Commando Archive

This sounds like the "nerf everyone but me" post you see so often. What's wrong with dabblers? That's the whole point of a 250 skill point system. To pick what you enjoy and leave out what you dont. Why should ANYONE be penalized for that? If you want master elite professions to be the one and only option then go play EQ where you are born and you stay into a profession your whole online time.

yeah mastering a class should do something like 25% bonus to ALL weapons of the class (speed, accuracy, damage, accuracy while moveing accuracy while standing still, all of it, for all classes, experimentation chances, success rates, crafting details) This would seriously improve master levels of the proffessions. I think the Devs merely see that the elite proffessions master levels only cost 1 point and therefore shouldn't be anything but iceing on the cake. Very untrue.

The truth is we are all dabblers no single profession needs 250 points to obtain so we all dabble in skills that are not part of our main profession.

Meh - simple solution would be to make skill obtainable and degradable with time and completely scrap the SP thing - it would be a bitch to program, though...

The basic concept is pretty simple - say you want to learn pistol skills... You then proceed to, *gasp* pick up and start using a pistol. With time, you gain XP, which would go into more free-form levels as opposed to a box system. For example, the 1k Pistol XP mark is tagged as +20 to speed and damage, for sake of discussion. However, this should be completely scalable - when you have 500 pistol XP, you've got +10 to pistol speed and damage. Get to 750 XP, and you're +15 speed and damage.

However, to prevent people from becoming everything at once, XP should degrade exponentially. In other words, when you only have 1000 of a certain XP, you would lose, say, 10 XPper day IF you didn't use your pistol skill. However, at 10,000 XP of that type, you would lose, say, 10 XP each HOUR you didn't lose your pistol skill. In other words, it's harder to stay in tip-top shape. If you use a certain skill constantly, you will be constantly earning XP for it, and thus it will not decay much if at all. A skill you use less frequently, however, will decay gradually so the XP count for the skill hovers around a lower skill level (the equillebrium of where experience decay and your experience gain average to 0 over extended time).

If someone has the desire and the ability to earn and maintain skill in every freaking master profession out there under this system, more power to 'em - I sure as hell couldn't do it, and in the end people would settle into the role of what they used. Since the decay system would only be active during active playtime (you shouldn't decay while sitting in a cantina healing up, or while sitting AFK while you make dinner or whatever), dabblers could have skills every bit as powerful as powergamers.

game is designed for dabbling. It adds variety to the game. This avoids having all same classes all around like boring everquest. You get to see all sorts of different players and all have different unique skills.

Dabbling is what makes it fun. You dont want to do it? Dont. I am not holding your hand and telling you to.