ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Well I can see this idea being popular...

But consider it seriously. At the moment you will only get 3 or 4 category points in the whole game. Their use is not clearly defined in the game, being a catch-all of opening new trees, improving existing trees or making a new rune/infusion slot. This is not particularly newbie-friendly, whilst also being generally unintuitive and inelegant. For many characters there is little thought in how to use them - a lot of the locked trees are fundamental to the class, whilst others are irrelevant in comparison. Locked trees give no chance to dip in for a few skills - you have to be very invested in the whole tree to consider them worth the rare category point. Ultimately there's a lot of trees that may as well not exist on certain classes, even though they have one or two talents that could combine well.

So, I say have all trees unlocked from the start. Give people wider choice in how to spend their generic and class points. Let people build more interesting classes. At the same time have certain trees not available until level 10 or even 20 (there has already been certain movement towards this). You could even have powerful trees that can't be used until level 30+.

Expand rune/infusion slots available at level 10 and 20. Give a notification of this with the level 10/20 achievement pop-ups. Simple, yes?

As for improving talent mastery... well, do people use that much anyway? Still, I'd fall back on an idea someone else proposed recently - improve mastery in a tree with points invested in it, so the mastery value is a reflection of the real investment in the tree. Either +0.01 mastery per point invested, or +.05 for each talent maxed. The generic combat tree should maybe be exempt from this...

And for Cornacs... well, I'm open to suggestion here. The xp boost they get is already significant. An extra generic point at levels 10 and 20 wouldn't go amiss - perhaps even every 10 levels. This would put them back to the sort of power they were before runes/infusions - weaker at the start, but with the potential to grow further.

I think overall these changes would be a more elegant solution to the problems category points address, whilst adding choice and variety for the player. As it stands having a point you only get to use 3 times in the whole game is a bit silly. People complain that adding racial points would be overkill in points types, so why not trim down the least used of the existing ones.

Discuss. Maturely, please ;P

Sounds good to me.

I think it's a good idea and agree with your reasons.

I really like the current option to use category points to increase mastery level, but for various reasons I've never actually done it. If the option disappeared it wouldn't affect my Tome experience, but it would annoy the game designer in me. So what if we allow the player to spend points to increase mastery directly, just like category points now? Each point could give .05 mastery or something, up to a certain cap.

If we really want to pare things down, unify class and generic points (I know, they used to be). Keep the distinction between generic and class talents, and force the player to keep the number of points spent on class and generic talents balanced to within some tolerance. This combined with the ability to increase mastery using talent points would, I think, result in quite a bit more use of the mastery-increasing option; if you have to spend points just to keep things balanced but you're out of, say, generic talents that you want to spend points on, use your points to increase your mastery of some generic talent tree.

I imagine that some other changes might also improve the way this works (making 1.0 the norm instead of 1.3, altering number of talent points per level, etc.) But I'm getting a bit far afield. To summarize: good idea, Grey!

I like this idea. It would mean that a lot of currently locked trees would need to be updated so that they're not available till higher level but that's not really a bad thing. Gives players something to look forward too.

I have to say, I *dislike* this idea. Category points are an interesting and nifty part of the optimization for me.

- First, I don't agree that "a lot of the locked trees are fundamental to the class", at least in my experience. If they are, perhaps we should be rebalancing the locked trees to a degree. I really like the fact that if I'm playing a Cursed I have the option of skipping the Rampage tree (which everyone seems to think is an absolute necessity) and instead buffing my mastery level somewhere else. I'd honestly say that it makes the classes (at least potentially) more varied and interesting - there are some skills that would be must-have, except that category points are rare and expensive enough that it's at least worth stopping and considering whether it's worthwhile.

- For the locked trees that are simply not worth playing with... well, that's fair. Why don't we start working on identifying those, and buffing said trees to the point that they *are* worth considering as a tree? That would actually make the decisions involved *more* interesting.

- I'll agree that "make things easier on the newbies" is worthwhile and all - but only to a point. Any given player that actually sticks aroudn is going to spend a lot more time as an experienced player than they are as a newbie. Therefore, the "make things easier on the newbies" is useful only as far as it limits the frustration of getting over that first hump of a learning curve. Additionally, it's worth considering the fact that we're still in beta. We've got a lot of good press, and we're getting a fair influx of people, but we are still in beta. Eventually, we'll get to the point where the changes have settled down enough to make a full set of helpfiles worth creating. At that point, the confusion of being a newbie goes down fairly significantly. I find myself somewhat opposed to the idea of warping the fundamental systems permanently in order to provide an ease of learning that won't be as much of a factor once things are settled down.

- Personally, I'm pretty happy about some of the side effects as well. Specifically, there are classes like the archmages, who get more toys on average anyway, who have more places they want to spend their category points, and thus, on average, get fewer runes/infusions. It's a useful balancer, rather than just saying "hey, everyone has 3 investments at level 1, 4 at level 10, and 5 at level 20" or whatever.

