Yes.
Ehhh… This only works if the talent is already totally obligatory, easily pathed to and interestingly pathed from… OR if you buff the hell out of all other talents or there’d be no net loss to gameplay in cutting the maximum effect’s power in half. Otherwise, you make those talents obligatory where one formerly had choice.
So, vibe-wise/broadly agreed, but… keep some of those balancing nuances in mind.
Aside: Tuning talents higher gets a lot easier if you baseline basic situational skills like Tranquilizing Shot, Concussive Shot, Countershot, Misdirection, Tar Trap, etc. Else, you proportionately increase the cost in personal performance, utility, durability, and the like of taking those talents.
Not entirely sure what you mean by this. Do you just want to see Death Chakram removed? Bestial Wrath taken off the GCD (though, that has zero impact on button bloat)? What, exactly?
This many will likely not be a fan of. Moreover, if you’re going to add choice nodes anyways… why not give a means to avoid it despite allowing players to take it from a far earlier level?
Why wouldn’t you just baseline them, then? Just to make them easier to find in the spellbook? What’s the motive here to purposely adding non-choices to what we must spend our talent points on?
Me like.
It’s not a good mechanic regardless. If we’re to get something in its place (or hopefully to far greater effect), I’d rather it just be something altogether new and far better designed.
Not a fan. Bestial Wrath is effectively a non-CD, but its uniquely being that way, is kind of fun. However, I in no way want my actual CD, CotW, to follow suit. I like having at least one real, separately timeable CD.
Nice.
The concept sounds fine, but the example is worrying. That’s not interactivity. That’s just an example of degrading an existing optimization (noting TTK) by shifting its balancing point.
I could see “causing Serpent Sting to tick more quickly”, so that one actually affects the other, but making a default choice (maintain all of your DoTs) even less varied from isn’t interactivity; it’s what you’d have done anyways, but now with even less thought worthwhile.
I know that sounds like a nitpick, but such distinctions are pretty vital. They make the difference between improving and worsening gameplay.
Same as above. Good direction. Terrible example. You’d have taken an effect whose problems are primarily tuning (of its % effect per point of stat and the balance of Butchery’s damage vs. WFB’s) and made it entirely one-note instead, in this case without even giving the option to avoid Wildfire Bomb entirely, which would be the only advantage of a Mastery that affects only one skill.
Not a fan, for largely the same reasons given in reference to CotE.
Also not a fan. Anti-synergies allow for individually strong abilities for the fact that they can’t so well be stacked, which in turn allows for more intuitive use of skills towards their actual strengths (CA for AoE, Spearhead for ST, FotE for Execute, etc.).
Survival needs a bit more burstiness available to it, yes, but that shouldn’t come from shallowing out its CDs to make everything stackable. Ideally… from buffing the hell out of nearly all Survival talents, siphoned from the baseline, such that Coordinated Assault and Spearhead can each be more powerful in their own right.
And yes, for all intents and purposes, Mongoose Bite and the fact that the Mongoose Fury window buffs only it… is very much like a CD a la Coordinated Assault, albeit with fallback value as well. Optimizing it is a commitment.
There’s no point in doing that through talent options, specifically, as doing so just forces the tree to split itself up, giving melee and ranged each at most two-thirds an actual tree.
Instead, simply use a holistic passive to convert normally ranged abilities to their augmented melee equivalents. Without a melee weapon equipped, the talents and the actual skills will look like X. With a melee weapon equipped, the talents will look like Y, and when also in melee (or charge/dash/blink-attack) range, the skills will likewise look like Y. Now you don’t have any outright wasted talents and thereby less accessible surroundings for them, even if you may still wish to include a choice node here or there in core locations.