It's not a waste when you can use it instead of having to find the key.
You really think so?
“I need to make a call, but I have lost my $500 cellphone. I’ll go buy a new $500 cellphone.”
-LATER-
“Oops, after buying the new phone, I discovered that my old phone was on my dresser all along. Well, at least that wasn’t a waste because I was able to make that call!!!”
Ability points are a rare and finite resource. They have to be spent sparingly. Therefore, you should get value for these points. Because I have seen no use for lockpicking outside of Cyseal, Lockpicking right now needs more value.
Sometimes, as the tavern locked doors show, you can't acquire the key if you didn't have the right tools. Let's not forget that we haven't seen the later game stages, so who knows, maybe keys are very hard to come by.
What kind of argument is that? “You can’t complain because maybe the issue will fix itself in the areas we haven’t seen.”
The beta is for getting feedback. This is feedback. I can only go by what we have seen. My default assumption is that the beta is representative of the full game.
My complaint ain’t all that complicated to solve. There are a bunch of chests around in combat encounters, and they are all unlocked. Lock some of them. There are a bunch of chests you have to dig up. They are all unlocked. Lock some of them. There are chests inside dungeons. They are all unlocked. Lock some of them.
Suddenly, Lockpicking becomes attractive to use, even in cases where there actually IS a key, because it is no longer a binary “unlocked/locked-with-key-nearby” situation. Because chests were ONLY locked if there was a key nearby, I learned that it was better to look than to lockpick. Introduce uncertainty by introducing some chests which are locked and amazingly, lockpicking no longer seems like a waste of ability points.
Not rocket science!
There's still the issue of "Wizard smash puny chest", but this thread has a couple suggestions for that too.