Sirrocco wrote: - For the locked trees that are simply not worth playing with... well, that's fair. Why don't we start working on identifying those, and buffing said trees to the point that they *are* worth considering as a tree? That would actually make the decisions involved *more* interesting.

The problem is often with trees from other classes. They may be perfectly fine for their native class, but only partially applicable to shared classes. The Cunning/Survival tree is a good example - locked on several classes, and not worth unlocking just to spend a few generic points in. It's a good tree for Rogues, and other classes would use it a bit if it didn't cost a precious category point. Also, all trees need not be equal - indeed, it's impossible to make that so, especially when you consider the vastly different playstyles people have.

One would still be left with the important decision of where to spend one's class and generic points, which would in fact become a trickier decision, especially as you advance in levels and other trees become available. At the moment the game seems to encourage specialisation more. The synergy of spending category points on rune slots whilst pumping all of your class/generic points into optimising most-used talents works much better than spreading yourself thin whilst also losing the runes. Mostly I'd like the spreading across vs maxing out trees option to be independant of the rune choices.

At that point, the confusion of being a newbie goes down fairly significantly. I find myself somewhat opposed to the idea of warping the fundamental systems permanently in order to provide an ease of learning that won't be as much of a factor once things are settled down.

Yeah, it's not something I care that much about. I think new players are generally smart enough to figure things out for themselves. I just thought I'd point out the dichotomy of people being so against inventing new types of points, but not realising how category points perform such an out of place and unneeded role. In my opinion anyway :)

- Personally, I'm pretty happy about some of the side effects as well. Specifically, there are classes like the archmages, who get more toys on average anyway, who have more places they want to spend their category points, and thus, on average, get fewer runes/infusions.

"Like the archmages" - care to name any more? I personally think archmages are the *only* class that really has freedom with their category points. Others may have some partial leverage, but it comes down to the specialisation thing I mentioned. Unlocking a new tree means you need to sink a lot of talent points into it to make the unlock worth it. And doing that means pulling lots of points out of other trees. Without unlocks there would be more freedom to dip a little into trees without feeling pressured to make the most of the whole tree.

There seems to be a deal of fuss around category points and talent trees.

Personally I would like to see the talent trees revamped and made more granular and effective for their particular class... Once this has been done I would then suggest that if people are not happy with the category point system we then invest time and effort to revamp that part of the system.

Doing both at the same time is, in my opinion, counter-productive!

It does seem reasonable that "cross-class" shouldn't necessarily mean "costs a category point". I don't think that means that we should throw out category points altogether, though. There is value to having a strictly limited, build-defining resource like that. Actually, changing the "just sprinkle it on" cross-class trees (like the cunning tree for most people, the one-handed tree for the wyrmics, and so on) to require a higher level (and in some cases possibly higher stat requirement) than the base class but not cost a category point seems entirely reasonable. On the other hand, situations like the Shadowblade unlock trees (where it's more a feel of "we strive in our own way to match the powers of the true masters" rather than "and we dabble in the stuff those guys over there do on the side") should still take category points.

I agree, and I disagree...

What I agree with, is that some skill combinations could work well together, and it's a pity that they are not always available to some classes that may want to try them... (Stealthy slinger is what I had in mind...)

What I don't agree with with the initial argument is this part:

Grey wrote:This is not particularly newbie-friendly.
...
So, I say have all trees unlocked from the start.

More options is *less* friendly to noobs.

Grey wrote: get 3 or 4 category points in the whole game

But you have several trees unlockable in different manner of ways, (Escorts, Sand-Worm, Antimagic, Last-Hope Town, and probably others (I am not through the game)), which to me is the preferable route... just have more of the trees unlockable - and maybe through THIS process make it so that certain class/races cannot use that route to unlock it, similar to how antimagic works now)

It seems like the issue is a lack of category points. How about we add in some more points, about 3 more should allow for some nice customizing and class building. Perhaps for certain quest rewards? Here are some ideal places:
1)Completing Storming the City
2)Completing a mysterious staff
3)Completing The many Prides of Orc

All of these are fairly major quest and don't really have rewards

Canderel wrote: What I don't agree with with the initial argument is this part:

Grey wrote:This is not particularly newbie-friendly.
...
So, I say have all trees unlocked from the start.

More options is *less* friendly to noobs.

That's why I said push more trees back to higher levels, so that you automatically get more choices as you progress. Some classes possibly need looking at to see if they have too many trees (Berserkers come to mind).

One approach I often like is to have classes that branch into different specialties as you progress. At certain levels you could offer the character a choice of which branch they want to take (e.g. offensive vs defensive, magic vs combat, etc.) which would give them an extra talent tree to support that playstyle. That makes the choice a lot simpler for beginners because they can play for a while then make a simple decision. I also think it is easier to balance because you don't have to balance a bunch of trees at the same time. You just balance one branch against the other to make sure they are about equally useful. I'd probably have a branch at level 10 and another branch at level 20 for a total of 4 extra talent trees. It might also be nice to have each branch grant a couple of bonuses to stats and such for extra flavor.

This does take some of the playstyle choice away but I don't think people are buying that many categories anyway so I think that choice is more of an illusion.