Balancing the skill tree

[LRobin89]

I have the game on PS4 since patch 1.06.
Despite the remaining bugs, or the inventory becoming quickly unusable if you have too many items (like in The Witcher 3), what a game! The best in my opinion since The Witcher 3, or Skyrim if we consider 1st-person RPG.

But I have some suggestions regarding gameplay, and notably the skill tree. It is a very good choice to let us select any perk in the trees, if you have the required attribute level. Complete free customization is a perfect design (this is one of the best qualities in the Fromsoft games in their character-building mechanics for instance), but there are some unfortunate disbalances in Cyberpunk.

ATHLETICS

• Athletics skill levels up too slowly. I had twice less XP in athletics ( level 5) than other skills (level 10), despite never using vehicles and fast travel and always running, only using melee weapons and doing any available strength actions I could (doors, windows, turrets) during 80 hours, for example...
• Some athletics perks prevent and worsen levelling in this skill! "Marathoner" or "Like a Butterfly" cancel stamina use and so ways to level up athletics... We should still be able to gain XP by running, dodging even if these perks cancel stamina use for those actions.

COLD BLOOD

• Cold Blood skill only levels up with the Cold Blood mode. This is unfair when other skill tree can level XP without any perk. We should be able to level up Cold Blood by just killing people, even without the Cold Blood mode. The XP reward could be lower than in Cold Blood mode but should be there (for example to level up Cold Blood to 3 even if you dont choose any perk in this tree). It could be done by having the innate ability of the Cold Blood mode when you kill someone, without any bonus. Bonuses would be provided by the different perks of the tree. (EDIT: Like Adrenaline in the Witcher 3).

CRAFTING

• Scrapper skill automatically disassembles junk, even expensive ones. But this is pretty bad regarding 750€$ junk... It wouldn't be much a problem if the components were better for this expensive junk. In the Witcher 3, junk had level of rarity, why not here? 750€$ should give you rare components when disassembled at least.

PERKS ONLY WORKING WITH OTHER PERKS (should not)

• To emphasize customization, we can choose any perk, in the order we want. That's a very good choice in terms of gameplay design for the players. But some of them don't work without previous perks! This leads to mistakes during the creation of the character!
• You should either locked those perks if you don't have the required ones. OR (better in my opinion in terms of freedom in the customization) just activate the required condition for those perks by themselves. Making them independent. Here 2 examples.
• Dog of War and Wolverine can not activate without Regeneration but should. Those 2 perks should work by themselves and activate regen during fights. Regeneration too, but this perk should have something else, special to it in consequence. Why not copy/paste the Epimorphosis effect, but during fights, for the Regeneration perk? For example, with Dog of War but not Regeneration, you would have faster regen during fights but only to 60% health. Conversely, with Regeneration but not Dog of War, you would have a regen during fights up to 80%/100% but in a slow way.
• All the Cold Blood mode-related perks should work independently, not only with the Cold Blood perk. Those perks should work and activate Cold Blood mode by themselves, to be fair with the logic behind the full customization. Except they wont have the bonus given by the Cold Blood perk of on the cumulative charges and increase in speed movement. Actually, as I said previously for the Cold Blood tree, the Cold Blood mode should be innate for any character. Only the different bonuses should be dependent on the perks. That way, all the perks of this tree would work independently from each other. That way, no mistake could be done during the choice of the perks, they would always work as intended, and the customization would be completely free (no need to take the first Cold Blood perk if you don't want to).

I hope these remarks would be taking into account. In this state, the customization in the skill tree can be pretty frustating.

For players in the forum, feel free to make other suggestions to improve and balance the current tree, which is very good in this state but displays some important flaws.
For CD Projekt Red team, wish you the best to perfect your yet-amazing game. I hope my suggestions would be useful in this regard.

 

[Simpson3000]

get a berserker implant and activate it each time before you start boxing the air till the effect runs off. That way you´ll reach athletic 10 in no time, 11-20 will then slow down alot but still if you dont mind same cramps on your attack button finger or perhaps a new controler, you should max out atletics in no time.

