So what got a new lease of life?

[Tzcheese]

@weeping.moon

I heard they were doing weapon specialization as keystones, but it was scraped due to bad balance.

@FatsharkCatfish

Initial designs for the Veteran talent tree included weapon-specific Keystones, with the plasma rifle, bolter and power sword as first set. The idea was to create specific bonuses for different play styles while introducing mutual exclusivity between them. After multiple iterations and some closed testing feedback, we ended up removing the weapon specific keystones. In the end, any weapon specific node ends up either offsetting the entire balance of the particular weapon or becoming a mandatory talent tax. Neither were impressively interesting.

Personally, I loathe the idea of being forced to use a specific weapon by the talent tree. I get that the available talents are always going to be stronger for some weapons than others, but actually naming weapon sets and saying “you must use this if you want to go anywhere with this class” is just monumentally restrictive. I’m so glad they dropped it. The fact that they’ve added something purely for lasguns and nothing else seems to fly in the face of their realisation around this. Puzzling.

Now, if there was a way to give all of the different classes of weapons something, like what exists only for lasguns right now; That I could get behind. Assuming it didn’t force you down a build path full of nodes you don’t want to get it, of course.