Skills and difficulty

[Voodoo_Sun]

I was just wondering on how difficult you will be making your skill selection.? Ei vanilla diablo = very easy to understand, skills are based on skill level only basically. Or Median = very hard, skills are based on many different things and only a very limited build is possible due to this, also hard to understand.

[Tyd]

i think they'll probably stick with the diablo2 style or take the system CW was about to have.

[Joel]

Well. The skills are classically splitted into 3 skill trees of 10 skills eahc.
They have lvl req and pre-req. Nothing fancy. Choosing skills will be a bit harder cause of the new ones adn their interaction, but we definetively ditched all the fancy Skill Systems we cna have tought of. KISS -> Keep it Stupid Simple.

The trick is that some skills greatly modify some others. Not like sinergies, but more like upgrade or such. For example, the passive skills that modify Vampyre minions stats. This is a basic example. Another one is the in-game modification. The Feyling skill 'Call Lightning' is designed to shoot out 1 to 5 "bolt" at enemies. During the skill effect, any other ltng related skills used byt he Feyling get additional damage. But once the CL is over, the damage return to old values.

Environnement is also a factor to consider. Some minions Feyling (skills comins soon (c) ) are getting stronger and thougher when you are in forest type maps. Some are stronger at night. Another class can summon
Beast Spirit that depends of the location they are summoned from. casting this skill in a dungeon will summon Cave Crawler, in a town you'll get Wandering Souls etc ... There is even a chance you can get a Summon Trent skill that look like the Keeper of the Grove Warcraft III Hero ^^

[Rhonlore]

[quote=Joel";p="155522"]KISS -& Keep it Stupid Simple.[/quote]

Its Simple, Stupid

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Anyway, How would you pull off this summoning business of different creatures depending on where you are? It sounds like a lot of work.

I can't help but be amazed at what you guys are capable of doing.

Good luck with this one Joel

[Brother Laz]

V_S: You do know that all low level skills that aren't percentage based are either too weak later on, too strong at level 21, or both?

Ps: depending on who says it, it's either 'Keep it stupidly simple' or Keep it simply stupid'. :p

[Voodoo_Sun]

Brother Laz = I know what you are saying and personally I think the skill system in your mod was a good idea. I think it needed to be a little more user friendly and easier for a new player to understand and build a good character but I still think it was good. personally I wish you keep going on that mod or worked on a new one at least. I realize that normal Diablo II skill system does make low level skills useless once you reach a higher level and it is kind of sad. (I guess one way to fix this would be to base almost all the skill stats on character level). Anyways what I said wasn't ment as a slight on your mod. I give you all the props you deserve. :-)

Joel = Glad to here that you are keeping it simple and mixing it up a bit. I was thinking about making skills that work in tandem with other skill but how to do it is way beyond me. lol. Casting a few tornados and then firing some fireballs into them so it "Catches" them and imceases the damage each would do would be cool. I Know this isnt' quite what you ment with yours but still its similar. :-) Will there be more skills that are like this then the lightning one you wrote about?

[cafa]

I know that its all almost ready for the skills but you must see what a modder (Vegabond_635) has done. He made an new kind of skill tree in his mod that make the search for gold much more fun, sice you only can have the skill if you buy it
he made an basic tree equal for all the classes (all these are passive- like mana reneg, life leech...) and the class specific skill you buy (for a hight cost)in the shop
For me its the best skill idea...
well the link for his mod forum(I think is an alpha version...) its here
http://s2.invisionfree.com/PKIncubator/ ... wforum=210

[Retroboy]

[off-topic] Hey, that last bit about requiring the purchase of skillsets is clever. Another way to approach it is to have a cube reagent recipe that adds +'s to specific skills to fill class-only empty charms that the character starts with [e.g. Leech's Familiar, perhaps for a vampire]. You have to either find the reagents (which are incredibly rare) to add skill levels to this charm, or buy these reagants at horrendous cost. It could be the case that a character might eventually find less powerful empty charms for other character's skills that they could use to gain lower-level non-balance-wrecking abilities of other classes (e.g. a Necro finds a Sorceress charm, and imbues it with a first-level Sorceress Warmth innate ability).

That's what I love about D2 - the possible inventive ways of modding.

-- Retro

[Joel]

I'll stick to a classic skill system. Exotic mumbo jumbo make the game hard o grasp and not fun.

[Retroboy]

No doubt true for most, but I don't mind a little complexity in the skills model - some of the power-up processes in other mods were quite clever. Mods should appeal to the greatest number of players, tho, and that discussion was kinda off-topic anyway. Thinking about it further, I can see all kinds of problems with it.

A good comment earlier was about the lower-level skills not being powerful enough at higher levels. I think the system of providing multipliers per level of the character is a good approach. One of the hardest things to do in a 'long' game like D2 is managing the character's power against the difficulty of the monsters to a proper level at the beginning, middle, and end-game, so hopefully you guys will have good luck with that. I've played a couple mods that were great fun at the beginning, but certain imbalanced spells allowed me to waltz through nightmare until finally some immunities made things a bit harder in Hell.

-- Retro

[mjj_jjv]

hey not sure if you have all the skill icons done yet or not (no time to check) but anyways if you don't you could go to http://www.guildwars.com/professions/default.html for some icons or whatever they're called

(not sure if this is the right topic for this but didn't want to make a new one)

Keep up the great work!