Are Passive Skills Boring?

[Red]

For mobility? Defense, while it can be covered very well by equpiment, requires luck in that department. But mobility can pretty consistently be covered by equipment to at least a satisfactory degree, and often to a quite good amount. I'm honestly a bit confused-I was addressing mobility and not defense.

For defense, there either needs to be more reliable defensive items or every class needs good options. Most runs can handle it fine, but pick the wrong class for an unlucky run and you can be doomed.

[edge2054]

It's tricky to make interesting passive skills and as the game evolves I think there's a degree of one upmanship that occurs, not so much as competition but because as class designers we're always wanting to push the envelop.

Some of the talents I've seen mentioned in this thread are some of the very first coded and while they do their job they're not particularly interesting. On the other hand these talents are part and parcel to classes that new players are most likely to start off playing.

As an example, and I know Combat Veteran has it's own thread but I'm going to use it anyway...

Compare the Solipsism tree to Combat Veteran.

Combat Veteran is a very straight forward tree. It's easy to grasp and something that new players can easily digest. Solipsism on the other hand is very complex. This makes it more interesting but on the other hand it makes it a lot harder to understand. Personally I cringe every time I take a look at the Solipsism talent descriptions.

The point I'm making is that there's a balance here. Talents should be interesting, I agree. Preferably all talents should be interesting. But there's a line where we can get a bit overboard and that line is much finer on classes that brand new players will have access too. There's a lot of games that I've heard great things about but never got into because the learning curve was too steep.

I don't think that passive talents as a rule are boring and I don't believe they should be. I think some passive talents could use some work but it's not as straight forward as more complex == better.

Personally, I like passive talents that function as triggers of some kind. Step Up is a good example. When X happens Y happens. It also opens up design possibilities for internal synergies.

Sorry to use Solipsists again as an example as I don't want to shut any new players out of the conversation but I'm a bit rusty and it's a class I'm more familiar with. But a good example of passive synergies can be found in the Slumber tree. Sandman and Restless night both make Slumber more effective while also having synergy with Sleep and Nightmare. There's similar synergies running throughout the Slumber, Dreaming, and Nightmare trees that make the passives and sustains more interesting then +X to a stat.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents on it. I think the game has come a long way since the early betas, and while we do still have some artifacts of those early days around, that Darkgod and the other class designers have learned a lot since then and built a lot on each other's ideas. Unfortunately going back and reinventing the wheel isn't always the funnest thing, especially when you have 100 other ideas on the horizon that you want to work on.

[Doctornull]

Combat Veteran is a very straight forward tree. It's easy to grasp and something that new players can easily digest. Solipsism on the other hand is very complex. This makes it more interesting but on the other hand it makes it a lot harder to understand. Personally I cringe every time I take a look at the Solipsism talent descriptions.

IMHO the issue with Combat Veteran isn't that it's "too easy", it's that it's used as a solution to a RESOURCE, not the solution to a class.

Many classes with talents that use Stamina have access to Combat Veteran, and that's bad mostly because it seems like a design crutch. "Oh, you use Stamina, that can run out, so you can spend points HERE and then it will come back faster."

Compare:
- When you get hit, you regain +x Stamina. Great for Bulwarks, decent for Berserkers, poor for Archers and Rogues.
- When you crit in melee, you regain +x Stamina. Great for Rogues, Brawlers and Sun Paladins, decent for Bulwarks and Berserkers, terrible for Archers.
- When you spend mana or use a Manasurge Rune, you regain 10%-50% of the mana spent or gained as Stamina. Great for Mana-based hybrids, encourages a mixed-mode spell + technique style.

All of those are strategically interesting, and have tactical implications for play style, unlike the stuff in Combat Veteran. All of them are also easy to understand.



Also, as a side note, it's entertaining to see the author of Bias Weave complain about overly complex talent info text.

[edge2054]

I hear ya on it being something of a band-aid on stamina but the point I was making wasn't that it was too easy but that it's easy to grasp and helps to smooth out the learning curve for newer players.

To continue on the Combat Veteran route, for the sake of illustration as there is another thread for it, let's take a look at Fleet of Foot and Quick Recovery.

Both are basically stamina regen talents. Fleet of Foot approaches the issue of stamina as when X then Y. Quick Recovery gives a flat +X per turn. Fleet of Foot also offers a reduction in fatigue which makes each point of stamina more valuable.

Now I can't speak to the effectiveness of Fleet of Foot as I haven't used it in awhile. But on paper it gets my mind turning. How can I get more movement to get more stamina regen? Where as Quick Recovery you put the point in and basically forget about it.

Fleet of Foot is also a really simple talent that I think most any player could pick up on easily. At it's heart I think it's a better design. Easy to grasp but complex enough that the player will start looking for a way to leverage it.

And not to derail, I wrote Solipsism too. It's an example of a talent, as is Bias Weave, that tries to squeeze some complex class mechanics into a talent description. I'm sure there's a better way to go about stuff like this.. but I haven't found it yet.