 

[LRobin89]

get a berserker implant and activate it each time before you start boxing the air till the effect runs off. That way you´ll reach athletic 10 in no time, 11-20 will then slow down alot but still if you dont mind same cramps on your attack button finger or perhaps a new controler, you should max out atletics in no time.

Thank you for this tip!

I have found one myself : I was under a roof, and had just the space to jump from few centimeters. I could then do small jumps really fast to level up athletics.

But those kinds of tips are just "cheats" to be honest, and break immersion. Other skills level up smoothly with the story. Athletics twice less XP in my experience, despite the fact I used a gameplay focused on this skill (it would have been worse if I fast travelled or was not using melee weapons)! The point of my topic was to indicate that flaw to CD Projekt Red to make them correct this disbalance.

 

[keviny01]

Cold blood is such a contrived skill anyway. Why give you separate XP for a separate skill instead of just giving you MORE XP for the skill you use to defeat enemies, i.e. handguns, blades, etc.? I just don't see the point. The only thing cold blood does is encourage you to kill enemies faster, which doesn't really benefit certain builds, such as stealth.

 

[jj284b]

Actually, Cold Blood is excellent skill.. It works the same way as Adrenaline worked in Witcher 3.. but you can chose which effects you want to have when it activates on kill... all those buffs can be applied 5 times (with perks) and length of single one can be 15 seconds... plus at level 16 you can enable it so they disappear one after another, so you tend to keep the buffs during combat.. and those buffs are quite good - 100% to armor, 10% Damage reduction etc etc...

 

[keviny01]

Actually, Cold Blood is excellent skill.. It works the same way as Adrenaline worked in Witcher 3.. but you can chose which effects you want to have when it activates on kill... all those buffs can be applied 5 times (with perks) and length of single one can be 15 seconds... plus at level 16 you can enable it so they disappear one after another, so you tend to keep the buffs during combat.. and those buffs are quite good - 100% to armor, 10% Damage reduction etc etc...

But Witcher 3 has no stealth mechanics and you are supposed to always kill enemies as fast as you can, thus making adrenaline relevant. But in stealth gameplay it is useless. Here, cold blood is even placed right next to stealth in the skill tree, which is puzzling.

 

[LRobin89]

But Witcher 3 has no stealth mechanics and you are supposed to always kill enemies as fast as you can, thus making adrenaline relevant. But in stealth gameplay it is useless. Here, cold blood is even placed right next to stealth in the skill tree, which is puzzling.

Cold blood with silent weapons can work perfectly. This can be combined with stealth, without a doubt. Imagine a silent revolver, and eliminating quickly one by one your targets from a roof (I have completed a contract like that).
But you are right. Cold blood is also perfect for a super fast exposed killer.

Post automatically merged: Jan 17, 2021

Actually, Cold Blood is excellent skill.. It works the same way as Adrenaline worked in Witcher 3.. but you can chose which effects you want to have when it activates on kill... all those buffs can be applied 5 times (with perks) and length of single one can be 15 seconds... plus at level 16 you can enable it so they disappear one after another, so you tend to keep the buffs during combat.. and those buffs are quite good - 100% to armor, 10% Damage reduction etc etc...

Yes, Cold Blood is very good and original too. I just wish some balances in terms of structures comparing to the other skills.
You should make XP in Cold Blood without any perk in the tree, like for other skills.
You should be able to have working perks without the Cold Blood perk, for a completely free customization.
In this state, Cold Blood perk is probably the most important perk to choose in the game, even if you don't want to play as a fast killer. It seems mandatory for almost every builds, just at least to unlock the perk point at the Cold Blood level 3.
In this case, why not give us the capacity to unlock Cold Blood mode right from the start, in an innate manner, but just add some bonuses to it with the Cold Blood tree perks? Would make more sense, right?

 

[-Aeon-]

What if i told you, you can use stealth and be fast. Stealth does not necessarily mean slow and steady. If you have a good stealth build. You can probably delay detection times long enough that you can just run up behind people and shiv them. The more you invest in a build the better it gets. Cold Blood is good and later on it becomes insanely good.

