Should every tree be as free to pick core choices ie Blitz, Aura, Ability, Keystone at same, little or no extra “talent tax” cost? or should classes be encourage / constricted by the branch they take?
The most optimal talent selection would be a pool (no limits, cherry pick) but for a tree the simplest would be a straight line of no choice or multiple without any “tax” talents in the way… while ours and WoWs originally forced key choices and made reaching and mixing harder to do… should we keep character designs rigid and thematic making mixing hard or tax them? Or a bit in between blitz more fluid others more rigid…
Ogryn lets you choose any grenade with flat node (Operative Modifier) as the mandatory choice to allow greater variety.
PS.
-Ogryn is very special his ability is before Aura… interesting note.
For numbers and reference I counted and compared each tree, terminology used below. Ogryn’s counts below for Aura to Ability is factually Ability to Aura.
Talent Counts: Every talent / node
Total-Locks: Pool minus what is blocked by core choices.
Missed Talents: Everything left over after your 30 talents are spent.
Missed Unique Talents: Passives / Core choices missed after your selection.
Reach: Lowest-Furthest reach to next core choice ie Blitz, Aura, Ability, Keystone
U-Turn: Furthest reach after reaching your next core choice.
Lock Out Passives: Unique corners of trees unable to be reached or U-turned currently in Ogryn and Psyker trees.
I think high amounts of operative modifiers, low Missed Unique Talents, Reach and U-turns lead to the least amount of fun in talent trees. Especially when the unique talents are particularly powerful and clumped ie Zealot.
Zealot with low M.U.Talents, Highest reach and high U-turn cost (caused by lack of centralized nodes).
Veteran has much more talent choice in M.U.Talents but shares high reach and U-turn cost this is less troublesome as its Reach and U-turn is centralized around end of tree.
Psyker with the lowest M.U.Talents possible and having close to the best reach, U-turn (also around end of tree) but little to spend on unique talents, but rather flat nodes.
All 3 have a glut of flat nodes and are likely targeted for revamps in structure as well as increasing / normalizing talent counts, Ogryn becomes new baseline.
Ogryn being recently fixed has the highest M.U.Talents, the lowest reach and U-Turns. With exceptional freedom of Blitz.
Blitzes and Auras should not “lock out” trees at all. They should all be equally accessible for the most build variety.
Zealot has the worst I agree. To take Immolation grenade means wasting a ton of points because the right upper side of Talent tree is really painful to pass up.
Wow, really good analysis. I’m torn because I want my cake and eat it too.
Zealot’s Thy Wrath Be Swift is always so far away, and yet I love it… and my Blitz choice is more dependent on the perks than which one I prefer to use.
That said it’s compelling to trace a path through a node tree because of the hard decisions you are forced to make. Trade-offs can make what you get seem shinier
A bad example in recent memory was just prior to Ogryn re-work when they swapped a juicy %TDR node with a niche %Suppression node for, uh, balance? Ham-fisting the talent tree to crowbar balance cheapened the feeling of achieving a good skill tree imo.
And then a good example is the Ogryn re-work to minimise tax nodes on Blitz. All my builds use Soften Them Up so I never really used the rock!
At the end of the day I feel like having maximum agency while keeping a similar tree structure would be most satisfying for build-crafting. Hybrid builds would be happy! I like your suggestion to remove tax nodes from Blitz, Aura, Keystone, etc. with the addition that regular perk tree branches should still exist for balance and flavour imo.
Why do people want to completely remake the game every year???
If they rework the game every year, we never get big updates… Sure, with such inaction, we’ll still be discussing each class in 2036.
Not sure the game will survive until then.
I’ve never seen developers rework their entire game periodically. To be honest, I have seen it, but it was normal in that context. It was during a closed beta to create a game (I insist, I was part of a game project that went from the beginning all the way to the release of a full game). In that game, the developer experimented with several mechanics and ultimately chose the third one that was tested as the final game mechanic (it was the system behind territory capture and control in a MMORPG where factions could occupy colonies).
All of this is to say that the situation here is NOT normal. You shouldn’t rewrite your game every year… Never seen that, never.
Is it normal for Fatshark to continuously rewrite their game? In other words, do they know what they’re doing and where they’re going?
