At some point in the game, around level 15-ish, upon leveling up, I opened up the Talents panel, and realized that, I wasn't even sure what to take next. Why? Because not much left is that interesting or useful. I remember during early game, every level-up was really exciting. Talents kind of lost their novelty for me when I was about 2/3 through the game.
Now some Talents are "decent", but when you compare them to the game-changing ones, they become really underwhelming. We have a total of 34 Talents, excluding special ones. Yet at level 21, you can get up to only 5 Talents from leveling up - I'm not counting some special ones. 5 out of 34. So I feel that Talents really should be more useful overall, than just some extra flavor you can totally do without.
1. All Skilled Up / Bigger and Better: these two are really of their own kind. They don't really "decide what your character can do" like Talents are supposed to do. But anyway, in my experience, I find that these two are only really attractive during early game. Later on, when all my stats/skills are high and I have all sorts of gears that increase my stats/skills (and I can pretty much buy anything I need at this point), 1 or 2 points don't matter that much any more. I realize I can totally give away these two Talents to get something else that actually helps maximize the effectiveness of my build.
2. Arrow Recovery: The fact that special arrows are fairly abundant in this game, even powerful ones, makes this Talent underwhelming fairly early. Granted, I haven't played an archer build, but I really don't know how much of a special arrow spammer you must be for this Talent to be that useful.
3. Comeback Kid: I played on Tactician and from my experience, I think it's not that hard to avoid dying at all throughout the game. Sure, it helps once in a while, but again, as a TALENT, it is rather underwhelming.
4. Demon / Ice King: 15% extra resistance to X but -15% penalty resistance to Y... so not a clear advantage here. Does Fire or Water constitute a major portion of elemental damage in this game? No, I don't believe so. What about the 10% extra in maximum resistance? What is the default maximum resistance anyway? I don't know. 100%? So with this talent you can stay at 110% without the need to use any potions? I mean, after Black Tea and Large Resist All, my Fire Resistance is 200 something, why would I need that 10% again?
5. Duck Duck Goose: you can evade attack of opportunity. But seriously, you can avoid it for the most part just by being careful, right? It's not like every turn 3 out of 4 of your guys would get hit by 3 attacks of opportunity...
6. Escapist: simple question: If you have beat the game, how many times have you wished you had this talent? How many times have you been in a situation where you really, REALLY needed to flee, but were unable to because enemies were too close? I'm not saying you can never be in that situation, I'm just asking how many times. In my case, one. At level 9.
7. Five-Star Diner: I don't really want to bluntly say that it's totally useless, but... If it worked on ALL consumables, it would be something, but as it is right now, just no.
8. Guerilla: if you have tried to play a rogue char, you know that this Talent is next to useless. You can take advantage of it when you know there is combat ahead, then you let the rogue guy stay back and sneak while the other guys enter combat. Then the rogue guy can get some extra damage when he lands the first hit out of stealth, which, obviously, forces him into combat. And that's about it. Now if you're telling me, "but you can make use of this Talent during combat too"...
9. Mnemonic: I admit, I had this Talent until endgame last playthrough. But at the end of the day, I would still say that, I can go without it. It is the same as 3 extra points in Memory. Again, 2-3 points in late game don't carry that much meaning anymore. Not to mention, in most fights, you really don't need every single one of your memorized skills. With a bit of management, you can totally forgo 3 memory slots.
10. Morning Person: the character gets full HP when resurrected. But even at full HP, without any armor, they can easily be incapacitated. It helps by only resurrecting near the end of the combat phase, but doing that also reduces the overall effectiveness of this Talent. I don't know, you probably must rely on Resurrection A LOT for this Talent to be somewhat useful.
11. Parry Master: I'm not sure about this one. Have you ever done a dedicated "dodge" build? I need someone to tell me how useful this one actually is. Me, I was going with a dual-wielding build with this talent, and at some point, I realized my dodge chance was pretty much crap anyway, so I used the mirror to remove it and took something else. Let's say you have 10 Dual Wielding, one other guy has 10 Leadership. That gives you 30% Dodging. Plus 10% from Parry Master, you get 40%. Maybe another 5% or so from equipment. You can use Potion of Nimble Tumble to get another 50%, and you would get almost 100% Dodging. Awesome! Right? But hold on. But when that value is close to 100, you realize the 10% extra from earlier doesn't matter THAT much anymore... You'd rather exchange it for something else that suddenly seems very attractive NOW... Not to mention, the boost from Leadership is fairly conditional, and the Potion has a duration of 2 turns.
12. Stench: the -25 Attitude can certainly be ignored. So there's the "melee fighters find you less attractive in combat" part. But how much less, exactly? Personally, I was not willing to put my faith in such a vague factor, and spend one whole Talent point on this one. If I don't get focused by melee guys, I get focused by the archer guys. Is there any fight where NOT half of their team are ranged? I'm not sure. Oh wait - the fights with the Voidwoken worms. You got me there. Still... unless every squishy guy on your team has this Talent, otherwise, the aforementioned melee guys will just focus on some other squishy guy on your team.
13. Torturer: you get another tick of damage over time. How helpful is that, exactly? Yeah, you get an extra 400 damage for free, but it comes NEXT turn, and the guy has 8k HP anyway, so...
14. Unstable: you deal 50% vitality value as physical damage in a small radius. Well... I suppose if you combine this Talent with Comeback Kid, Picture of Health, dying on purpose a lot, having a ton of HP, and spamming Resurrection,... then maybe... But wait, if you have a lot of HP, it also means it's harder for that character to die repeatedly, so... Actually, I need to try this strat and see for myself. I'll get back to you.
15. Walk It Off: this Talent reduces ALL statuses by one turn, positive and negative alike - so again, not a clear advantage here. But, if you think about it, it is actually less useful than it first seems. How so? Because, you can avoid negative statuses by playing smart. Not all the time, of course, but that is true to some extent. So generally speaking, chances are, you will be buffing your chars more often than having them being debuffed. The NET difference will be negative. It's the other way around for enemies, because in the case of enemies, mostly they will be debuffed by you, rather than having multiple buffs from their teammates. Now if you tell me, this Talent is especially good for this encounter and that encounter... then I'd still rather not spend one whole Talent point on this one just to get through those two encounters a bit more easily.
Aside from the above, some others like, Leech, What a Rush, Living Armor, they help somewhat, from time to time. Maybe 3 out of 4 fights, they don't do anything. For Leech to do much, you'd need to get HP damage regularly, access to a lot of blood surface, then you'd have to spend APs walking around, consuming blood surfaces, to gain some HP. They don't bring anything exciting to the table in terms of gameplay. Honestly, take out all of the Talents mentioned above, then the ones that don't work with your build, the rest would include the few must-haves that you would always take, and those that you take when you really don't know what else to take. Considering you can take only 5 Talents, this says a lot.
It's definitely not a simple task to make ALL 34 items to be equally valuable. BUT, as it is right now, when you have stuff like Lone Wolf or Savage Sortilege, and stuff like Five-Star Diner, on the SAME table, you can't help but ask "Hey guys what's with the balance here?"
So, this is my take on the Talents. As for, "Then what do you suggest?", that is another topic (which someone else has already opened). There is a thread where we can discuss ideas for new Talents, which is great, but an overhaul of the old ones could be a good start too. (Otherwise, we'd all just opt for the new, suggested Talents cause they're certainly more appealing)
In case anyone patient enough to read through all this, and wants to give any opinions, please, by all means.
Last edited by Try2Handing; 12/10/17 04:16 AM.
