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. [...] No initiative on wits is weird.
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.
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.
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.
Critical Chance, or bonus critical damage? Just wondering since backstabs are a guaranteed crit, so bonus chance won't do anything.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
