Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Complete overhaul of attributes and abilities.

Previous system was flawed, new one is ugly and still flawed.
Unlikely as changes of this scale are to occur, I'd like to present my take on how the character attributes and abilities should look.

Base value of each attribute becomes 5, and players get 1 point per level. You still get 2 points of racial bonus and 3 points to distribute at level 1.

Fortitude (replaces Strength) - a point in Fortitude grants bonus Vitality and a big bonus to Melee Damage.
Melee damage in this case refers to ALL damage dealt with melee attacks and abilities, be it maces, daggers, staves or even touch spells.
Fortitude becomes the primary attribute of melee fighters as it grants them great damage and durability needed to excel in melee combat.

Precision (replaces Finesse) - a point in Precision grants bonus Accuracy and bonus Physical Damage.
Precision becomes the attribute to invest in when your attacks stop hitting their mark. It's a reactionary purchase for melee characters and the primary damage source for ranged ones.

Intellect - a point in Intellect grants a small flat bonus and a big percentage bonus to all Magic Damage.
Intellect would be the go-to attribute for characters that wish to boost their magic damage, as it's flat+percentage nature would offer it's benefit both to those that focus on it exclusively or deal smaller amounts via weapon enchantments.

Resilience (replaces Constitution) - a point in Resilience grants bonus Vitality as well as a small flat bonus and a percentage bonus to Armor.
Resilience becomes the primary attribute for tanks and others in need to increase their resistance and durability.

Wisdom (replaces Memory) - a point in Wisdom opens up one Skill Slot for abilities and allows for items of one level higher to be identified.
Wisdom is a fancier name for the utility stat that absorbs Lore into itself as part of changes to the skills.

Wits - a point in Wits grants bonus Critical Chance and improves the value of items that can be found or stolen.
Wits becomes the stat of thieves and rogues that absorbs some benefits of Lucky Charm and Theft into itself as part of changes to the skills.

With attributes cleared out of the way, time comes to look at the changes to Abilities.

To start with, gone is the distinction between combat and civil abilities, as it takes away from the ability to have a non-combatant on the team, or otherwise to vary the balance between combat and out-of combat utility of party members. Instead, certain abilities that have dual use(like sneaking) are rolled into relevant combat disciplines.
Weapon specific abilities are also gone, as they are boring stats rather than interesting ability unlocks.
With the selection narrowed down, 3 points to start and one point per level is entirely appropriate.

The new Ability list would look as such:
Appraisal: +1 level of item identification and improved barter prices.

Assassination: Increases sneaking speed and reduces enemy detection area. Unlocks abilities that require or enable invisibility.

Charisma: Improves conversation results. Unlocks abilities that boost the performance of allies or hinder enemies.

Cruelty: Increase DoT damage(burning, bleeding, poisoned). Unlocks abilities that apply and enhance or scale with such effects.

Elementalism: Increases the AoE of magic abilities. Unlocks spells that create elemental surfaces.

Knowledge: +1 Skill slot and additional enemy information when using examine.

Marksmanship: Increased bow/crossbow range. Unlocks abilities based on using a bow or a crossbow.

Martial: Reduces damage taken from Melee attacks. Unlocks abilities based on using a melee weapon.

Rejuvenation: Increase the amount of Vitality and Armors recovered. Unlocks abilities that recover vitality and/or armor.

(kickstarter)Shapeshifting: Regenerate some health every turn. Unlocks abilities that shapeshift the user.

(kickstarter)Summoning: Increase summoned creatures stats. Unlocks abilities that summon creatures.

Tactics: Increase positioning(flanking, backstab, high ground) damage bonuses. Unlocks abilities that mark enemies or allow the user to reposition.

Vampirism: Recover health in proportion to damage dealt. Unlocks abilities that take advantage of blood surfaces and grant further healing based on damage.

Under the above system, Skill Slots available to the player are simply Wisdom+Knowledge+Talent bonus(if it applies).

Skills can only be learned not by simply having a point in a single ability, but rather by having an appropriate number of points across abilities that are relevant to the skill effects.
To present some examples:
-Phoenix Dive would require points in Tactics and Elementalism, as it is an ability that both re-positions the user and creates an elemental surface.
-Rain of Blood would require points in Cruelty and Vampirism, as it is an ability that both causes massive bleeding and creates a blood surface.
-Contaminate and Ignite would require points in Elementalism and Cruelty, as they cause a DoT effect that interacts with surfaces.

