Suggestion ⛽ give the "Core" tag to more skills

Spiritborn
1

TLDR: follow green text

I would like to see more core skills in the talent trees as they are the most fun to play with and they provide the perfect foundation for new builds.
This is not just a suggestion for the Spiritborn, but should be considered for every class.

What makes core skills fun is that they are spammy with no cooldowns to wait for, the effects can go crazy. Core skills are promising and very clear to beginners. You can easily develop a power fantasy in your mind and get started with a single aspect. And there are already many existing aspects and items that benefit core tags, so they can draw from a full well.

If we want more play styles and variation for classes with different builds, it might help to ask the developers for more balance and more skills to be marked as core. I go into more detail below.

Sorcerer is done right
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With patch 1.4.0 the Sorcerer class got its mastery skills also tagged as core skills. The class was already leading in total skills available but this change makes it special and very appealing for experiments in the training area.

Lets say "This week/season I want to play a build around

  1. Incinerate
  2. Fireball
  3. Frozen Orb
  4. Ice Shards
  5. Chain Lightning
  6. Charged Bolts
  7. Blizzard
  8. Meteor
  9. Fire Wall
  10. Ball Lightning

All of them are core skills.
In theory there is potential for 10 different builds, 10 starting points to an endgame build. It is an awesome variety and my wish for the developers to target on every class.

Number of pure core skills for other classes:
Spiritborn 4
Barbarian 5
Druid 6
Rogue 5
Necromancer 6

Compared to the Sorcerer, the other classes have half as many.
Now I dont want to say other classes are less fun, but you might agree that many non-core builds only start to make sense the moment you get rid of some cooldown via reduction affixes, aspect mechanic or node in the skill tree. It is sort of a prerequisite (that in some cases takes considerable investments) to get them in a spammy state, like the core skills.

In that regard, core skills are much more accessible. Very comfortable to switch to and being able to spray enemies with effects, without having much dependencies. Once you unlock the mastery branch, the Sorcerer offers a whole new set to experiment with. Feels great while leveling up.

Not happy with Core skills coming from a skill node
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Spirit Born’s Core skills are

  1. Crushing Hand
  2. Quill Volley
  3. Rake
  4. Stinger
  5. Payback (node and aspect)
  6. Touch of Death (node)

Payback & Touch of Death use one of their own nodes to become core.
Touch of Death for example branches in these two nodes:

  1. Touch of Death's swarm bursts every second, applying 30% of its Base Poisoning damage over 6 seconds to surrounding enemies.
  2. Touch of Death is now also a Core Skill which costs 70 Vigor and has no Cooldown.

While you can argue this is a balancing issue, it is currently not possible to justify going for the first one, since the skills own aspect wants me to replace swarms early (happens by casting a new one), which would require a lot of cooldown reduction and equipment to make it work (15 seconds). Furthermore, there are huge amounts of damage bound in spending ressource.
Very unfortunate in my opinion, I like the first nodes design idea a lot.

The point I am trying to make is that it would be nice not to lose this option for the Touch of Death build. The core node shows that the skill is not overpowered at all without a cooldown. The core node makes the skill just more fun to play. In the case of Touch of Death, it would be nice to let it be core permanently and to put some other cool idea in the empty skill node, for example:

  1. Touch of Death only spawns a single giant swarm that bursts every second, infecting and dealing damage to surrounding enemies. New swarms are absorbed and for each the giant Swarms explosion range increases by 33%. (this keeps the explosions going while having a different replacement mechanic, absorbed == replaced)
  2. The infection has a chance to spawn a Pestilent Swarm instead, dealing Touch of Deaths Poisoning damage over time. (for the glyph)

Summary:
I think these core nodes are a good and at the same time a bad idea. Because, more often than not, it will be a lot more beneficial to choose the core option with its synergies, which leaves the neighboring node to be wasted.
But balancing the other non-core node is like fighting an uphill battle when the game constantly receives new item and aspect additions for the core tag.

Suggestions for NEW Core skills
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What I am suggesting is not necessarily adding entirely new core skills to the tree. I suggest to check if the “Core” tag can be a permanent addition to some of the existing skills (especially those that have the core node).

Most classes have skills in the tree that could make sense as a resource spender with a little tweaking. Others need a bigger rework, but in any case, it never hurts to keep the talent trees and skills updated. There is a lot of untapped potential there. Suggestions:

Spirit Born
Payback
Razor Wings (visually really cool skill)
Touch of Death

Druid
Wolves
Poison Creeper
Ravens
Boulder (without aspect)

Rogue
Dance of Knives
Smoke Grenade

Barbarian
Kick (without aspect)
Rupture
Mighty Throw (as ranged build)

Necromancer
Perhaps the minion cooldowns? Necro definitely needs more skills in general.