The complicated part is actually creating the talent point plan in the first place. Here's the steps involved:
- Install the Build Order Maker addon and this addon.
- If you're making a plan for an existing character, make a note of where you've already spent points for it, for reference while making your points plan..
- Create a new character of the same race and class you want to make a points plan for. Necessary to avoid getting your real character marked with the 'cheater' flag.
- Bring up the build-order dialog via <ctrl-alt-b> and choose "Output build order". You'll need this for references later. The build order file will get created in the same general areas your save files; on my Linux box, for instance, it lives at ~/.t-engine/4.0/tome/build-order/<class-name>-1.csv.
- If you don't plan to back out and reallocate your initially assigned skill points, bring up the level-up dialog and make a note of where your character has points pre-spent. You can also check this in the initial build order file you created above.
- Go back to the build-order dialog and choose "Reset talents, be level 50 and give talent points". This will, unfortunately, give you spurious "Level 10/20/30/40/50" achievements if you don't already have them, as you can see on my profile (honest and for truly, I was going to edit them out before I created the profile; I just forgot...
). - Go to the level-up dialog and allocate your talent points as you desire, remembering to match the pre-spent point allocation you noted earlier. Order doesn't matter, as we're not going to use it as an actual build order. NOTE: This will clobber your hotkeys, as any talents you started with will be duplicated onto a second hotkey, throwing all the rest out of sync. You can fix those now, if you want.
- Go back to the build-order dialog and choose "Output build order" again to output your final build order. You can now quit and delete this scratch character.
- Edit the initial and final build order files using your favorite text editor. In the initial build order, you'll see a dozen or so lines between "#Talents" and "#Types"; find the corresponding lines in the final build order and delete them. (These lines were left behind by the build order maker in the process of leveling up to level 50, and will cause those initial skill points to be double-counted if you leave them in.)
- If your talent point plan is for a new character, create that character now and save it immediately. Then copy the modified final build order file into the character's save directory with the name 'points.csv'. Keep a copy of this file elsewhere, as it will be clobbered if your character dies and you restart it.
- Reload your character and go the level-up dialog and the Talents tab therein. You should see a new column in the talents tree showing your points plan. Uncompleted talents will show their points target in yellow; completed talents will show the target in green. Similarly, categories that you plan to open will be marked with a yellow "[+]", and categories that you've opened according to plan will have a green "[+]".
On a tangentially related note, a couple questions:
- Is there an official protocol for adding fields to the game.player table? A namespace convention, for instance, to avoid collisions between addons? Because this addon keeps its points plan in game.player, as does my Notes to Self addon with its character notes, so I want to be sure I'm doing it right.
- Is it customary to have a topic in this area for all addons, or just the ones, like this one, that are involved enough to need one?
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