Do keep in mind however that the above examples use existing abilities merely as samples and I do not necessarily suggest that they even remain in the game with any changes similar to what's suggested being applied.

I don't get your issue with civil abilities. Most people don't like sacrificing power for roleplay bonuses. Maybe a few don't mind, or even like having a weak char or non-combatant but overwhelmingly it's not something people find satisfying. With civil and combat abilities as one, people invariably find it difficult to justify spending points on roleplay skills unless they actually ultimately provide a combat bonus (like bartering granting extra items, or charisma granting extra XP or items for quest rewards, and the like.) Splitting civil and combat abilities gets rid of this dilemma and need to balance roleplay skills against civil ones. I actually wish there were more civil skills that were mostly roleplay focus, or at least the current ones given more roleplay usage, like making loremaster give you more dialogs and specific item interactions (with an ancient sculpture, for example) and the like.

I think they could add a couple talents that let you focus more on civil skills at the cost of combat prowess to appeal to people who want to play characters like that. For example, a talent that lets switch the rate of gaining civil and combat abilities (and grants an extra civil point on the spot), so you gain a civil point every 1 or 2 levels, and a combat one every 3-4. Or a talent that grants 3 civil points at the cost of 5 constitution, to symbolize a weak tradesman.

As far as your attributes, I don't think attributes per level needs to be toned down to 1 again, and fitting in civil skills into them. I wouldn't mind if they gave a slight bonus to skills, like if wits increased the gold/weight amount you can pickpocket by 1-2% per point or something, but not as the primary way. No initiative on wits is weird. Wisdom would suck with 1 skill slot per 1 point. I like the idea of Fortitude increasing all melee damage, even melee spells.

If the game was being rebuilt, I'd probably find your abilities trees thematically more compelling than the elemental distinction we have now, which is a bit cliche, but nonetheless works fairly well. Like there isn't necessarily a "rogue" skilltree, but you'd probably pick between assassination, tactics, and cruelty. Skills requiring different multiple abilities would be cool too and open up lots of freedom for developing skills. Still something they could do of course. I'd add Telekinesis to your list, which would grant skills that let you manipulate enemy and ally positioning.

Edit: Beat you by 4 seconds Stabbey :P

This is such an overwhelming change that it's really more of a suggestion for D:OS 3 than something likely to be implemented in D:OS 2.

That said the system looks pretty interesting. But you really have to remember to use the appropriate terminology used by D:OS. For user-activated things, use "Skills" not "Abilities". Makes it a bit easier to understand if it's consistent.



I guess this means that instead of there being 5 levels of Loremaster which magic items can fall into, identifying items will be based on the item level. It also looks like all items level 5 and below are auto-identified by default since everyone starts with 5 Wisdom.

Unfortunately, the item-identification part still wasn't thought out very well at all. Players can reach about level 30, but it's highly unlikely that anyone is going to pump more than half that amount of points into Wisdom, just because it's not great to have a lot of memory, but all your attacks are really weak because you haven't put any points into attributes which increase your damage.

That means that about halfway through the game - probably much earlier - you'll no longer be able to identify items yourself and have to have merchants do it.





bonus Critical Chance, or bonus critical damage? Just wondering since backstabs are a guaranteed crit, so bonus chance won't do anything.




This is an immediate problem flag. There is no room for a non-combatant on the team. This is more of a talky, quest-solving RPG than a mindless monster-slayer, but there still is a lot of combat.

Splitting of abilities between combat and civil was definitely a good change because it meant not having to fall behind in combat abilities by increasing non-combat abilities.




This is very questionable. What do you imagine the base range of bow/crossbow weapons to be? What do you imagine the maximum range would be with this ability maxed out? The usefulness of increasing the range will depend a lot on how far enemies can appear in encounters.

There's not much point in having a +10 to range (total range of 25) if all enemies are within 15 meters. There's also not much point in putting enemies 25 meters away who have to spend two turns moving to get within range of the players. But if they start out from that 25 meter range and CAN hit players, then that forces one member of the party to be a ranger and to spend all their ability points into Marksmanship. This gets worse if you cut the default range on weapons to 5-10 meters, in which case melee enemies can walk straight up and attack. (And it still forces Rangers to spend all their points onto Marksmanship.)