As far as Solipsism goes, I have a hard time digesting that text and I wrote it. I hate thinking about how it must look to a player that just unlocked the class :/

[Doctornull]

I hear ya on it being something of a band-aid on stamina but the point I was making wasn't that it was too easy but that it's easy to grasp and helps to smooth out the learning curve for newer players.

Yeah I hear you on that, but the thing is, it's even easier on new players to just make the resource pool internally balanced so regen scales with level or something and they don't have to know about the talent-point tax because there is none.

To continue on the Combat Veteran route, for the sake of illustration as there is another thread for it,

Since you've repeated this disclaimer, let me explain.

There was a thread in which someone said, basically, Combat Veteran is bad because it's nothing but a bunch of boring passive talents. It has no tactical nor strategic value. It's bad and should go away.

The OP of this thread decided to misinterpret that as "all Passives are bad" and mad this thread which seems to needlessly be confusing to people.

I can't really excuse the existence of this thread, but I can hopefully assuage any guilt you'd feel for bringing this poorly conceived thread off topic. Its original topic was a (willful? rhetorical?) misunderstanding.

let's take a look at Fleet of Foot and Quick Recovery.

Both are basically stamina regen talents. Fleet of Foot approaches the issue of stamina as when X then Y. Quick Recovery gives a flat +X per turn. Fleet of Foot also offers a reduction in fatigue which makes each point of stamina more valuable.

Fleet of Foot could be made good, yeah. It's a good idea at its core, and it could work well for Archers and Rogues where my other proposed talent ideas would not work well.

And not to derail, I wrote Solipsism too. It's an example of a talent, as is Bias Weave, that tries to squeeze some complex class mechanics into a talent description. I'm sure there's a better way to go about stuff like this.. but I haven't found it yet.

The thing about Bias Weave is that the effect is entirely meaningless for people who don't read the code (or scum up on spoilers).

But that truly is a topic for another thread.

[Atarlost]

To continue on the Combat Veteran route, for the sake of illustration as there is another thread for it, let's take a look at Fleet of Foot and Quick Recovery.

Both are basically stamina regen talents. Fleet of Foot approaches the issue of stamina as when X then Y. Quick Recovery gives a flat +X per turn. Fleet of Foot also offers a reduction in fatigue which makes each point of stamina more valuable.

Now I can't speak to the effectiveness of Fleet of Foot as I haven't used it in awhile. But on paper it gets my mind turning. How can I get more movement to get more stamina regen? Where as Quick Recovery you put the point in and basically forget about it.

This is actually, in my view, the primary merit of Quick Recovery and Fleet of Foot is a good example of what I'd prefer not to see in my passives. If I'm having stamina problems I can put a point in and forget about it, just like if I'm having accuracy problems I can stick a point in Combat Accuracy and forget about it or, for that matter, if I'm finding that I'm taking too much HP damage relative to Psi damage for the current ratio between the sizes of my HP and Psi pools I can put a point in Solipsism and forget about it. If I have a simple problem I'd prefer a simple solution that lets me just play the game, not something where I have to dance around to regenerate stamina or worry about how much stamina I'm not regenerating by prematurely ending a movement infusion just because I got to where I wanted to go. There are a bunch of different solutions to the basic problem that stamina is consumed to quickly or regenerates too slowly and only a few actually mirror the problem. Quick Recovery is one. If you interpret the problem as the stamina bar being too short Second Wind and Relaxed Shot are direct solutions. The problem doesn't have anything to do with movement, though, and Fleet of Foot is just presenting extra hoops to jump through. The Fatigue reduction part is direct, but it's mostly on classes that don't have problems with fatigue so the bulk of it is just bad. Imagine if Second Wind's cooldown was 0 and it only regenerated as much stamina as Second Wind. It would be terrible. Even though Fleet of Foot is a passive it's just as much of a pain outside of a few narrow cases. That's a kind of interesting I'd prefer to do without.

Actually, Fleet of Foot is boring and Quick Recovery isn't in the same way that manually correcting English to American spellings is boring but throwing a pre-existing Sed script at the problem isn't.

[Candesce]

Yeah I hear you on that, but the thing is, it's even easier on new players to just make the resource pool internally balanced so regen scales with level or something and they don't have to know about the talent-point tax because there is none.

Except this means you can't do the interesting things with other classes that use the same resource, 'cause they've already got their resource fixing from the pool itself.

You forfeit all your flexibility for more complex options when you do that.

[Doctornull]

Except this means you can't do the interesting things with other classes that use the same resource, 'cause they've already got their resource fixing from the pool itself.

You forfeit all your flexibility for more complex options when you do that.

That's incorrect, because different classes can have different resource uses, like how Alchemists and Archmagi regard Mana very differently.

There's no "get back mana" talent-tax, but many classes use Mana and they don't play the same.