I actually attacked the humans in hunters edge when they all gathered up after killing the last orc. Was fun, killing fighting 20 guys at once, took a great deal of setup to get right.
Anyway, back on the topic of skills. My idea only really lessens the problem. I'll put it like this:
Problem: players want to avoid using non-combat-optimal skills during combat while still gaining their full noncombat effects. There are 3 main methods to go about this: Item swapping, Respeccing, and companion swapping.
My proprosed solution attempts to address the "nonoptimal" part by making noncombat skills desirable in combat. However, this only goes half way. At some level, either some other skill will become more desirable in combat, or else the newly buffed noncombat skills are by definition overpowered. At that point players will again rely on these other methods to max out the non-combat skill when the situation calls for it, without keeping it that way at all times.
The obvious full solution would be to remove noncombat skills from items, skill respecs, and extra companions from the game entirely. This solution obviously does more harm than good. Alternatively, we can nerf option 2 and 3 so that they are far less appealing. If companions don't auto level (henchmen already don't), making a skill mule becomes detriment to your combat effectiveness (less XP to go around, lower level for your designated combat companion). Instead of removing removing respecs, we can make repeated respecs far less managable by increasing the cost of each respec exponentially. That way you can still change your build mid-game, but if you try to respec every other level for crafting, lockpicking, bartering etc, you are going to quickly hit a wall.
The item part however requires a bit more finesse. If you flat out remove the item bonuses to noncombat skills than making good use of them becomes entirely too difficult. There are so few points to go around that 15 is too much even for many important combat skills. I think ultimately the solution may be to divide skillpoints into seperate combat and noncombat pools
Ultimately though, I'm still not sure the benefits outweigh the costs. This requires removing and nerfing a lot of major features as well as putting restrictions on character building that may reduce depth. It may just be better to live with the item swapping and put in tools so the act itself detracts less from the game. If you can't beat it, legalize it. By this I mean making one-click gear sets and maybe even automating the process of swapping for certain actions like identification.
Last edited by Sotanaht; 08/11/15 03:19 PM.
