Weird question About the Past ( probably only mods can answer )

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Diaco
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why does everyone seem to expect all o-skills to be endgame viable? I think it's reasonable that only a handful of them are, since you are usually saving yourself quite a lot of skillpoints by using them. it also makes sense to me that you need specific gear and build to make most of them work, since that's exactly what happens with every non-oskill
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ChuckNoRis
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Diaco wrote:why does everyone seem to expect all o-skills to be endgame viable?
because that way you could have a lot more diversity , not just 5 builds per patch that every newb plays by default because they are marked as overpowered , or got a 60% finished "guide" posted


also because some of them used to be valid , but they were left in oblivion and not balanced to the current era , and so we are left with a shitload of oskills that may spawn on items that are worthless , mostly because their damage sucks big time .

it was the main purpose on why the oskills were invented in the first place . DIVERSITY

now you look at the affix pool and see countless worthless skills . the years have passed , but most of them were left unchanged since the Laz era
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Diaco wrote:why does everyone seem to expect all o-skills to be endgame viable? I think it's reasonable that only a handful of them are, since you are usually saving yourself quite a lot of skillpoints by using them. it also makes sense to me that you need specific gear and build to make most of them work, since that's exactly what happens with every non-oskill


well, maybe it's just me, but what I love the most in games in general is trying out new stuff. I don't need to play the current best build in order to have fun. I'd rather try out things on my own, having to actually think of what the best equipment is, what mystic orbs to put on and so on.

I really don't need every oskill to be balanced. I'd just like to see things like Splitfire, which is so ridiculously bad that I couldn't possibly describe it in words even if I was paid a million €, replaced with something I can actually try to make a build with.
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Marco
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ChuckNoRis wrote:
Diaco wrote:why does everyone seem to expect all o-skills to be endgame viable?
because that way you could have a lot more diversity , not just 5 builds per patch that every newb plays by default because they are marked as overpowered , or got a 60% finished "guide" posted

also because some of them used to be valid , but they were left in oblivion and not balanced to the current era , and so we are left with a shitload of oskills that may spawn on items that are worthless , mostly because their damage sucks big time .

it was the main purpose on why the oskills were invented in the first place . DIVERSITY

now you look at the affix pool and see countless worthless skills . the years have passed , but most of them were left unchanged since the Laz era


As someone who's been around for this long, I'm surprised you think this was any different in Laz era. This discussion has been a thing forever.

There's been a lot of work towards oskills in sigma - with orange stats, lots of oskill themed SSUs, oskill sets, and various reward items which give you oskills. But the reality is that there are over 350 oskills and yes some of them (splitfire) suck, but if people are all about the oskills there are virtually more viable oskills than you'd get to play in a lifetime at a casual rate.

The expectation towards oskills seems to be "as soon as I wear it, it should work". Let's make an example here: you are playing a sorceress with 30 points in flamefront and you find
Bartuc's Curse
Bartuc's Curse
Lamellar Armor (Sacred)

Defense: (4647 - 5680) to (5040 - 6160)
(Sorceress Only)
Required Level: 100
Required Dexterity: 499
Item Level: 105
2% Base Block Chance
+100 Spell Focus
+(25 to 50)% to Fire Spell Damage
+(1 to 50)% to Cold Spell Damage
+(1 to 15) to Phoenix Wave
+(80 to 120)% Enhanced Defense
(21 to 25)% to All Attributes
-30% Gold Find
Socketed (6)
. Surely you are specced into fire stats - therefore Cataclysm oskill "should work", right? Well, not really. For once, you get tons of free skill points back, you could even swap fire tree for something else, AND your gear is most likely not optimized for oskills. You could be wearing a staff with "+10 Sorceress Skills", while if you decided to use oskill you would go for a "+10 to All Skills" affix instead, let alone aiming for that stat in the rest of your gear. So no, cataclysm wont outperform FF on your fire sorc just from slapping some item with the oskill.

The further step of progression on oskills are certain item combinations which are conveniently there to be used for that exact purpose. But people have given up with the oskill much before this point anyway. So what's the point here? People want more viable oskills but are generally not willing to put the effort and theorycraft work, it's easier to collectively agree oskills are bad until the showcase forum appears to prove us wrong once again - even if it takes months or years for people to discover the efficient way to scale/synergize them. We will continue to work on oskills for the theorycrafters that appreciate them, but the issue/complaint will be there forever. Just like "why are there bad affixes/builds/tus/sus/sets/etc". Only when we have only 1 class with 1 skill we will have achieved the long-desired balance.
Diaco
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As a small addition to what Marco said, I think some oskills are there more to fill the gaps in the progression of some builds than to become endgame skills. for example, I found Rock Shock to be really useful for nagi assassin until you can successfully spam Hades Gate or for druid werewolf in places where you are still too squishy to just spam Harbinger
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ChuckNoRis
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@Marco the complains do not come for the oskills that can be made viable with hard work and dedication (for which i have put togather numerous builds in the 11 years since i'm around here) , but for the crapy ones that are out there which stay crapy no matter what , which take forever to use even for farming places like k3kba , some of them of which i wonder why do they even exist (see Bloodstar or Slicer blade as examples , which are a minor percent of the viable Bloodstorm and Barrier strike skills ) . And yes , many of them are unchanged since the Laz era . so many years gone , and still no love in that direction .

there isn't a single oskill out there which i have not tried or not attempted to build something viable around it . i once had the patience to make a list here : viewtopic.php?f=4&t=33585&p=271866 but not much has changed since then .

yes , there are some cool oskills in the latest set reworks and on a few other items , but there are still a shitload of them left which require some love . Some of them don't even need that much work and could easy be fixed by receiving double damage or double AoE or a better weapon damage modiffier ( Guided chain ?) since the chances to proc something were more than halved in the recent years

i know they may not be on the maximum priority list , which is understandable , but some of them would really make room for some fun builds (can we have that Churel bug fixed already? )

Marco wrote: We will continue to work on oskills for the theorycrafters that appreciate them


i'm glad to hear that and will be looking forward to see some more changes around this in the next patches . i also agree that there's a very thin line between crapy-> decent-> overpowered