gabelle said: Another feature that I have seen as a potential great idea is crafting skills influencing combat and general stats. Say a high ranking blacksmith might have higher Dex, constitution, strength because they have spent time hammering and sweating. A tailor might have higher Dex or agility. An alchenist my have a higher perception from being careful with mixes or constitution from being acid spilled on them so many times. Basically spending tons of time doing actual skills might translate into high combat advantage and vice versa.
This is generally a bad idea as it tends to pigeonhole different classes into specific tradeskills unless the bonuses are small enough to not matter anyway (in which case what would the point be). The balanced way is having the benefit of tradeskills on combat classes be the product of the craft.
1. Having skills raised by practice as very important - perhaps as much so as level. I don't think this is a feature in Pantheon and I think the negatives greatly outwiegh the positives. Spending endless hours using the same skill over and over and over is not my idea of fun. The elder scrolls single player games had that - take some damage, heal yourself, repeat for hours and hours to raise skills. Find a relatively trivial enemy and spend hours slapping it around using whatever skill you wanted to raise. No thanks.
2. Taking from anime and manga. That would drive a lot of us away one recurrent theme here is few people on these forums want a game or characters that look like cartoons. Plenty of Asian style games out there already.
3. Crafting skills giving benefits that help in combat. Occasionally discussed and I wouldn't be as fast as Iksar to say it is a poor idea. Certain crafts always go better with some classes than others - a cloth wearing finger waver will have less reason to be an armorsmith or weaponsmith than a warrior. Giving a blacksmith plusses to strength that increase as she raises her blacksmith skills makes plenty of sense. Or plusses to fire resistance. Maybe coupled with a few negatives. Reduced perception for example. Yes I would like such a system though it is far from critical.
One of my core principles is that anything that differentiates characters is good - I like "alts". Thus my position in favor of subclasses (will not happen and probably just as well) and a choice of spec/AA trees in other threads. People whose playstyle goes more to focusing their effort on one character and making it as close to perfect as possible tend to disagree with me on many points, and vice versa obviously. Quite logically - there is no "right" or "wrong" just differing approaches to playing a MMO. So the crafting suggestion plays to my biases.
gabelle said: Basically spending tons of time doing actual skills might translate into high combat advantage and vice versa. I know pvp isn't expected initially, but if there is ever like player war and castles and stuff later on down the road, it would be neat to maybe be a level 80 character that's spent hours upon hours level and training skills go into another player that just went into dungeons with a party, got up in levels to 100, but just stood around towns otherwise thinking they were strong. Then the lvl 80 person easily takes out the lvl 100 person because of all that time spent training skills. The lvl 100 left scratching his head and cussing at the screen....
dorotea said: Having skills raised by practice as very important - perhaps as much so as level. I don't think this is a feature in Pantheon and I think the negatives greatly outwiegh the positives. Spending endless hours using the same skill over and over and over is not my idea of fun. The elder scrolls single player games had that - take some damage, heal yourself, repeat for hours and hours to raise skills. Find a relatively trivial enemy and spend hours slapping it around using whatever skill you wanted to raise. No thanks.
This IS going to be a thing in Pantheon, but only for Skills and not for Abilities.
What's the difference? you may ask... Well your Abilities are the things that cost resources and are part of your spellbook so to speak. We use the word Abilities because not all classes are casters and use spells. Spells are just a type of 'Ability' in this sense of the word.
Skills on the other hand are just actions that your class is able to use that aren't tied to a resource in anyway. These can be passive or activated skills, such as Dodge (passive) or Bandage (activated). These will passively go up as you use them. Some are tied to Abilities in a passive way, such as when you cast a Fireball type spell you might raise your 'Evocation' skill. This doesn't change the damage of the spell, but it will effect your sucess rate at casting. So if your Evocation skill is very low you might Fizzle your spell when you try to cast it. So lets say that your heal spells are tied to a 'Divination' skill and when you are leveling up you always do a lot of healing, so your Divination skill goes up as you play, but since you never really use any of your damaging spells, your Evocation skill might be very low. So when you are level 50 you have a very low Evocation skill. So when you try to cast your damage spells they fizzle on you, but when you cast your heal spells they never fizzle. Note, there will be a specific cap on these skills that is tied to your level. So you won't be a level 80 with skills that are at a level 100 skill rating.
Of course all of this isn't set in stone and perhaps they will drop this skills stuff, but it's in the game up to this point so far...
Check out the following from the Stream with CohhCarnage: Time is about 21:20 in the stream.
https://youtu.be/QWgKSQJtHrA?t=1278
You can see him open up his character window and there is a tab he switches too called "Stats & Skills" where you can see the list of skills his class (Rogue) has and what level they are at. You will notice that rogues have 'Hide' and 'Sneak' listed as Skills rather than Abilities. This suggests that these will not consume any of his Endurance (rogue mana) when used. Of course higher end Enemies may see through his hide and sneak skills, which will require him to use his Shadow Walk ability that does use Endurance (mana) over time.
gabelle said: Another feature that I have seen as a potential great idea is crafting skills influencing combat and general stats. Say a high ranking blacksmith might have higher Dex, constitution, strength because they have spent time hammering and sweating. A tailor might have higher Dex or agility. An alchenist my have a higher perception from being careful with mixes or constitution from being acid spilled on them so many times.
One really big issue with this idea is the fact that if players can get an advantage in their stats by doing crafting, it will make people feel like they MUST do crafting in order to be equal with their peers. On one side you may think of this is 'if you do crafting you have an advantage' but from the other side it looks like 'if I don't do crafting I am at a disadvantage' and thus players feel forced into working on a crafting skill just so they can 'keep up with everyone'.
It's great when games give people options on things they can do in games, such as crafting, but it's not great when people feel like they are forced to do those things just to feel like they compete. Especially when that option is something that not all players will like doing. Some love crafting, but others hate doing it. So making it a requirement in order to have equal stats with everyone else then it frustrates the players who really wish they didn't have to do the whole crafting thing.
dorotea said:1. Having skills raised by practice as very important - perhaps as much so as level. I don't think this is a feature in Pantheon and I think the negatives greatly outwiegh the positives. Spending endless hours using the same skill over and over and over is not my idea of fun. The elder scrolls single player games had that - take some damage, heal yourself, repeat for hours and hours to raise skills. Find a relatively trivial enemy and spend hours slapping it around using whatever skill you wanted to raise. No thanks.
It makes a lot more sense in an MMO than it does in a single player game, imo.