I have to give this game credit. It's basic, somewhat crude but it's aptly functional most of the time, and that's a huge thing to say with regards to an independant 'company?' mashing together the RPG from world of Warcraft and the RPG from Pokemon into one game. It's quite the genre bender, and while I've not been into these freebie online games, this one has devoured an unhealthy chunk of my soul.
However, it has flaws. That goes without saying, and many of them can be forgiven with the "Beta is beta" moniker. This said, there are a plethora of improvements that can be made, many of which have been made into dedicated threads, but this remained conspicuously absent, so here is a thread.
Currently, Proficiency points are earned once every five levels. There is apparently a level 250 cap. This means, you will only ever have a maximum of 50 points to play with. Seems reasonable at first glance. But then you realize that there is 66 points in each tree. 96 if you include the 3 primary stats. And there are 6 trees.
While a slightly greater amount of breathing room would be nice, what I cannot abide is the fact you can only access your next skill after investing 5 points into said tree. This means you learn a new skill every twenty five levels! Talk about tedious, but wait! it gets better (or worse, in this case) While *you* don't have access to the repertoire of utility until level 25 (and technically it's 50, because the first skill in half of the trees is 'eh...' and really only fireball and slash are worth their weight in button presses), the enemies you come up against, from the lowliest bandit to the wtfbbqpwn-iest bosses have most certainly NOT lost their keys to the trunk of goodies, and will slap you about with enough buffs/debuffs/lifesteal/aggro/damage-over-time/restoration to empower an entire barn worth of party members, and we have no recourse but to keep pounding our fists against them until we have enough mana for a max power finishing blow whilst necking back enough elixirs to cure eastern africa of all it's drought and famine. And no, Mend does not constitute a form of healing. With a 25 turn cooldown, it's simply sustain on a long voyage and has very little merit in a big fight beyond a cheese 25% health boost which may or may not be completely revoked by a lucky critical hit on an AOE strike.(Why does AOE crit anyways? O.o that was an unusual decision) I've found myself with a party of 37 odds wailing away on a boss, and he suddenly gains three ticks of healing. He then proceeds to regain health while my trio is pounding on him because his regeneration is so ridiculously high. Meanwhile, he instagibbs one of my folks with a 1200 damage crit (approximately 1/3rd of the sylesty in question's maximum health). I get that bosses are meant to be hard, but are supposed to be overcome with proper team composition, but we don't actually get to compose teams with roles until ridiculously high levels because the skills to make them work are unlocked every 25 levels. I'd certainly at least have one basic teir skill in each tree availiable to shove a point in at level 0, just so you can have SOME variety beyond physical damage/magic damage for your first 25. It gets repetitive going A, click on enemy, click on end turn... (sidenote: hotkey for end turn button, please and/or thank you if possible)
TLDR: enemies get their utility kit LONG before we do. And this is due to the current proficiency system burning slower than molasses on a winters day.
SOLUTION: Number of ways to approach it; basic gist is: FASTER POINTS.
The one I personally feel would sit best with the current balance of the game would be to remove the point investment cap on the skills, and make them instead dependent on having invested a point into the skill below it. While this does mean that we suddenly have 10 MORE point slots to sink our precious 50 into, it also means we don't have to wait to level 45 to get a reliable taunt, or a almost halfway decent heal, or a reliable party buf-oh wait, single target only. Self-buff then. However, that would mean you could get the ultimate skill in each tree by level 50, and so if you weren't limited to your chosen tree, you could completely break your skill bar.
Another way would be to accelerate the attainment of the proficiency points. every three levels would be the barest minimum, with every other level being ideal, but that does leave us with 125 points to spend, which is almost enough for one and a half complete trees. Again, back to the limited skill bar overflow issue.
Probably the simplest way however would just be to reduce the point cap for unlocking the next skill, again to every three points or every two points. This allows for moderate skill progression and we don't get this horrendous 'ability bubble' where we're supposed to be fighting bosses with our fists and they're hurling complex magics at us.
If you read this far, congratulations. Please do something about this. It's incredibly off-putting and frustrating to get yourself mercilessly whomped by a critter you knew you could beat if you just had access to another piece of your skill kit.
And wow, this post sounds quite butthurt rereading it. >.< |
In the simplest way that I can say: we are planning on completing overhauling combat in the future. This includes how stats function, itemization, abilities, proficiencies, level ups, and anything else related to combat.
I agree that the current system is tedious and not very dynamic. It's better than no system, but it has lots of room for improvement. When we are able to finally get to that point, we plan on recreating the entire system. |
