[REQUEST]Cheaper Skills - Horizontal Progression

[Phinnway]

[REQUEST]Cheaper Skills - Horizontal Progression

I want to make a mod that accomplishesh two things:

(A) Unlock all skill slots from from level 0 Already done.
(B) Makes it so you only need to invest one point in a skill to have the highest upgraded version. Basically, make it so all skills only cost 1 point.

The goal of this mod is giving players more skills to mess around with and hence a better sense of progression. Having so many skills should be counter-acted by the fact that you can only have 12 skills equipped at one time.

Ideally this mod would be used in combination with other mods that add combat stats on monster strophies and things like that.

For balance I intend for you to have enough skills points to unlock around 33% of all skills by level 30. That's compared to vanilla where you only have enough to unlock 20% of all skills by level 30.

________________________Update 8/29/15 ______________________________

To maintain a sense of progression, I'm considering alternating unlocking skill points and skill slots on level up instead of unlocking all skill slots from level 0. However, you'll still have all skill slots unlocked by around level 18.

Also, I think I'll make it so you only need 1 point in a tree to unlock teir 2 and teir 3 skills. And 4 points in each tree to unlock tier 4.

 

[Mordek113]

I don't really understand point B

"(B) Reduces the cost of all skills to 1 point and upgrades all skills to the highest tier."

You mean player can give only 1 point in 1 skill, (not 5 or 3) and this skill is maxed out to max tier?

Rest things is pretty easy to do:

Check ...\gameplay\abilities\geralt_levelups.xml to set geralt skill point every level

Place of powers - scripts\game\gameplay\interactive\placeOvpowerEntity.ws

To unlock all skill slots and edit skills - ...\gameplay\abilities\geralt_skills.xml

 

[Phinnway]

I don't really understand point B

"(B) Reduces the cost of all skills to 1 point and upgrades all skills to the highest tier."

You mean player can give only 1 point in 1 skill, (not 5 or 3) and this skill is maxed out to max tier?

Yeah. Skills only have 1 tier now and it's the highest teir. So all you have to do is spend one skill point and then you have the fully upgraded version of the skill.

Thanks for your help

 

[Fartuess.807]

Vertical progression basically ends up in killing possible existence of builds that are using interesting perks from different subtrees (And devs often place interesting strategy changing perks on the end of the tree and putting stat boosters at the beggining). It limits creativity and potential "build space" dramatically. Flat talent trees (basically losely flying perks) are getting rid of tradeoffs that players have to do when creating builds. The best talent tree is not deep one, but breadth ones in which you spend your points getting stuff you find useful instead of spending it to get to them... at the end of the game... Breadth trees have their own problems but those can be solved by various gating techniques or "muli level breadth trees" like it was in case of first Witcher game. CDPR tried to make a twist by limiting number of perks you are actually using by including talent slots. This created situation where you are going into deep tree and don't get all perks in the process which possibly widens "build space" despite of having deep tree. It ends up in something working like Deep tree where you choose perks that will build flat tree where you choose actual functioning perks, but you can change used perks all the time. It is kinda weird solution made to enable pseudo resettng the talents without resetting it completely. It would suit for turning on augmentations in Cyberpunk 2077, where shooting should be more important than development of character skills and perks, but not in fantasy rpg. But if you want to redesign in to proper complex bredth talent tree, then you would have to redesing specific perks too. Someone on the forums created mod, where you don't have to place perks into slots to have them enabled - people don't like buying stuff and not getting it even if it in such way in a game for balance reasons aka reducing power creep.

 

[Phinnway]

@Fartuess.807 Thanks for commenting. I've been trying to identify what exactly it is that I don't like about The Witcher 3 skills trees that inspired me to make this mod. I think a big part of it is that your build doesn't really "come together" or "feel complete" until late-game because you don't unlock all your skill slots until level 30.

Right now I'm trying a version where I simply increased the amount of skill points you get because I couldn't figure out how to make a version where skills only cost one point and still had the right amount of perks. When I first tried it skills only had their rank 1 bonuses.

I decided the "right" amount of skills points to have is enough to buy roughly 33% of all skills by level 30. In the vanilla game you only have enough to buy 20% of all skills by level 30.

 

[Fartuess.807]

Well... me and my brother wrote so much about character development of Witcher games on polish subforum (before TW3 came out) that you could release the book by combining them together .

 

[Phinnway]

Well... me and my brother wrote so much about character development of Witcher games on polish subforum (before TW3 came out) that you could release the book by combining them together .

It's too bad I can't read Polish then