Planning big perk / leveling overhaul - need input for early stages

[H0i]

Hey hey,

 

I'm busy planning a huge overhaul to the perk and leveling systems. The vanilla behavior misses the sense of accomplishment and working towards something for various reasons, such as most of the perks being static (such as +x% damage). As an example to overcome this problem, I plan on dumping these static changes in the very first perk of a tree and make them depend on skill level. Then many other perks will have real abilities, spells and the like which will really change the way you play the game.

 

This is in the very early stages of planning out all the perks and their interrelations. So, I need your input. It would be nice if people could answer these questions:

 

- What do you dislike most about the vanilla perk/leveling behavior?

- What would you really like to see, assuming everything is possible?

- What are some of the mods which manipulate the perk/leveling behavior that you really like?

- Views on adding a "general" perk tree?

- Anything else?

 

When I have enough input I'll probably start a more in depth question list, after considering the outcome of this thread.

[asdgora]

What I dislike most about the vanilla perk tree is that there's no "hardcore" or "role-playing" element in them. I'm a user of SkyRe, it greatly improves perk trees but still, you could choose any perk from any tree you want.

I would suggest making a tree based on classes rather than skills. Instead of having "light armour", "alchemy" etc... why couldn't we have "berserker", "warmage", "assassin". I think that adds a whole lot to role-playing and makes the mod distinct from the other skill tree mods.

I also suggest making the tree based on levels. When you start a new game, you would have 4 trees: "Warrior", "Mage", "Thief" and a huge "General" tree. Leveling up would give you 1 perk point and 1 general, of course the general points allows to unlock only the general perk.

Say after investing 10 points in one of the base trees, it will unlock an array of classes. Investing for example in the "warrior" tree will unlock the "paladin", "berserker", and "archer" tress. You could unlock a second array of skill trees , for example "mage", when you reach level 40 and invest the proper amount of perk points in the base tree. After that, the array of the "thief" tree will be permanently locked

[H0i]

I agree totally. The problem with the current system is that it's dimensionless. Playstyles don't go further than "destruction = destroying stuff", "alchemy = make potions", "conjuration = conjure stuff"... etc. The game was not made with supporting various more complicated ways to play in mind. But this also raises a fundamental issue. If this is taken to a certain level, it might be more effective to create an entirely new game. And that isn't simple, and would require an enormous amount of developers. So I'll need to review the possibilities of these changes, and how far I really want to and can go.

[H0i]

A wild chart appeared:

 

(click for new tab so you can actually read it)

 

http://i.imgur.com/x0Zfs.png