 

[jj284b]

Cold blood with silent weapons can work perfectly. This can be combined with stealth, without a doubt. Imagine a silent revolver, and eliminating quickly one by one your targets from a roof (I have completed a contract like that).
But you are right. Cold blood is also perfect for a super fast exposed killer.

Post automatically merged: Jan 17, 2021

Yes, Cold Blood is very good and original too. I just wish some balances in terms of structures comparing to the other skills.
You should make XP in Cold Blood without any perk in the tree, like for other skills.
You should be able to have working perks without the Cold Blood perk, for a completely free customization.
In this state, Cold Blood perk is probably the most important perk to choose in the game, even if you don't want to play as a fast killer. It seems mandatory for almost every builds, just at least to unlock the perk point at the Cold Blood level 3.
In this case, why not give us the capacity to unlock Cold Blood mode right from the start, in an innate manner, but just add some bonuses to it with the Cold Blood tree perks? Would make more sense, right?

it requires single perk point.. you can get that very early in the game and its the first perk point i usually invest... considering how many perk points you can get in this game, i dont see this as a huge problem..

 

[LRobin89]

it requires single perk point.. you can get that very early in the game and its the first perk point i usually invest... considering how many perk points you can get in this game, i dont see this as a huge problem..

Yes you are right, that's not a huge problem and that's only one single perk point.

But, first of all, I tried to calculate how many perk points are possible in a playthrough : depending on your trees, more than 100, that seems a lot. But they are still limited.

Then as you concede it, it's the first perk point you usually invest... and so a lot of other players will do. What is the point to let us choose something who will always choose after understanding the game mechanics... As a consequence, why not give us the Cold Blood mode at the start, ‎without knowing it actually, without any bonus, so we can level up by killing people the Cold Blood skill right from the start of the game? This is the only skill you can not level up at base game. And we could save by this way 1 perk point. And also be able to choose the most advanced perks in this tree without choosing the first one (as we can do for other skill trees). Just to balance the trees' mechanics.

Finally, you compared that to Adrenaline in the Witcher 3 : this capacity was available from the start. Then, you was able to choose a skill tree improving that mode. That should be the same for Cold Blood mode in Cyberpunk, I think.

That kind of detail is clearly not a game killer, you are right, unlike the lack of XP for the Athletics skill, but it really bothers me because it differs from all the other trees and could be adjusted very easily (I think).
That's the same thing for the crafting perk, automatically disassembling junk. You lose money, that's not a big deal, you have so much in the game, but hey, that's a bit frustrating for a lot of us who took the perk without realizing this is almost a handicap in a playthrough, and doesn't make much sense.

I wanted to indicate the small details to correct, because I didn't see really big flaws. Or does not believe they can change them easily if they exist, like the cops suddenly appearing, the lack of chase with them, or the lack of content, like tatoo shops, etc. This kind of changes would ask way more effort.

 

[jj284b]

all i think its just a minor detail, and i dont doubt when overhaul mods come out eventually, there will be plenty of such changes available.. after all, its singleplayer game..

Whats more interesting for me though is the fact how my perception towards attributes changed over time... originally, i thought its best to max out few attributes and leave other low, but now, i think its much more beneficial to actually progress all at least to 12 and then specialize with few.. a lot of cyberware and useful perks are only available after attribute 10-12, while not that many really important skils are at skill level 18 or higher... So you can have quite strong character if you dont specialize but aim towards those boundaries to get best stuff...

 

[keviny01]

What if i told you, you can use stealth and be fast. Stealth does not necessarily mean slow and steady. If you have a good stealth build. You can probably delay detection times long enough that you can just run up behind people and shiv them. The more you invest in a build the better it gets. Cold Blood is good and later on it becomes insanely good.

