Post:New Circle Requirements - A Precursor - 03/09/2012 - 12:50

Re: New Circle Requirements - A Precursor · on 03/09/2012 12:50 PM CST	2146
>>#1) not all skills have been developed to scale all the way to 2000(I thought DR3.0 was addressing this) This isn't totally correct. DR3 (such as it is) is the first step that has to be taken before we can even begin to properly scale. That's not to say that every skill will scale to 1500, 2000 ranks when we release. >>they'd land at the 2000 cap somewhere around 198th circle; Right now the most aggressive requirement in the game is trading. For 150th circle, they need 990. To make that scale to 2000 it would require 20 ranks per circle in trading reqs, which is insane even by my standards. The rank limit, whatever it is, would be higher than the highest circle req but not by much. >>I haven't found those ways to be particularly viable, unfortunately (there's a reason my mech sat unloved for so long before the new creation systems). Check with other players - Many people swear by some of these methods. >>I hope it's really much much less. It'd be completely ridiculous for me to have to spend years to regain something that already took me years to gain. It will be much less than that if you train more than two skills at once, or two skills from higher than 0 ranks. It will likely be months, not years, before your bonus pool's been drained. >>That being said, I do wonder if it wouldn't be better to spend time on asking the players what they'd like to see developed, and work on that. Oddly enough, the technical hurdles of circling to 200 are actually very few. It's the perception problem, and the expectations that come from doing it. >>Could someone explain this concept, I have clearly missed something. What is this and what skills will contribute to it? Check the Elanthipedia posts about the skill merger. They detail what the Mastery skills do. >>So I would have 500 smithing and 300 mech... and then the day comes that mech needs to die (?) and then what? You always have the option of never putting any of your mech into smithing, too. It's just that if you DO decide to transfer your mech into your smithing, all of your smithing ranks would be discarded. We'd probably prevent you from putting fewer ranks into Smithing from Mech than you currently have in Smithing, too. 'Cause we're nice. >>Where does the 300 ranks of mech come from? The part of my brain that wanted to hammer out an example :-P >>Train Smithing up to 500 - mech will also increase some amount - less than 500, due to bit/rank comparison. For numbers, lets say 300. So mech is now 800. Smithing won't train both skills. It will only train Smithing. >>I will need to watch out and not train it "too high" or else lose the option to actually make the choice of putting my mech into it if I find out enchanting isn't what I want to do? Bleh, this is not good. Yeah, I don't particularly like this approach. The one that's winning in my mind is the one where if you do want to move ranks from mech to smithing, you'll lose any ranks you already have in smithing. What you're really suggesting is that you want to be able to use mech for all of the current crafting systems until everything has been released. I admire that desire, but the whole point of the mech split is that each crafting system uses a different skill. Postponing that leaves Mech as an incredibly broad uberskill that is against the whole point of the S3 updates. >>If PM is no longer useable as counting towards ranks needed in magic to circle, are we going to then require less ranks? Wait for me to post the new circle reqs. All will be revealed. >>Why not base the Circle cap off of the Skill cap? Couple reasons: * Round numbers are nice * Leaving unbarred circling means unbarred ability slots, which makes it harder to balance things. * Having an unbounded cap means that the guilds lucky enough to have skills trainable to 2000 are way better off than the ones crippled with a low cap on their skills. That leads to a lot of dismay. >>and then you are going to make the athletics skill contest against webs? Really? Look, I know you're unhappy with the solution. There IS no good solution, because the other option is just as bad or worse for balance and skill distributions. Please withhold judgement until you've seen the changes in action, though - Righteous wrath is all well and good, but without any data there's nothing to be mad about except for assumptions and wild guesses. >>Hey there, I know you keep saying free ranks, but really they aren't free, they use the bonus pool of ranks we already earned. The calculated ranks are 100% free. The ranks required to bring you up to your circle in skills are the ones coming out of the bonus pools. >>I find the skill not necessary for these two reasons: It's a little late for that :-P. They're going in, and there's a pretty good argument for them. I don't think it's necessary to have it here, though. Maybe once this thread cools down I'll elaborate more. >>Does any of that make sense or did I miss something along the way about these skills? I hope the explanation about new skills and grandfathering has eased some of your concerns. >>On a completely unrelated tangent, what exactly is the point of melee and missile mastery? Basically, what Codiax said. They're used to augment your weapon skills if your mastery is higher. A clever player will notice that this makes weaponmasters even better, because somebody that trains every weapon will likely end up with substantially higher mastery than any of the individual weapon skills. Additionally, there are a lot of times where it's beneficial to be able to assess, in an overall fashion, how good a character is with weapons in general, rather than a specific weapon. Feats are the main reason - Some abilities make more sense to gauge your overall ability with weapons rather than the specific one you're using. >>But how important will it be in combat? You can do just fine in combat with 0 ranks of tactics. >>What if the bonus pool worked like TDP's for skills and a player can go to a temporary trainer facility, purchase "ranks" in a chosen skill from the trainer using the bonus pool. I explicitly