Anyway... I have been writing some coverage and have also listening to all the comments about skills from both Flux and the Community. One of the issues that people keep bringing up over and over is how some people love passive skills and some dislike them all lot. This led me to think a ton about skills and all of a sudden an idea about skills came to me.
Problems with Active Skills:
- People max their chosen skills and then have nothing left to invest in or get excited about.
- Low level skills often don't last the entire game and feel like wasted points (one of the primary reasons people want respecs)
- If people don't invest in lower end skills, then they are using crappy skills as they level and this is less than fun.
- Lots of people don't find it as fun to invest in a passive skill compared to an active skill.
- People feel compelled to min-max by investing in passive skills and therefore don't have as diverse an active playstyle.
- Like Travis said in the podcast, spending three types of points is extra paperwork.
- Also... if Runic did this, then people will eventually run out of active skills they are interested in and have nothing to spend points in.
- While designed to combat many of the other problems, they tend to make people into one trick ponies.
A Possible Solution: Merge Active + Passive Skills together.
Basically, I think it's possible solve most complaint people have about skill trees if we remove passive skills and instead give each active skill a passive component. This makes it so that people always have cool active skills to play with and also never run out of places to spend points. It also encourages people to diversify (as you could make the first point give the most passive bonus then work with diminishing returns after that).
Example Outlander Skills:
- Combine Zombie Dust and Zombie Ammo into One skill.
- Combine Poison Burst and Master of the Elements
If balance was a problem, the passives could be toned down and spread across two active skills. Anyway... I think this works like an improved skill synergy system that would make people super excited about skills. I don't think you would need as many skills if you did this since it would make people more interested in each skill as a whole.
What do you guys think? While is probably too late for Runic to do something like this... would it be a mod you could see yourself playing if I tried to mod something like this? Do you think it would be too hard to design a balanced skill system using something like this?