If you have to crouch a lot you can't be fast. If enemies are 100 feet apart you can't be fast. If a quickhack takes 8 seconds you can't be fast, compared to one-shotting with a sniper rifle. If you have to keep dumping bodies into containers, you can't be fast. But if I fight like Rambo, I can kill 10-15 enemies in a row without missing a single cold blood. You simply CAN'T do that if you sneak around. To add insult to a stealth player, a non-stealth player like me can still dump bodies into containers AFTER a fight and rack up HUGE stealth XP. Because of that, my stealth has the highest XP among all my skills even though I'm mostly non-stealth.

One big advantage stealth has is that you can often save game in the middle of combat. If you don't alert the enemies, you are not in combat mode, and therefore you can save.

 

[Lexandro_Albion]

What if i told you, you can use stealth and be fast. Stealth does not necessarily mean slow and steady. If you have a good stealth build. You can probably delay detection times long enough that you can just run up behind people and shiv them. The more you invest in a build the better it gets. Cold Blood is good and later on it becomes insanely good.

^This. If you use slow time, have high stealth and stay out of direct line of sight you can ghost an entire hotel of people in minutes undetected just by running up behind them and snapping necks before they can react. Hell you can even just run at people with a Katana and kill them before they can ask for support even when you see you.

This is not splinter cell. You do not have to crawl around 24/7. You can use stealth in multiple ways, with cold blooded or not.

 

[keviny01]

^This. If you use slow time, have high stealth and stay out of direct line of sight you can ghost an entire hotel of people in minutes undetected just by running up behind them and snapping necks before they can react. Hell you can even just run at people with a Katana and kill them before they can ask for support even when you see you.

This is not splinter cell. You do not have to crawl around 24/7. You can use stealth in multiple ways, with cold blooded or not.

There are so many requirements just to be able to do that, whereas a low-level player with low skills can just charge at the enemies and get cold blood easily.

 

[Aetrion]

The crafting perks need to be changed or moved to whatever tree the actual items being crafted reside in. The crafting for legendary quick hacks makes sense, it comes in when you have become a legendary hacker. The crafting for everything else in the game doesn't, because it makes it mandatory to be a mechanic to be top end at basically anything else.

No matter what weapon you pick for yourself, without crafting you can't access legendary iconics, you can't properly handle mods, and resources basically serve no purpose. Being a mechanic isn't an alternative to other ways of playing the game right now, it's basically a requirement if you want to be good at anything. The bonuses aren't minor either.

The other skill trees need to at the very least contain a perk that gets you in contact with an NPC who can do the crafting for that item. It's totally absurd that someone who specializes in, let's say, pistols has no ability to get the best pistols unless they are also a techie. It simply makes no sense that nobody in the world can build and mod them for you.

 

[heskyttberg]

The stealth xp given to dump bodies into container that is minimum of what you should get in athletics for ripping a turret or forcing door/shutters open. Since there is a lot less door/shutter maybe even 3 times as much as for dumping bodies.

Without the berserk/slide glitch athletics will be close to impossible.

Even with a berserk mod, you do not get more athletics xp for melee fighting, you only get about 400 xp for activating berserk.

So this means that to get athletics to level 20 you would need to activate berserk about 225 to take it from level 18 to 20.
It lasts 10 second for a legendary one and it has 60 second cooldown.

We can lower cool down by 18 seconds making it 42 seconds + 10 equals 52 seconds so if you can activate it on every CD that is 52 times 225 = 3.6 hours of doing nothing but activating berserk on every cooldown.

Even if we would have berserk legendary from start and 3 mods that lower cool down, I doubt you could max it out in normal game play even if you clear everything and using a melee buiild.

Forget about swinging weapon, killing/running/jumping/sliding/dodging only gives 20 xp for every 3 accumulated stamina bar depletion's. So if you have 200 stamina, you need to do skills gathering 600 stamina before getting a whopping 20 xp.

I said before this 20 xp need to be 400 xp or more, imagine like above with 400 xp you need to deplete full stamina bar 675 times to go from 18 to 20. I doubt you would even do that in a normal playthrough.

I don't think the perks removing stamina use stops athletics xp it still accumulate used stamina and gives the 20 xp.