If all points were created equally, but they are not, hence the additional “tax” points and the dead ends / branches bring in thematic lumps for more complex either or choices.
At the end of the day, you’re just asking for more power and less variety, I just don’t think either is what the game needs
In this post I’m purely questioning the talent tree structure and curious of others ideas, not asking for changes yet just people opinions.
It was because of my attempts of reworks and people voting against structural changes at all that i wrote this thread. Perhaps ignorance so I did math for them.
This is likely a reason people also voted no
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Still a question of to use trees at all or optimize as right now we have purely mathematical/physical imbalance restraints to talent selection beyond talent balance.
Well, in all seriousness I can wear… this will not help me staying on this game.
I can assure you that now I am so disappointed (mainly cause of the total lack of balance) that I just wish that Dune awakening will be my next “every days” game.
This game has too few new content. 1 weapon every 6 months that’s not enough. And even the 1 or 2 missions they give us is not enough.
I want more content and balanced weapons and talents. And to say the least, I love the Ogryn changes… but they are absolutely NOT balanced. Several things make it too strong. And I fear that we will see same move for zealot and veteran.
I can understand several concerns, but as I expected they have just buffed the class.
But why would we redo talent tree? they have just spent 6 months at redesigning Ogryn and Psyker. And they should restart from scratch???
How many time they should entirely redo the classes? we are at 3 for Ogryn and Psyker (1st was the release, 2nd was patch 13, 3rd are the latest patches).
So how many? 4, 5, 6, 10, every year until the end of this game?
New weapons and new maps are never enough, either. They provide some relief but the long waits are a feature of FSs speed. Mastering the melee in VT2 is what got me hooked. I think in Darktide is largely the variety of gameplay on top of it from sprinting, ranged, enemy variety to deep talent selections and builds.
If they could settle on a balanced structure I think, ideally, they could tinker with interchanging positions, swapping lesser passives for new interesting passives and number tweaks at much less time consumption, room for other projects… at the very least lose less players by getting it right earlier next game.
WoW would basically overhaul its trees every expansion with constant changes in between… it is very normal for “talent trees” which is why some have suggested it a failure to revert from what VT2 ended on. Unique classes with only core choices, much easier to balance but absolutely no cross tree choices we see here.
I don’t think anything will, you sound already checked out in every post, but yet still here.
I love the game… but the lack of balance is pushing me out of this game. Btw, Dune is still not here, and as I said, few chances that I adopt it as my “every days” game…
DS, PG, Bolgtun, pickaxes…you always meet someone that uses something too strong, and that’s normal.
And we cannot play in solo…
I seriously wait for a solid solo game mode. The current bots are too bad to handle anything because they have given them worst weapons of the game and a build that can be summarized to “survivalist aura”.
I really love the gameplay… but since patch 13 situation is becoming worse and worse at every new patch.
Now we can see patrols of 15 dreg ragers. Soon we will see hordes of dreg ragers (let’s not talk about DH thrown on us now). This is ridiculous when you consider what we had before patch 13 (2 - 3 dreg ragers were a maximum back to these times).
All of this is due to the buffs they grant us every 3 months. And Havoc is the worst thing they could put in game. No chance it entertains me.
And yes I really wish they could fix the game for my experience… meaning or balancing weapons (cooperation part) or giving me a solo game mode (then in solo, balance is not a problem).
As I don’t believe they will balance the game… I mainly ask for solo.
I mean Patch 13 seemed to be the turning point correlating with the lowest and largest rebound in Darktide. Average player numbers are stabilizing at higher rates than VT2 ever was.
Yes cause of Talent tree… you know the thing you don’t like?
8 more “classes”, lot of combinations… lot of gameplay.
Every times they have removed restricting features, the game has got more players.
And it was not at patch 13 that we have seen patrols of dreg ragers with 15 of them.
At patch 13, we have got a MASSIVE buff.
Let’s say it… there were things that needed buff etc.
That’s not the problem. Problem is about balance.