***

You seem to have neglected any ability which increases elemental damage WITHOUT creating a surface. So either you're cutting out a lot of magic skills, or you're having more spells create surfaces than before, which leads to out-of-control surface spam.





Okay, this might be another problem. Not only do you only have 3 points plus only 1 per level, but now you need multiple points into multiple abilities to be able to use skills?

It would be hard enough in the first place to fairly balance all the skills in the game so there's a relatively even distribution between all the abilities. Look at some of the categories you have: "Martial - Unlocks skills based on using a melee weapon". - That covers a LOT of skills. "Assassination - Unlocks skills that require or enable invisibility." - I can probably count the abilities that affects on one hand.

Adding in dual-ability requirements will mean that users will have even fewer skills available, and it gets worse with ones which require multiple points, forcing them to spread themselves over a ton of ability categories just to get a basic library... and doing that means the power of the ability's passive benefits is weak.

It would be difficult to balance.

Initiative is something I forgot that should probably be put back in there somewhere.

As far as Attribute points being 1 per level, that's because I want to tie Skill Slots and item identification to their number.
There's Abilities that add to that(so you can basically choose to spend an Attribute, an Ability, or a Talent to get Skill Slots/Identification levels), and with the base values halved the 1 per level is proportional.


That's why Appraisal skill exists, and what Talents are for.
It is entirely deliberate that at some point, if your characters aren't keeping up with their studies about the world, they will end up having to rely on the locals to identify their acquisitions.

There's also the Identifying Glasses which, should a system as suggested be adopted, could very well come in varying qualities providing a bonus to the item level that can be identified, say, an endgame glass can identify +10 additional levels which puts a 10 wisdom 10 appraisal merchant character comfortably at the level cap for items with no talents spent.


Chance. I have perhaps erroneously assumed backstabs to be a damage bonus, rather than a guaranteed bonus from another source. File it with the other things to iron out.


The proper balance for this scenario is for non-combatants to have a way to make combat easier.
Buy more grenades/better gear, get the XP from talky quests earlier, etc.

Blacksmith was super broken in the original game, and that's what a non-combatant should do, though perhaps without invalidating the loot drops through crafting(or being an auto-leveling drone back at home-base).


Base range of bows would obviously have to go down a bit which I see as a positive thing overall, since it solves mages abusing special arrows without investing in bow usage. The base range is already hilariously long, so cutting that to something more reasonable in the early game would be absolutely in order, especially that it affects the enemies too.
It solves more problems than it introduces, because now that ranged characters aren't quite as ranged the re-positioning skills can come in later in the game, or the early ones can be weaker.


Almost every skill that has an elemental effect can be ground targeted to alter a surface.
The ones that don't can be comfortably made to be another type plus token points in Elementalism, since it will almost certainly affect the surface the target is standing on.
Cruelty and Charisma together cover the vast majority of such abilities, and a mage is almost certainly going to have points in Elementalism to begin with anyway.


That's the point.
If you put a point everywhere, you shouldn't just be able to use the best of everything.
You want that source skill that turns a poisoned person into a poison puddle? Stack Cruelty instead of spreading thin.

On the other hand, I have no issue with there existing a different version of "<creature> Dive" for every possible combination and ratio of Tactics+another skill.

You're also always only unlocking abilities you already have the primary synergy for: you don't go "I might as well pick up a point in Warfare since Phoenix Dive works well as a Pyromancer", you have to actually invest into specific synergies to get specific skills and hopefully there'd be enough of those to make every combination offer at least something.

If that's the case, it seems somewhat pointless to even have another system for identifying items other than merchants. It's an obviously flawed design to tie identifying items to points in attributes and an ability which becomes less and less useful over time and eventually becomes worthless. Just only allow identifying items to be done at merchants or through specific items.

The Knowledge ability is similarly flawed because (A) points put into that one are points not going into combat abilities. (B) You'll run out of useful information for Knowledge to reveal well before you max out the skill.




You seem to have missed what I was trying to say. What is a "non-combatant" doing as a party member in a Divinity game? The party size is too small and the amount of combat is too great for a non-combatant to be a good fit in this type of game.




I don't think I understand how your system is supposed to work. Have you taken a look at all the skills in the alpha and classified them, putting them into the appropriate ability categories? Then, have you determined how many points into the abilities you'll need to unlock those skills?