 

[CS554]

• Athletics skill levels up too slowly. I had twice less XP in athletics ( level 5) than other skills (level 10), despite never using vehicles and fast travel and always running, only using melee weapons and doing any available strength actions I could (doors, windows, turrets) during 80 hours, for example...
• Some athletics perks prevent and worsen levelling in this skill! "Marathoner" or "Like a Butterfly" cancel stamina use and so ways to level up athletics... We should still be able to gain XP by running, dodging even if these perks cancel stamina use for those actions.

Save your fingers and use this this method. If this works on PS.

Use the berserk ability and heavy punch, in mid move go on your inventory. It tricks the game into thinking you are infinitely punching. This also works with sliding.

Note: You need to keep switching between inventory menu and skill to see if effect is working, as skill xp isn't updated on skills page in real time.

Note 2: My Athletics skill was at level 11-14 I think, while I had body 20. It took about 15 minutes or so to level up Athletics to 20. XP requirement just gets that huge that high level Athletics.

 

[Gen_Liu]

I have the game on PS4 since patch 1.06.
Despite the remaining bugs, or the inventory becoming quickly unusable if you have too many items (like in The Witcher 3), what a game! The best in my opinion since The Witcher 3, or Skyrim if we consider 1st-person RPG.

But I have some suggestions regarding gameplay, and notably the skill tree. It is a very good choice to let us select any perk in the trees, if you have the required attribute level. Complete free customization is a perfect design (this is one of the best qualities in the Fromsoft games in their character-building mechanics for instance), but there are some unfortunate disbalances in Cyberpunk.

ATHLETICS

• Athletics skill levels up too slowly. I had twice less XP in athletics ( level 5) than other skills (level 10), despite never using vehicles and fast travel and always running, only using melee weapons and doing any available strength actions I could (doors, windows, turrets) during 80 hours, for example...
• Some athletics perks prevent and worsen levelling in this skill! "Marathoner" or "Like a Butterfly" cancel stamina use and so ways to level up athletics... We should still be able to gain XP by running, dodging even if these perks cancel stamina use for those actions.

COLD BLOOD

• Cold Blood skill only levels up with the Cold Blood mode. This is unfair when other skill tree can level XP without any perk. We should be able to level up Cold Blood by just killing people, even without the Cold Blood mode. The XP reward could be lower than in Cold Blood mode but should be there (for example to level up Cold Blood to 3 even if you dont choose any perk in this tree). It could be done by having the innate ability of the Cold Blood mode when you kill someone, without any bonus. Bonuses would be provided by the different perks of the tree. (EDIT: Like Adrenaline in the Witcher 3).

CRAFTING

• Scrapper skill automatically disassembles junk, even expensive ones. But this is pretty bad regarding 750€$ junk... It wouldn't be much a problem if the components were better for this expensive junk. In the Witcher 3, junk had level of rarity, why not here? 750€$ should give you rare components when disassembled at least.

PERKS ONLY WORKING WITH OTHER PERKS (should not)

• To emphasize customization, we can choose any perk, in the order we want. That's a very good choice in terms of gameplay design for the players. But some of them don't work without previous perks! This leads to mistakes during the creation of the character!
• You should either locked those perks if you don't have the required ones. OR (better in my opinion in terms of freedom in the customization) just activate the required condition for those perks by themselves. Making them independent. Here 2 examples.
• Dog of War and Wolverine can not activate without Regeneration but should. Those 2 perks should work by themselves and activate regen during fights. Regeneration too, but this perk should have something else, special to it in consequence. Why not copy/paste the Epimorphosis effect, but during fights, for the Regeneration perk? For example, with Dog of War but not Regeneration, you would have faster regen during fights but only to 60% health. Conversely, with Regeneration but not Dog of War, you would have a regen during fights up to 80%/100% but in a slow way.
• All the Cold Blood mode-related perks should work independently, not only with the Cold Blood perk. Those perks should work and activate Cold Blood mode by themselves, to be fair with the logic behind the full customization. Except they wont have the bonus given by the Cold Blood perk of on the cumulative charges and increase in speed movement. Actually, as I said previously for the Cold Blood tree, the Cold Blood mode should be innate for any character. Only the different bonuses should be dependent on the perks. That way, all the perks of this tree would work independently from each other. That way, no mistake could be done during the choice of the perks, they would always work as intended, and the customization would be completely free (no need to take the first Cold Blood perk if you don't want to).