Since this patch, every problem has been addressed by increasing things:
increasing number of special per 2, and later by 4, now we are at something by 8 and they added the Demon host as a common enemy
buffing weapons every time and never seriously nerf what is too strong
My opinion is that the guy that was behind the combat was the ONLY one that has a clue of what he was doing and in position to balance the game. Sadly, he works on HD2 now…
By the way if you check numbers… they drop after 3 months…
Yes, they never reach that low again…yet the average high sustained 5 months much longer than launch sustain… though the end numbers are quite similar our boosted average is now higher.
Yah i feel the Darktide melee was never as polished as VT2s though the blessings and weapon special was a big improvement
I’m a bit 50/50 on this. I’m 100% in favor of free blitz and ability choice, but I actually want stricter Auras and ESPECIALLY strict keystones.
For Blitz, I think them being right at the top of the tree is the perfect excuse for having as much flexibility as possible. And this should be true for every Operator except maybe Psyker, but Psyker’s tree is fine as it is in this regard already.
For Combat Abilities, I think these should also be fairly flexible, maybe not as much as Blitz. They represent a core identity of any build, and so being able to easily swap adds a lot more build variety with minimal effort.
For Auras, their impact wavers greatly. Some Aura’s are extremely popular, others still quite laughable. I believe since we’re creeping the power here, it might be better to lump unpopular Auras with popular talents, placing them after the Aura selection. I don’t feel every operator should fit this standard. I’m not 100% sold on this notion.
But what I am sold on is having strict keystones. Keystones are where a massive chunk of power should reside, and they should require considerably more investment to reach. This is where the majority of the “Pressure” should come from. In addition to having a lot of power, making them difficult to reach creates interesting choices. Not just “Which Keystone should I pick”, but also “Should I even get a keystone?”.
TLDR: Flexibility is great for build variety, but a certain degree of strictness is necessary so that people actually have to make hard choices when they build. No build should have everything a player wants, sacrifices must be made.
Also, something to be said about each operator having very distinct and very different trees. Perhaps looking for standards is the wrong way to go about it.
The biggest reason I like having the ‘free choice’ is it makes the tree easily expandable. You can just add a new blitz option and not worry about how it ‘fits into’ the tree.
For Vet, it would be nice if all of the blitzes went into 1 common node (toughness or something universal) like Ogryn. If that happened, it would be trivial to add a plasma grenade node because it won’t impact the flow or what is or isn’t accessible. Just boom, new blitz.
It makes it much easier to add new content without a lot of skill tree tweaking.
Yeah you could have unlimited options on a core choice if it has these good funnels of a single node. Limiting it to blitz makes the most sense unless they really want to get creative with other options.
The ogryn tree has 3 sorta archetypes, and that sorta works OK You can mix and match a bruiser and protector, or a protector and a gunner, but it’s a little harder to do a bruiser gunner. Bruiser+gunner make sense to be separated, but… stealth vet and shooty vet don’t make sense to be penalized for mixing… sniper vet seems like a good pairing. And adding a 4th archetype would be difficult, a 5th and 6th, would be a nightmare.
Dev workload aside, a big reason we don’t have more than 3 archetypes is the tree structure is limiting. Adding a plasma grenade to the vet shouldn’t take a tree rework to get things flowing well and balanced. There shouldn’t be hard choices to make when picking between grenades and the nodes you want to take before and after them.
I’m kinda wondering if we had multiple mini trees… I’m not sure how to describe it well but take the current ogryn tree and snip it at the first +25 toughness. so the first tree is 7 nodes. Second tree is the blitz, maybe add a few more modifier nodes. Third tree is the middle toughness gain region. 4th tree is the abilities. 5th is the aura bit, and last is the Keystones.
Once you put in a few points into the first tree, the next would unlock, and keep going in that manner. We would also need a few simple bonus nodes, +15 toughness, etc in the 1st, 3rd tree, maybe some others, more powerful ones like +10% attack speed could be much further down in the last tree.
You can still lock some things behind others, like in the last 2 trees, but being on the left or right side of the tree at the top no longer restricts you swapping archetypes further down.
The bruiser gunner is pretty fun synergy before the keystones. Emptying clip for melee into melee for range and reloads for every damage on either =)
Basically would be the same concept of a singular node for the core choices pre and post without the flat node tax. It may also only require so many points be spent to move on to next subsection.