Assassination Skills:

Charisma Skills:

Cruelty Skills:

Elementalism Skills:

Marksmanship Skills:

Martial Skills:

Rejuvenation Skills:

Tactics Skills:

Vampirism Skills:


I can't make any informed opinion unless I see what you have in mind - both where the alpha skills fit and the number of points in the ability needed to use them.

That specific issue is something I very well have accounted for.
Much like how not every level of a combat ability would give you access to new skills, Knowledge would past a certain point serve only to expand your Skill Slots when necessary.


It's hard to really use the skills available in Alpha as a baseline, since many of them are IMO garbage to begin with, especially after the recent changes to things like Ignite and Contaminate.

As per my "<creature> Dive" comment, the idea is to have lot's of similar abilities that have varying flavor and power based on how heavy the investment to unlock them is.
What I have in mind is something along the lines of:
Throwing Knife (Assassin 1) - Throw a knife that deals piercing damage without breaking stealth.
Poisoned Knife (Assassin 2, Cruelty 1) - Throw a knife that deals piercing damage and poisons the enemy, without breaking stealth. Enemies already poisoned take additional damage.
Shuriken (Tactics 2, Assassin 1) - Throw star-shaped blades to slow down the enemy, gain 1AP when used from stealth.
Shadow Knife (Assassin 4, source) - Throw a Throw a knife that deals piercing damage and become invisible. If you are already sneaking or invisible, you are not revealed and deal massive additional damage.

It ties in nicely into the skill crafting thing too, now that I think about it.
Since all of those are a flavored variations of the basic skill: Throwing Knife.

So not only do you want to throw out Attributes and Abilities, but skills as well. That's definitely a "not now, maybe in a brand new game" approach. But I'll set that aside.

D:OS 2 is probably going to have roughly 16 skills in each of its 10 schools (160), not counting weapon (4) and racial skills (5). Not many of those are in the D:OS 2 alpha right now since it is the early game.

One reason I asked for the list was because the effort of categorizing them and figuring out the distribution would give information which you could feed back into the design of the new ability categories. I highly doubt that you've already designed 160 skills to go with your new system, so trying to fit the existing 50 skills into your system would be a good starting point.

Evolving skills is nice way how to reduce skill explosion which suffered DOS1 late in game. It looks to me that Larians are trying to fight this with memory, but you still have a load of skills in the book. So, finaly you will scroll up and down in the book before combat ... if combat is not ok then load and select another deck. Chmm.

I thinkg that evolving skills might be implemented in the current game.

Just a note, do I understand correctly that when you get better skill then older is replaced ?

See, the beauty of this system is that I need only design 3 skills for each tree(the ones you pick from when you start), and the rest of them practically designs itself, since it's just a mixture of <skill 1> with <trait B>, with an occasional upgrade to account for higher mastery.

But just to entertain your original query:

Aerothurge:
Blinding Radiance - Charisma + Elementalism(it's an AoE Debuff)
Electric Discharge - Elementalism(it's a spell that can electrify puddles and clouds)
Favourable Wind - Tactics + Charisma(it's an aura that boosts mobility)
Shocking Touch - Elementalism + Shapeshifting(it's a spell that'll electrify surfaces/clouds the target is standing in, and transforms your touch into electricity)
Teleportation - Tactics + Summoning(it's a spell that moves another entity)

Geomancer:
Fortify - Rejuvenation(it restores and boosts armor)
Fossil Strike - Elementalism(it's a spell that creates a surface)
Magical Poison Dart - Cruelty + Elementalism(it's a poison dart that interacts with surfaces)
Contamination - Elementalism + Cruelty(it's a spell that turns relevant surfaces to poison)
Impalement - Elementalism + Charisma(it's a spell that creates surfaces and impairs enemies in a large area)
Acid Spores - Elementalism + Cruelty(it's a poison spell that creates surfaces)

Huntsman:
First Aid - Rejuvenation(it restores health and removes impairments)
Mark - Tactics(it marks an enemy and denies them positioning benefits)
Marksman's Fang/Ricochet/Arrow Spray - Marksmanship(they are all special bow attacks)
Snipe - Marksmanship + Assassination(It's a special bow attack that benefits from stealth)
Tactical Retreat - Tactics(it's a purely positioning move)