I hope these remarks would be taking into account. In this state, the customization in the skill tree can be pretty frustating.

For players in the forum, feel free to make other suggestions to improve and balance the current tree, which is very good in this state but displays some important flaws.
For CD Projekt Red team, wish you the best to perfect your yet-amazing game. I hope my suggestions would be useful in this regard.

This topic just shows the tip of the iceberg when it stands to ballancing Perks.
I'm not saying I disagree with the changes you're proposing but there's way more important changes to make imo (like fixing hugely overpowered Perks or hugely useless one, for example. You did mentioned one though, which is "Scrapper". I don't even think it's a matter of item rarity, this Perk is straight up detrimental no matter what, it should be changed to something more useful).

Btw, unless you mean something else and I don't get you properly, Cold blood does improve even if you don't invest into it.
I've never put a single point in that Skill tree and it's at 5 already (don't ask me what I do to make it increase, I have no clue but admittedly, it does).

 

[LRobin89]

This topic just shows the tip of the iceberg when it stands to ballancing Perks.
I'm not saying I disagree with the changes you're proposing but there's way more important changes to make imo (like fixing hugely overpowered Perks or hugely useless one, for example. You did mentioned one though, which is "Scrapper". I don't even think it's a matter of item rarity, this Perk is straight up detrimental no matter what, it should be changed to something more useful).

Btw, unless you mean something else and I don't get you properly, Cold blood does improve even if you don't invest into it.
I've never put a single point in that Skill tree and it's at 5 already (don't ask me what I do to make it increase, I have no clue but admittedly, it does).

Yes, I proposed only minor changes to balance skills. I do not want to change all their design choices (too much work, and I respect what they decided).

For Cold Blood skill, if I don't take 1 point in Cold Blood perk, I don't get any XP for the skill. I killed everyone during 80h and took a lot of perks in this tree (except the first one, my mistake). I realized then I was still at 0 XP... and my perks were probably not working since the beginning. Patch 1.06 on standard PS4.

In an other save I took the first perk, and I am level 5 in Cold Blood, no problem.

So are you sure you didn't put a point in Cold Blood perk? Or maybe that's the last patch 1.06 that introduced the mistake and you were playing on a previous patch?

 

[Gen_Liu]

Yes, I proposed only minor changes to balance skills. I do not want to change all their design choices (too much work, and I respect what they decided).

For Cold Blood skill, if I don't take 1 point in Cold Blood perk, I don't get any XP for the skill. I killed everyone during 80h and took a lot of perks in this tree (except the first one, my mistake). I realized then I was still at 0 XP... and my perks were probably not working since the beginning. Patch 1.06 on standard PS4.

In an other save I took the first perk, and I am level 5 in Cold Blood, no problem.

So are you sure you didn't put a point in Cold Blood perk? Or maybe that's the last patch 1.06 that introduced the mistake and you were playing on a previous patch?

I'm 100% positive I didn't take any Perk from the Cold blood tree and in fact you know what, since it's free, I took a screenshot:

That made me realize that I though I was at 5 but I'm at 4. Either way, that Skill levels up and I never invested any point in it.
In fact, I didn't even took any Perk from Cool since a very long time. Only recently I added a couple points into it to pick up Hidden dragon (which feature a Spider on the icon of course lol) but Cold blood were already at 3 when I did and then it kept increasing.

It could be a patch that caused that but apparently, my game isn't affected somehow because that character I'm playing, he's kicking since Day 1 (I'm what you could call an extremely slow player, haven't finished the game even once lol) and as you can tell, I keep building up Cold blood (I'm not even caped at 4, the Xp bar is still filling up).

I though it was normal and to be fair, maybe it is and you encounter some sort of bugs with your game (that would be a pretty big one in fact). It would be interesting to hear from other players see how it goes with them.