don't want to do this, because it would cause people to skyrocket in circles in a really incredibly nasty fashion. >>I don't understand what the concern is here about people "double dipping" their Forging/Mechlore skill unfairly The problem comes in when they can have Mech and Smithing (for instance) in their rotation such that both stay ML'd the entire time. If you're allowed unbounded transfers of your mech into smithing, you can train smithing at a very increased rate. It basically allows you to increase the learning rate of the new crafting skills. >>I think you're misinterpreting Soch. He said you could continue to work both, but I don't think he meant a single action would work both. Just that you were free to do some forging to work Smithing, then do some braiding to work Mech. This is correct. >>it would be a terrible waste of time to purposely train a skill from scratch rather than immediately split some ranks into the new skills while keeping some ranks in Mech Lore This might be true (I'm not sure), but the concern I have is with being able to pump one specific skill at a faster rate than other skills. >>But for those who want more than one discipline, we are forced to wait until everything is out before we can move our ranks. Yes. Don't move ranks into Engineering until the system you want in Engineering has been released. I strongly recommend doing this, and will not shoulder the blame if you transfer your ranks into a skill that doesn't have the system you want yet. >>Why do I keep a bleeder? For BLB spell. I have to keep an active bleeder so I can train TM and the rest of my magics. I'd seriously rather have any of my survival "bonus" pool ranks go into either evasion Ok, I'm going to go ahead and just say it - This is a really bad reason. This is a problem with the spell and not the idea of bonus pools. I'm still waiting for a general reason that you want to use a skill but would prefer to earn ranks in a different skill in the same skillset. >>The least "ugly" option is not to do a partial mech split -- that is, to leave mechanical lore as the crafting skill until all of the crafting systems are released. However, I understand the balance problems that come with prolonging the period in which a character is equally proficient at all crafting skills. Got it in one. The goal behind the mech split is to make the master forgers not the same people as the master fletchers without using weapon ranks (those are examples, not hard-defined reasons). >>Earlier, we were assured that "it's perfectly viable to hold onto your mech lore skill until you've had a chance to try out all of the crafting skills." Whatever approach to the mech split you choose, I hope that this remains true. Yeah, the sentence you quoted was poorly written by me. This will always remain true. >>I like the hybrid approach. I would say do the split now for every crafting system that has been release (smithing, tailoring, stonecarving), and release the skill every time a new one comes out, and allow people to continue training mech. The only caveat would be there is no double-dipping (i.e. you get to transfer your mech skills into a particular discipline once and only once). Yep yep. We'll turn off mech learning once the major systems that use mech have all been converted to use the crafting skills, and not sooner. >>I'm not saying adding circles would discourage end game expectations, but I really don't see how it encourages? What it encourages is people saying "I can get to circle 175 but I have nothing to hunt then, make something to hunt". >>I then could move mech trained with braiding into Tinkering even if I had dumped all my mech at the time into Outfitting when the first three went live? If you mean Engineering, yes :) >>Just please don't help create a system by which people who have 'Won Dragonrealms' either simply sell, or fade away. I think the point is, right now we have even less. You might not care about posturing and bragging rights post-150, so increasing the cap wouldn't change anything for you, but there's a set of people who DO care and would enjoy being able to do that. That's just better than what we have now, which I think we can all agree is lacking. >>It's not like if someone has 100 ranks of mech, then gains 100 ranks of forging, then invests that 100 ranks of mech, they'll end up with 200 ranks of forging at notably less work/effort/etc than if they had 200 ranks of mech to begin with or gained 200 ranks of forging from the bottom up. True, but (as you probably figured from reading the rest of the post) while you're gaining those 100 ranks of mech you're also gaining more ranks in smithing at the same time. >>Summary: In the new system, you'd have more bits if you had trained climbing for 500 hours and swimming for 0 hours (in the current system) and then combined the bits from both of these into the athletics skill, than if you had trained climbing for 250 hours and swimming for 250 hours (in the current system) and then combined the bits from both of these into the athletics skill. An interesting thought. The basic suggestion is that you're better off training the higher of the two in a pair of skills being combined right now, because you'll earn more bits per hour. Though, this falls apart a bit when you consider that you can train most of the skills being combined at the same time anyway, so there's not as much need to make a decision. If you DO have to cut a skill from your rotation, though, it sounds like the lower of a combine-pair is the right one to cut out. I don't disagree with the logic here in any way I can see. >>Isn't one of the original goals of the changes to make it so that every guild doesn't have to rank every skill in the game to amass tdp's just to be comparable to other guilds at similar circles? The TDP change is a change that will have long-term effects with respect to the gap between more casual players and more hardcore players. The increases for power circlers will be one-time, and will balance out over time. WHEW. I'm going to work. Back online in a few hours.
This message was originally posted in Abilities, Skills and Magic \ The Experience System, by DR-SOCHARIS on the play.net forums.