Hydrosophist:
Armour of Frost - Rejuvenation(it restores and boosts magic armor)
Global Cooling/Hail Strike/Rain/Winterblast - Elementalism(all create surfaces in an area)
Healing Ritual/Restoration - Rejuvenation(both restore Vitality)
Steam Lance - Elementalism + Rejuvenation(it's an area attack spell that heals allies)

Necromancer:
Blood Sucker - Vampirism(it's an ability that interacts with Blood pools)
Decaying Touch - Cruelty + Rejuvenation(it's an ability that turns Regeneration effects into DoT effects)
Infect - Cruelty + Elementalism(it's an ability that turns surfaces to poison)
Mosquito Swarm/Rain of Blood - Vampirism + Cruelty(both abilities cause bleeding, while stealing Vitality/creating a Blood surface)
Shackles of Pain - Cruelty + Tactics(it's an ability that marks an enemy making them receive damage)

Pyrokinetic:
Burn My Eyes - Charisma(it boosts an ally)
Haste - Tactics + Charisma(it boosts an ally's mobility)
Fireball/Ignition/Infectious Flame/Searing Daggers/Spontaneous Combustion - Elementalism + Cruelty(they all cause elemental damage in an area and set Burning to enemies)
Fireblood - Elementalism + Vampirism(it creates fire surfaces and makes bleeding cause further fire surfaces)
Summon Flaming Totem - Summoning + Elementalism(summons a creature that strongly interacts with elemental surfaces)

Scoundrel:
Adrenaline - Tactics + Rejuvenation(it's a self buff restores AP)
Chloroform - Assassination(it's an ability that doesn't break Stealth)
Cloak and Dagger - Tactics + Assassination(it's a movement ability that doesn't break Stealth)
Levitate/Vault - Tactics(both are abilities that help with positioning)
Mortal Blow - Assassination + Warfare(it's a Melee strike best used from Stealth)
Sawtooth Knife - Cruelty + Warfare(it causes Bleeding via a Melee strike)
Throwing Knife - Tactics(it's an attack that benefits from positioning, but otherwise isn't strictly beholden to any other category)
Walk in Shadows - Assassination(it sets Invisibility on the user)

Warfare:
Battering Ram - Tactics(it's a combat ability that primarily moves the user)
Battle Stomp - Warfare + Elementalism(it uses a melee weapon to clear surfaces)
Blitz Attack/Crippling Blow/Overpower - Warfare(they are all special melee weapon attacks)
Phoenix Dive - Elementalism + Tactics(it's a mobility skill that creates elemental surfaces)
Rage - Charisma + Tactics(it's a buff that boosts combat power and mobility)

Since it's pretty late as I post this and it's already a long post as it is, I'll leave my ideas as to what the proper suggested abilities for the new system would be for another time.



No, you keep them all. If you want to just fill your bar with 5-6 versions of "throw a sharp object" that's an option too. Great for immersive role-playing.

Great for abuse cooldown. Great for confuse an average player. Greate for many things ... .

You seems an RPG expert, however, there are thousands of wife, clerks, retires who would like a play a game. But not a messy game, you know ? :-]

Skill explosion wasn't the problem with Divinity Original Sin 1s "late game"

The issue with that game is that the skills basically all but stop halfway through the game.

Once your done with Hyberion... You pretty much got all the skills with maybe 1 or 2 more master skills... and thus the game becomes a LOT more boring because of it.

Thanks for the list, Naqel. Using that, I went backwards and filed skills according to your suggested categories. I was not surprised to find out that produced some ...interesting effects on balance.

• Assassination holds 3 solo skills (only points in Assassination needed) and 3 combo skills (needs a point in Assassination and one other skills), split between three different abilities (three different abilities can combo with Assassination for a skill) For a total of 6 skills.
• Charisma has 1 solo skill and 5 combo skills, split between two different abilities.
• Cruelty has 0 solo skills and 9 combo skills, split between 5 different abilities. In other words, points invested into this ability on its own give no skills.
• Elementalism is the best investment, with 6 solo skills and 11 combo skills split between 7 different abilities.
• Marksmanship is the second worst investment with 3 solo skills and 1 combo skill. (4 total)
• Martial/Warfare has 3 solo and 3 combo skills, split between 3 different abilities. (6 total)
• Rejuvenation has 5 solo skills and 1 combo skill. (6 total)
• Tactics is another extremely useful ability, with 4 solo and 6 combo skills, split between 4 abilities, for a total of 10.
• Vampirism is pretty bad with 1 solo and 3 combo skills, split between 2 schools (4 total).

