Cription wrote:What decisions led to the current design of the character skill trees?
I feel like the ones in Median are a step down from D2. Less choices, more restriction, less freedom. It's honestly the only thing I dislike about the mod; however, skills are a big part of the game so even though it's only one aspect it weighs heavy. Finding a different way to provide the Reward Skills, either through charms or crafting reagents that can add the skill to an item, and opening up the skill tree more would be a huge improvement.
To be honest, I don't know what Laz was thinking when he created the skilltrees, but I'll try answering that for you.
In cLoD there were some problems with synergies. For example you could easily put all points in Fireball, resulting in huge amounts of mana costs early on. However, if you were to put everything into Firebolt as a synergy to Fireball, you were able to use Fireball much more often but with less damage dealt. That lead to the point that you always felt like smaxing all those synergies even though sometimes you didn't really need to or didn't have enough points to do so. It also resulted in mana costs being either too high or too low, which is a lazy approach for balance. It's like the devs telling the player: balance it yourself or you suck.
By restricting the skills the problem about mana costs is nearly non-existant. As is the too-strong fireball early in the game part. If you want to put points in a skill you can only get so far before you need to get another 6 levels.
Actually what I've always found good about the part with +1 max skill levels every 6 clevels: You get to try out more skills. You don't just bunk all points into your main skill, but contrarily, you are shown: Look, you can use other skills as well and still manage. So in a way this restriction is actually opening up more freedom. Kinda weird, but that's my opinion.
In case of reward skills: You basically get 1 of them for free without doing much. The other one is usually more important and thus worth a little challenge. Either way, any endgame char can get those skills, so I honestly don't understand why you would want to change the way you unlock it. Could you elaborate further?