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1.4 Skill Changes: Overview

04.28.08 by Taelorn

This is the first in a series of six devlogs (yes, six) about the major upcoming captain skill changes. We are hoping to release one of these per weekday until we’re done. All of the changes discussed in these devlogs are slated for build 1.4, which should be hitting testbed in early to mid May.

Keep in mind that the details contained in here are subject to change based on feedback, ongoing internal testing and testbed activity. These devlogs will almost certainly be outdated by the time these changes hit the live servers.

Why are we making these changes?
Goal 1: Provide more character options
We want to provide more character options within each career. Ideally, we want there to be enough good skills available that its difficult to select the skills you want to use.

Goal 2: Improve skill chains, reduce the feeling of “wasted” skill points
We want to alleviate some of the issues where players feel they are required to invest in an undesirable chain because of core skills. Although we expect a couple chains (like Survival) to be common to almost everyone in a career, it’s important that the chains are all useful. 1.4 makes some pretty big changes here, and we’ll continue to make adjustments until were satisfied with all the chains. None of the future adjustments should be as major as the ones that are coming in 1.4.

Goal 3: Create a skill landscape that is more conductive to game balance
We want to improve the overall balance of the game and make it easier to balance. The inconsistency in the quantity of tiered skills and some of the structural problems make it harder to provide a level playing field. 1.4 is an important step in balancing the careers. The core components are still there, but there is a lot of new stuff for players to learn, and we’ll inevitably need to make adjustments to fix problems that arise from these changes. This build will help us refine career roles and capabilities.

With that out of the way, here’s whats new!

Tiered Skills
If you look at your skill list, there’s a good chance youll see a handful of unused, tiered skills. These skills have a numeric suffix (Reload Discipline 1, Reload Discipline 2). Right now, theres a variable amount of tiered skills within each career skill tree. We want to provide more character options within a single career and reduce the feeling of “wasted” skill points. The tiered captain skills are all gone in 1.4, replaced by a single skill. This is by far the biggest change to the existing skill system, and you can get an idea of how much itll impact you if you look at your skill set.

Eliminating the duplicate skill points opens up a lot of new skill options, and were making adjustments to other skills.

Whenever these skills were removed, we kept the higher level version of the two. Some of these skills were modified, so the new ones wont always be identical to the ones you see now. Regardless, they’re intended to be the second tier.

As you can imagine, these changes mean there needs to be quite a bit of restructuring of the skill trees. We used this as an opportunity to move skills around, re-arrange trees and add a bunch of new skills. The number of new skills varies per career, but everyone is getting new stuff.

Respec & Dockyards
There are mechanical problems with respec in the current build, especially with relation to the number of docks you have full. 1.4 is bringing two big changes here.

The first is a bug fix so that there shouldnt be any more problems with respec. Aside from that, we’re removing all the skills that give an additional dockyard. Everyone will start with an inherent four dockyards (five ships including their current one), and it wont be possible to increase that number.

At the same time, I also revamped some of the underlying skill structure at the same time. This resulted in a lot of backend improvements that you might not see, but will help us make future changes. When you first log in to 1.4, you will receive a forced respec so that you can reallocate your skill points. In addition to that, everyone will receive a single career respec item. Were giving this out to make it easier to ease into the skill changes, and to help reduce the impact of making mistakes in your first respec in the new system.

A variety of the career skills changed, too. In those cases, you should automatically receive the skills appropriate for the missions youve completed when you log in.

Group Buffs
Group buffs are an important part of the game that pose potential balance problems, especially in regards to speed. There are more group buffs in 1.4, but we’ve also changed the way many of these function. Generally, theres less speed available from group buffs to help reduce the speed gap between lone ships and full groups. In several cases, group buffs were “split” into two effects. So, theyll provide a buff that hits everyone in your group (including you) and a separate buff that only hits you.

Intensity Multipliers
Attack skills can now have intensity multipliers. Attack skills with an intensity multiplier become more effective as you hit with more shots in a broadside, up to a specific limit. These show up as three new values on skills:

Base Intensity: On a successful attack, the effect of the skill is multiplied by this value
Per-hit Intensity Bonus: With each piece of shot that hits, the effect of the skill is multiplied by this value.
Maximum Hit Bonuses: This is the maximum number of shots that can add to the effect before they stop increasing the strength.

For example, let’s assume theres a skill that drops target reload by 2% that has a base intensity of 10, a per-hit intensity of 1 and a maximum hit bonus of 5. Just succeeding an attack would drop the targets reload by 20% (2% times the base intensity), and each additional piece of shot that hits would drop it another 2%, up to a maximum of 30% (5 hits).

Summary
These changes are going to give all characters some more options. In some cases, those options come from new skills, while in others it means easier access to important skills.

Without tiered skills, the value of a single skill points will be more consistent, which has strong positive implications for long-term balance.

We want to make sure that everyone has a place in combat, and that their skill tree is full of appealing options.

That’s it for this devlog. Stay tuned throughout the week as we release more information. Coming up next: The Naval Officer.