not sure if this is a hot take or an obvious one but i didnt see it discussed much.
i was looking at the skitarii tree and realized it actually isn’t really much different, it can be changed into a regular tree layout and remain functionally the same. i used my ms paint skills and threw together an example of what i mean. correct me if i made a mistake. i didnt bother making the red talents match, just pretend i did. the portals on the sides connect it back like in the hit videogame portal
now upon viewing it in a more comparable layout like this to standard trees i notice some things.
- it’s really just a 4 branches tree but each branch is extra wide and is missing 1 of the 4 between keystone, aura, blitz, ability
- due to this dynamic, it’s FAR LESS connected than other trees, which means you can’t “switch lanes” as easily, which is the main contributor of objectively making the skitarii tree MORE restrictive.
meanwhile the stated goal was:
which i just think is objectively wrong, the opposite is the case. it’s fundamentally the exact opposite of what they say it intended. it’s MORE trees with LESS moving between the trees. the big nodes (so keystone etc) are, in terms of nodes traveled, all further from each respective furthest big node. this results in having to spend more travel nodes to get to a specific talent you want, and forces you to pick up whole talent branches you don’t care about just to get to the aura you want.
meanwhile, on the more recently redesigned classes, this is (almost) solved:
any skill branch lets you directly go into any aura, keystone, ability, blitz, which in turn lets you launch into any skill branch, with the exception of auras and abilities having a 1 talent point tax to swap lanes on the right and left aura, 2 for the respective abilities. the tax point on the first one is one of the best talents in the game though so it doesn’t hurt. the tax points after the ability are slightly prohibitive but the builds you do on psyker generally (generally!) tend to align the ability with the keystone you take anyway.
however, this means in the absolute worst case scenario, on this class, you are forced to take 3 tax talents at MOST. on skitarii this number can go up to 4+4+3+3 = 14 (!) talents you have to take you might not actually want just to path to the keystone, ability, blitz and aura you want.
another thing which someone mentioned is that you can not just smoothly switch auras, blitzes, ability like in most the other trees. i think this is a step back and also makes skitarii feel far less flexible.
anyway i just wanted to point this out. the kinda gimmicky design of the tree is making it a lot less flexible than it could and maybe should be. and at least as far as i can see, it certainly doesn’t make it MORE flexible like the intent was. i don’t know what the solution is, i think if they’re unwilling to rework the gimmicky shape it’s maybe not solveable.
