Problems Identified by the Community:

1. Odd-Stat Issue: Currently, having an odd-number of the Memory Stat provides no benefit.

2. The Skill Attributes provide little benefit to focusing on their own school or unlocking more utility for the school in many cases.

3. The current Memory system promotes only equipping the fewest skills you need, and pumping up other stats.



To address all three issues in one sweeping change, I'd propose considering the following option:

1. Each point of Memory would simply be considered a "point of memory" rather than unlocking a set of "slots." You would have a Memory Pool equal to your Memory stat, and your abilities would each consume a portion of this pool to equip.

2. All Skill Abilities would be sorted into "Tiers," and each Tier would have specific Memory point costs to being equipped.

3. Every Two Skill Points invested in a Skill School would reduce the Memory cost of that skill's abilities by 1, with a minimum cost of 1 Memory.



E.G. Fireball has a base cost of 3 points as an Advanced Skill. If you have 4 points invested in Pyrokinetic, this would reduce the memory cost from 3 to 1, allowing you to equip it as if it was a Basic Skill.

Basic Skills:

The most basic abilities of a School will cost 1 Memory Slot to equip. (The absolute most basic skills, such as the Touch spells, the "effect foes around me" spells, or the Battle Stomp, Cripling blow type skills.) These would be the 50g skill books.

Advanced Skills:

The next Tier of skills would cost 3 Memory Slots to equip (think of the slightly more advanced skills, such as Fireball, Teleport, or Healing Ritual) These are the spell books that generally cost in the 250g+ range. (I'd decrease the costs to 150)

Adept Skills:

This is the second highest Tier of skills, in which we start seeing Source Points being consumed in addition to generally longer reuse timers and high impact. These would be like our current "source" abilities that we have in game. (I'd price these at 300g)

Master Skills:

These are the "pinnacle" skills in the game which consume multiple Source Points (perhaps all three?) to unleash devastating effects. These are your Meteor Storms, your Hurricanes, your Earthquates, your "Taunt everything in range to target me for two turns" type skills. Your "Instant Death if Magic Armor depleted" necro type skills. By using up 10 Points at default, it makes it very difficult to include these in your build without some very heavy investments in either Memory or the Skill's Skill School attribute.

These would likely be more quest rewards or unlocked later in the game to purchase for 1500g or more. Perhaps we can choose these as some of our perks of becoming the Divine?



Conclusion: Combining it all together with sample builds

If we look at this system now, we can imagine plenty of build opportunities:

Specialists

"Specialists" who pump their Skill Points into their specific Skill School to reduce the cost of their Advance and Adept level Skill Abilities. They have little use for Memory unless they want to equip more than 8 or 10 of their own School's Skills. Lets imagine someone playing a pure Pyromancer:

10 points in Pyrokinetic (-5 to Memory cost) - This reduces the cost of Advanced Skills from 3 to 1 Memory, Adept Skills from 5 to 1 Memory, .

If we assume the base 10 Memory, this would allow several combinations of Pyrokinetic skills to be used at once:
1. 5 Adept skills equipped at once.
2. 4 Basic/Advance (4) and 3 Adept (6).
3. 1 Master skill (7), 1 Adept skill (2), and 1 Basic/Advanced (1).

Now, the player can forgo Memory entirely and pump their Intelligence and Constitution/Wits if they want and only focus on the selection above.

Alternatively, the player can spend some points/itemization on memory to expand their options to add more Fire abilities, or to branch into another spell school for some Basic or potentially Advanced skills. That said, they won't be able to invest in other Skill Schools heavily due to their limited Memory and narrow Skill School Investment.




Generalist Mage:

Lets say you now want a mage who focuses on having as many buffs/debuffs/field effects/combinations at their disposal as they can. A jack of all trades Swiss army knife useful less for their raw strength and more for their ability to enable their team.

2 Points in Geomancer
2 Points in Hydrosophist
2 Points in Aerotheurge
2 points in Pyrokinetic
2 points in Necromancer

Lets say you really want to have access to a wide array of Basic/Advanced skills available at one time, perhaps also mixing in one or two Adept skills as well, so you pump your Memory to 20, which takes some points away from buffing your other main stats to compensate (maybe you go for squisher with low Con, or tank your Wits and forgot crits and turn order, or you sacrifice some Int as well for less total damage but more flexibility).

This would allow you to equip some of the following arrays of skills:

1. 10 Advanced Skills from any combination of the 5 schools (20 points). OR 20 Basic Skills. Or any combination there-of.

2. 2 Basic Skills (2 points), 5 Advanced Skills (10 points) and 2 Adept Skills (8 points).

3. 1 Master Skill (9 points), 2 Adept Skill (8 points), 1 Advanced Skills (2 points), and 1 Basic Skill (1 point).


Split Hybrid

This build focuses on investing equally in two Skill Schools, saving stats used on Memory to instead be devoted to other stats, allowing for different stat types (e.g. Str/Int Int/Ref or Str/Ref.) to be combined, or to focus on two Skill Schools using the same attribute (e.g. Scoundrel and Huntsmen) to add further stats to Wit or Con. This build gets to have a wide selection of Basic/Advanced abilities from either skill school, while still being flexible enough to include plenty of Adept skills as well, or even potentially run a Master skill at great cost.

4 Huntsmen (-2 to cost)
4 Scoundrel (-2 to cost)
(2 points left over to place in other areas)
10 Memory

1. 10 Basic/Advanced (10) Abilities from either skill.

2. 3 Adept (9) Abilities, and 1 Basic/Advance ability (1)

3. 1 Master (7) Ability from either skill, and 1 Adept (3) or three Basic/Advance Abilities (3)



Do you guys and gals feel that this system would improve the current Memory system while still meeting the goals of making players "invest" if they want to equip a wide array of skills, vs some form of specialization to improve a player's ability to equip powerful skills from a specific school?

Can you guys try to imagine what skills would fit into which Tiers?

Could you create some builds with this system to test it out on paper?