Skilling Rebalance

[midnight rune]

An issue I have always had with this game since I was really really young was the skilling
A fundamental issue with many NECESSITY building blocks such as Furnaces and so on (to place) require build level. For players who do not build often or are not big into buildings - but play skill enabled for the skilling experience, mainly do it for the RPG elements and progression of the tools/equipment ratio for the PvE experience (monster levels) myself included.
This creates an issue that for these players to progress even with simple QoL such as doors or fundamental stations (Furnace) they tend to, or at least I, to just spam blocks in a random spot and make nothing cohesive and mine them and replace to level easily. Which is no fun, and takes away away from much of the rest of the core experience.

Overhaul

• Retain weapon/tool related skills such as Smithing, as this is universal and there are multiple methods to increase this, from a variety of sources you're constantly upgrading and improving (tools, weapons, and armor)
• Remove Building & Crafting skills altogether, as it takes a specific level of other skills to mine things in the first place such as a specific tiers of tool for higher tier ores and other materials. Which in themselves take grinding to be able to use/wield.
  • Digging to use better pickaxes, smithing to make better pickaxes, need better pickaxes to mine better ores in the first place and so on.
  • Improves skill enabled experience for non-build intensive players. Makes building less prominent for aforementioned players, but still leaves the same opportunity for players who did enjoy building for less time-wasting inbetween leveling build/craft for the materials they ACTUALLY intend to build with from the get-go (as long as they still level mining/smithing, digging/smithing, or chopping/smithing) to be able to mine the materials they want.
• Reduce/rebalance EXP curve of all skills and buff various EXP sources or add alternative methods to gain them, as the base progression rate is much too slow. Typically, the slider being set to much higher is usually the only appealing way to play. Default value is unbearable at points.

[midnight rune]

The rebalance does include ideas for rebalancing various equipment levels/stats too, but that would mean a more in depth look at progression curves and other elements at a later time ^

[midnight rune]

I would safely say; in general, that leveling the weapon related skills like defence and attack could be much quicker by default. These by themselves to reach level 2 can take awhile even for being low level and early game.

[midnight rune]

Rework of Combat Level, Separate Total Level entirely

• Combat level would be defined by the sum of your offensive/defensive skills such as Strength, Defence, Attack, and Ranged.
  • This is separate from the current 'Combat Level' system that instead, displays the total of ALL your skills
• A total level would be given to the player currently under another name, which is the sum of the players total skills

Merge Health with Defence & Additional Methods to Level

• Players health would now increase with their defence stat, whether it's 2 health per level or however much is deemed adequate from a balance perspective.
• That means Defence would now be able to be leveled up via absorbing damage like Vitality currently can be. Other methods would be blocking with Shields, and other methods such as first time crafts on new armor pieces? I'm sure there's other things I cannot think of. Perhaps even consuming consumables or anything that heals the player.

Overhaul Spear to level Attack instead of Defence.

• Now that Blocking can increase defence, and defence would be merged with Vitality (and thus level up passively when taking damage) as well as your health... Spear can level Attack so swapping to other melee weapons of choice is not another hassle and additional grind of its own.
  • Most weapons are 1h and can wield shields in their offhand, so leveling Defence should not become an issue no matter what weapon type you want to use from beginning to end.

Concept; Additions to skills, milestones/feats

• For reaching milestones in each skills levels such as 5, 15, 20, 30 and so on - There could be varying bonuses that add additional passives to whatever is befitting of the skill/action to level said skill.
  • For example, T1 Feat for Mining might be 2% chance at additional ore or maybe 3% mine speed.
  • T1 (level 5 with bow skill) might provide player with 4.5% chance to not fire an arrow

[torn zinc]

I believe the current skill XP gain was designed around global skills. We plan to look at skills and XP and rebalance things to make them feel better. Some skills level way too slowly, and others level way too quickly. For some skills like building it's most effective to just grind them out, which simply isn't fun. What exactly we'll do though hasn't been decided yet.
Good feedback though, we'll keep it in mind!

[midnight rune]

Remove it…