast” or other variations of firebolt.
I’d rather have OShogun’s idea of morphing a spell, so firebolt becomes fireball at some point and gains new effects. You could even let the player choose between a few different evolutions to take a spell down.
The thing about the spell/loot comparison is that there isn’t as many spells as there are items you’re going to get. When we only have a handful of spells to begin with, I don’t want to immediately invalidate half of them in the end game.
Loot was made from the ground up to be replaceable. Spells not so much, even in Diablo 1 & 2.
Wolcen has that. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. It’s like your toon’s magical aptitude is increasing through long-term use, and then you reach a point where you can evolve the skill drastically by pumping points into it and choose from several different “nodes”.
As someone who pvped a bit as a bone Necromancer, I have to disagree with the sentiment that teeth was worthless. Teeth was good at getting rid of opponents summons (Druid and Summon Necros) and also for wearing down opponents with low life (like most bow amazons).
That said:
Having skills able to morph and/or upgrade into alternative versions would be interesting.
Because it is. Especially if skills are somewhat limited. Even more so if you’re forced to spend skill points on those skills and then abandon them later. Even if the skill points spent have some small future benefit, it still feels bad.
Trading “general fire spell” for “more powerful generic fire spell” isn’t interesting at all. I’d rather start with Fireball and be able to diversify it, then get Meteor later and be able to diversify THAT if I want to.
More variety is better as long as the spells have their own identity.
Go play D&D if you like it so much. Basically everyone else recognizes the issue with not scaling skills to be viable end-game… esp. when you put twenty points in it. These two games are not even remotely similar… I don’t know why you are trying to force mechanics from one into the other. You can name a hundred games you like better - just go play them.
I dont think a tier based magical progression system is defensible in an A-RPG tbh.
It can work in D&D and similar, where you have multiple spell ranks, where tier 1 can be cast more often than tier 2 etc. Or where muti-classes offers a real cost/benefit to reaching higher spell tiers.
But a system where you are out-phasing the lower tiers. Well, that is just bad game design.
And even in D&D, it kinda is that bad game design, where you end up picking lower tier spells that are not affected as badly by the scaling (picking CC or buffs instead of dmg skills as an example).
Indeed.
It is perfectly fine that you have to invest into fireball, to make it really strong in end-game, obviously.
I’m fine with either a tree or a web. Although I’d rather it doesn’t pack everything on the screen, all that would do is overwhelm some players. Instead, they could all the nodes except for the base skills (and maybe talents) invisible to players. However when you click on a skill to learn or level it, you then can see and have access to it’s support nodes in which it would zoom in and show the skill and it’s support nodes that you could customize.
So using the skill tree as an example, if I was a newly made sorceress character, I would only be able to see the base skills and the talents in my skill tree. However when I click on let’s say fire ball, then instead of leveling fireball, the screen would zoom in on fire ball and reveal it’s support nodes to me. Once I finish plotting points in the skill and unlocking some of it’s support nodes and exiting the Fire ball section, the support nodes would go back to being invisible, but the unlocked paths would still be visible; so in short you wouldn’t see the icons of the skill upgrade nodes, but you could still see the line that connects them to one another.
Then again, it simply may be better to make an option settings regarding it, where players could choose to see everything at once, or hide some of it unless they choose to level it.
Sure, but the point of a web would be that one node can support multiple skills, from all over the web.
Otherwise it might as well just be individual skill trees for each skill (which is also a great solution), and then yeah, no need to show them all at once.
Though the tree is a bit too linear for my taste.
Web 