Looking at the "real world example", this design looks far from ideal.

Some of these abilities - particularly elemental attacks and healing - gain access to a lot of skills just from points into the base ability. Physical attackers get only about 3 skills from the base ability and need to do quite a lot of point-splitting, PLUS they all need to invest in the Tactics ability for mobility.

In other words, this system promotes wizard dominance and substantial disadvantages for all other classes.

Not to mention that it's incredibly convoluted. If I need a map and flowchart to figure out what skills I can get, it's probably too complex. Plus, this is the version without number of ability points required to learn the skill.




Are you trying to say that you think it is wrong for users to reload and switch their skills to a more appropriate loadout?

reload and try different approach is ok. What is not so great,a game who requires knowledge of hundreds combination.
Rock, paper, scissor - lot of fun, everyone plays that since toddler
Rock, paper, scissor, lizard, Spock - only Sheldon likes that

That I am saying. Less is more.

The problem is that this isn't a "real world" example, it's just hammering the existing skills(of which I remind you I consider most of to be garbage in need of a rework as well) into a system that's not designed to hold them.

Were my system adopted, each school gets 3(elementalism 4, to account for the 4 elements) basic skills at 1 point investment(Throwing Knife rework example from before), and then those skills are "upgraded" and expanded upon as you unlock more levels.

Example skills each school to start with:

Assassination:
Throwing Knife(1 AP, 1 turn) - deal damage at range without breaking stealth
Shadow Walk(0 AP, 5 turns) - enter sneaking or upgrade sneaking to invisibility until the end of turn
Chloroform(2 AP, 5 turns) - put the target to sleep without breaking stealth

Charisma:
Leadership(1 AP, 3 turns) - aura boosts accuracy of nearby allies
Battle Shout(1 AP , 5 turns) - frighten an enemy
Command(1 AP, 5 turns) - ally gains a damage boost

Cruelty:
Envenom(1 AP, 4 turns) - poison an enemy within melee range, deal poison damage if already poisoned
Strike Vitals(2 AP, 4 turns) - attack with any weapon that causes bleeding
Firecracker(1 AP, 4 turns) - set the target on fire

Elementalism:
Earth Strike(2 AP, 4 turns) - earth damage and an oil surface in a small area
Hail Strike(2 AP, 4 turns) - water damage and an ice surface in a small area
Fire Strike(2 AP, 4 turns) - fire damage and a fire surface in a small area
Storm Cloud(1 AP, 6 turns) - creates an electric cloud in a small area

Marksmanship:
Retrieval(1 AP, 9 turns) - set a 100% chance to recover the next special arrow launched
Long Shot(2 AP, 4 turns) - fire an arrow at double the usual range, deal additional damage based on distance
Ricochet(2 AP, 4 turns) - fire an that bounces to additional targets

Martial:
Whirlwind Strike(2 AP, 5 turns) - strike all nearby enemies with your melee weapon
Crippling Blow(2 AP, 5 turns) - strike a single enemy and cripple their movement
Quick Stirke(1 AP, 3 turns) - perform a basic attack at a reduced cost

Rejuvenation:
First Aid(1 AP, 5 turns) - restore a portion of targets vitality and remove certain harmful effects
Helping Hand(2 AP, 3 turns) - remove knockdown, cripple, burning and restore some armor
Warm Over(2 AP, 3 turns) - remove frozen, chilled, wet and restore some magic armor

Shapeshifting:
Tentaclewhip(1 AP, 6 turns) - swing a mutant tentacle at an enemy, knocking them down
Scissorhands(2 AP, 0 turns) - replace your hands with blades that deal piercing damage and prevent the use of non-shapeshifting abilities or reverse the effect
Body Spikes(2 AP, 5 turns) - consume all armor and deal a portion of it as damage to all nearby enemies

Summoning:
Call Familiar(2 AP, 3 turns) - summons a creature you control to attack nearby enemies
Spectral Sword(2 AP, 5 turns) - summons a sword that strikes an enemy and continues to do so until retaliated against, doesn't count towards summoned creatures limit
Unravel(2 AP, 3 turns) - inflicts magic damage that's significantly increased against a summoned creature

Tactics:
Sprint(1 AP, 3 turns) - double the movement speed until the end of turn
Tumble(1 AP, 3 turns) - evade all attacks of opportunity until the end of turn
Seek an Opening(1 AP, 1 turns) - mark an enemy decreasing their evasion and increasing the damage they take from advantageous(flanking, high ground, backstab) attacks

