capstone Perks

[grave sinew]

I like having to chose one path or another when building a character. If I take ranks in this skill, I wont be able to take that skill ect. This game doesn't have that. I can spread out across all three classes, and I do. Nothing wrong with that it's like multiclassing in DnD, 14 fighter / 4 Sorc / 2 artificer is a perfectly valid build... probably... somehow; I digress. I would love to see something added to this game that would force us to make a meaningful choice that would make our characters unique.

My idea is a simple one. I propose adding a new row of skills at the bottom of the skill tree. The five skills in this row would have 1 rank each and would grant us a very cool very powerful ability, but the catch is you can only take one and the other 4 permanently gray out at least till you drink a respec potion.

This would be your capstone Perk.

3 rows 5 perks means 15 new capstone perks on the tree and since it would take 19 skill ranks to unlock each one you could theoretically have for example a capstone in Warrior and a capstone in Engineer, but you'd have 19 skills on each tab to do it meaning you'd have basically zero skills in the Arcanist tab.

Something like this could lead to a lot of wildly different builds.

I have suggestions for capstones.

Warrior Capstone Perks
-Shadow Cloak: This skill should be made a capstone so it can realize it's full potential. you should be able to move and stay invisible and if you duck behind something it should break all monster pathfinding.
-Weapon Specialist: You add 10% effectiveness to all mods on any melee weapon you hold. So for example if you have a hammer with 5% crit chance and 5% crit damage both become +15% as long as you have it equipped.
-Centurion's Aegis: You can do a shield bash while blocking that does damage equal to the shield's block rating and knocks the target back 2-3 blocks.
-Colossus: Gain 100 max hp and passive health regen equal to 1% of your total HP. Also your character gets 2 pixels bigger but now monsters will be far more likely to attack you over your allies.
-Arcane Fist: You may use weapon runes on gauntlets. This makes more sense if the below perks are also added to the skill tree at lower tiers.

Brass Knuckle: You may now deal unarmed damage equal to your gauntlets armor ratting.
Furious Fists: Unarmed attack speed increase. Rank 1: 25%; Rank 2: 50%; Rank 3: 75%

Arcanist Capstone Perks
-Transcended Form: Casting spells from book or rod no longer costs stamina
-Extended Release: You can have one potion active for one hour. To activate simply drink the potion you want extended and it's duration will be 1 hour. Other potions will work normally. Remove the effect early by drinking a purification potion.
-Rune Smith: Craft the first 3 tiers of runes without using Runalite.
-Tinkerer: You gain a new button in the modification station that allows you to roll an item back to a previous level. All changes from the last upgrade are undone, but materials are lost. items can be full reset to +0 using this.
-Elemental Master: Chose an element. gain an aura of the element. Spells and runes of that type now do 50% more damage and have an added effect based on their type.
Fire: non bosses hit with your fire spells are set on fire and run away till extinguished
Lightning: Chance to stun non bosses
Cold: Chance to freeze non bosses solid
Poison: target is weakened dealing less damage

The Engineer Capstone Perks below are just some ideas for now. when the engineer tree is revealed in full I may change them.

Engineer Capstone Perks
-Treasure Hunter: Adds Chest Scan to compass.
-Green Thumb: Crops you plant in an incubator never rot and grow twice as fast.
-Rocket Glider: Increase flight speed with glider, and upward movement for short distances.
-Expert Mechanic: Your ship's top speed is +5 and fuel in your energy generators burns twice as long.
-Power Armor: Upgrade Steamer Armor, weapons, and tools using Blaze Crystals instead of Power Crystals at upgrade station to gain special abilities / enhanced effectiveness. Items upgraded this way require this perk to function (no respecing out once you made the item)

capstone Perks

Obviously some of these are strong than others so some balancing and testing would be required I'm just putting ideas out there to get peoples gears turning.

[polar egret]

I like your spirit, and support this but could we hold off on making changes until the entire system has been fleshed out?

[grave sinew]

Respectfully, no; and I'm not sure how that would even be possible. Making changes IS fleshing it out. What you are saying is that I should wait till they finish putting the frosting on the cake before I suggest changing the batter flavor to chocolate. The ideas I discuss here are not something you just tack on at the end. I know I kinda worded it that way; that's my bad. The entire tree for all three classes would need to be reworked from the ground up because you'd need to rebalance everything around the idea of working toward a capstone. Honestly I think they should also split off the stealth and archery stuff from Warrior and make a 4th Rogue-type class, maybe add in some dagger and lock picking related perks (I'm gonna make a separate suggestion for this one, and another idea I have). These are not the sort of changes you wait till the end to make. They are foundational. There will be a massive overhaul of the skill system in the future that will leave the skills almost unrecognizable. We know this because they put it in the road map that was released over a month ago. I made this suggestion for that overhaul. If they are going to rework every part of the skill tree anyway why not include something like this? I expect almost none of what I wrote here to actually be used, because I expect most of the aspects of the game on which I based these suggestions to eventually change dramatically; however, by making these suggestions I hope to influence how they change.

[polar egret]

that's fine, it makes more sense now, i was not aware of the roadmap post, though i try to stay on top of it. i do think your rogue type class is excellent! was not trying to shoot your idea down...just trying to push the discussion along. i misunderstood i thouht you wanted it tacked on and not a complete rework.