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Exploding Penguin -> It's time to introduce a new set of skills to the skill trees (10/15/2015 1:06:33)
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As the title states, it's time that this happens. While there are some problems with suddenly introducing new skills to the skill trees of all classes, if we really want to effectively fix the silly problem concerning energy gain/drain skills then this is something inevitable. Here's why:
-The devs initially removed passives because they were pretty much mandatory places of skill point investment
-But now the devs have replaced them with another skill point sink. When I say skill point sink I mean a mandatory skill where, if you don't have anywhere else to put your skill points, you dump it into that skill.
-With 40 skill points at level 40 and only 12 skills with around 2 being sinks on classes, there's clearly a huge clutter for skill points. People can't invest in certain skills past a certain value too since it increases their cost which they may not want.
-Now, we want to get rid of skill point sinks. That was the whole reason why our beloved passives were taken down then replaced with the even worse skills known as battery backup, energy parasite, etc...
-However, if we do this, we're going to get into a problem known as clutter. Basically what was mentioned earlier, where we have skill points that we can't dump anywhere because we want to maintain specific lower costs for certain skills should the case where skill point sinks don't exist anymore
-In order to fix this, a new set of 3 skills should be introduced for each skill tree. This will alleviate the problem of clutter and make the transition of removing skill point sinks a lot less problematic.
So what's the ultimate motive behind even getting rid of the sinks in the first place? To improve build variety
This will really help make PvP a lot more interesting. Right now you see a BM and guess what they're running? A focus build. Maybe like 1 other type of build I'm not too aware about but it's almost always gonna be the exactly same plasma cannon focus build. Really boring and lame. Same can be said for every single other class aside from the fact that they host maybe 3 but definitely no more than 4 builds that are viable and what people use in PvP. Add 3 new skills into the mix and WAY more possibilities become open. 3 more skills is a 25% increase in the current number of skills each tree has.
Now a lot of people are very vocal about balance and think that a balanced game will always be a fun game, and an imbalanced game will almost never be a fun game, will become worried if this change happens. While I completely disagree with this way of thinking about balance and fun factor for several reasons which would take a lot of time to explain and so I won't do it here I will say that this change will not be too disruptive to balance initially. Upon release, there will be a huge array of new builds to try out. The overall flexibility and functionability of each class will increase drastically. As a result, even if someone does discover a potentially OP build it will very very likely have a counter accessible to multiple different classes or builds. The increase in variety will keep balance in check, and only builds that are just superior numbers-wise will have a clear advantage, in which case are ridiculously easy to balance because all the staff has to do is tweak some numbers to fix it.
Some people might be worried about the rock-paper-scissors matchup concept, where all builds just follow a cycle of hard counters to each other. However, ED is a RIDICULOUSLY 2-dimensional game because it is turn based so there's pretty much nothing you can do about hard counters to certain matchups. This is why bots and cores exist, and why we don't really see it in Omega anymore. Another reason is because of how almost every class is the same since they all have the same fundamental tools at their disposal regarding energy drains/gains which are the heart of the meta right now. Basically, robots and cores can and will cover up for most unwinnable hard counters. Aside from that, if we want a game that actually has classes which feel really different and unique from each other, it's basically impossible to not have hard counters here and there in a turn-based game. It just simply isn't. There isn't an extra factor to the gameplay aside from the turn-based to fix it.
Anyways, conclusively, introducing a new set of skills to the skill tree will improve build diversity which will also improve the overall fun factor of the game while not making a huge initial dent in balance. It also opens up more breathing room for work to be done on the problems with the current meta regarding the skill point sinks that currently exist.
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