Vampirism:
Drain(2 AP, 5 turns) - deal magic damage and gain health in proportion to damaged vitality
Draw Blood(2 AP, 5 turns) - deal piercing damage and create a blood surface
Blood Sucker(1 AP, 1 turns) - clear blood from nearby area and recover vitality in proportion to the amount cleared


While I'll concede that the exact details are up for improvement(like adding a school that can hold/enhance touch and bolt spells, instead of making those elementalism hybrids), the system is no more convoluted than the current one, and I'd even say it's less so.

Phoenix Dive is a prime example of this:
It's a fire themed skill that got moved to warfare because warriors need it to walk on fire.

There's things like all the poison magic being in earth, even though, of the ones available, necromancy is the word people unfamiliar with the game would use when thinking about poison or the variety of other skills that really shouldn't be where they are, but there isn't anywhere else to put them, like First Aid.

In the current system some skills are just arbitrarily shoved into one tree instead of another, even when it benefits only from the one it isn't in.

In my system, if you want a skill, you level the trees relevant towards it's functionality, which you can check at the store before you buy the book, so there's no flowcharts involved.

Hell, I'd much prefer a flowchart that offers proper sense of progression, than the current system where one point is enough to pick up a skill "for utility", resulting in everyone having access to the 24/7 stuns and escapes so long as they invest in memory along the way.

Phoenix Dive was likely not a "Fire skill" originally.

If I had to guess it is the same thing that was with Rain of Blood.

In which... They are both "Skill combinations" that were moved to being vanilla skills instead of remaining for skill crafting.

My point stands: it's a skill that benefits primarily from a skill school different to the one that it's learned from.

No amount of points in warfare will improve Phoenix Dive, because it never deals any damage to enemy armor.
It benefits from Pyromancer directly, since it's fire, and Aerothurge indirectly, since fire damages Magic Armor before Vitality.

Phoenix Dive is NOT an attack... The damage it deals is tertiary at best (and frankly is more of a liability)

Which I wouldn't care so much but the AI keeps treating it like an attack...

I don't deny that there are problems with at least some of the current skills. However, in my opinion, if the only way for your ability system to work is to throw out all the existing skills, that says more about problems in your ability system than problems in the existing skills.

Slotting the existing skills in showed that consolidating all elemental skills into one ability and splitting the so-called "Tactics" skills off from the others produces a system which gives lots of benefit for magic users and forces normal attack users to split points between their weapon ability and tactics for mobility.

Bunching all AoE skills into one tree, all DoT skills into another tree, all mobility skills into one tree... that does not make for a coherent skill set because instead of picking one ability set containing a lot of skills which has a little of each, now you need to pick 3-4 ability sets because of the one or two skills they each contain.




LOL! LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL




That's a neat catch, you're probably right that they do seem more like the result of skill-crafting combos.

Are you being deliberately dense?
This does nothing to counter my point.

Things that Phoenix Dive does:
-Moves you from place to place.
-Set fire to surfaces.
Things that Phoenix Dive does not do:
-Damage Armor.

What you think of the skills purpose or function is utterly irrelevant to the fact that it doesn't benefit from points in Warfare, at all, and does benefit from Pyromancy while also being fire themed.


This is literally a non-point, since a vast majority of characters ends up picking up multiple skill-sets regardless.
It's also a superior system in terms of balance, since it locks out all sorts of abuse the current one-point-wonder system has and offers a much cleaner sense of progression and theming(though across slightly different lines) for the character.


Just because you're unable to comprehend something is no reason to laugh like an idiot or misspell people's names.

Well I guess I'll voice my support for multi-ability skills, but it very much would require wholly different skills than we have currently. It would definitely require some kind of clear skill tree built in the game, or otherwise extremely intuitive ability trees and skills, which I think the OP's skilltrees are for the most part. Though I do think putting all elemental skills into the same tree is a bit much for how important elemental interactions are in the game (and presumably in a D:OS 3 as well).

Maybe you could have, like, the "Temperature" tree which deals with heat and cold, which is more the pure magic damage tree, and an Earth and Air tree (Paganism? Or more like manipulation of "Substance") which is more utility oriented with buffs, terrain manipulation, knockdowns, etc.