Mastery bonuses

[sick dawn]

Give the player an additional bonus for maxing out a category of enhancers. Examples:

• at 100 points in Haul Mastery, give an additional +200kg carry capacity.
• At Vitality 100, give an additional 50/100/x health
• at Battery 100, an additional +1/2/3kWh

and so on. Numbers were chosen largely at random just to serve as placeholders.

Actually, maybe a better option for Vitality 100 would be, say, 50% damage reduction

[ripe flint]

I like this. Aside from the obvious, it would incentivize specialization, making different choices result in a significantly different experience.

It would also resolve some oddball results - like 110 meters for depth, instead of a round 100. If the mastery bonus was 40 meters, 150 is just a little rounder.

[sick dawn]

Had a couple more thoughts for flavourful mastery bonuses;

Vitality 100, damage reduction like I said.

Engineering, I've got nothing.

Haul Mastery could have one of these options:

• Reduce the movement penalty for being overencumbered. Possibly put a minimum floor on how severe the penalty gets. You'd still be slowed down, but less than normal, and you'd still be able to move - slowly - no matter how overencumbered you were.
• Eliminate the movement penalty for being overencumbered at the cost of increasing battery consumption while overencumbered. That is, you'd move normally while overencumbered but you'd use up more juice while moving; Exactly how much more would scale with just how badly-overencumbered you are.

Battery mastery, reduce battery consumption by some percentage. It would be functionally-identical to adding a number to the battery in some ways (like, 50% reduction would be equivalent to adding 2.5kW to the battery consumption) but the flavour would be different. Plus, increasing battery capacity would make it take longer to recharge but a battery consumption reduction wouldn't. And yes, it would synergise with the second Haul Mastery mastery option. The biggest problem here is that there's already an entire enhancer category - Power Management - that has exactly this one job.

Improved Hydraulics - increase the range at which you can pull stuff. I want my gravity gun to work at a distance, dammit.

I've got no special ideas for Scrapper, Power Management or Field Medic.

Shock Absorber - all I can think of is a reduction to falling speed, like you don't fall faster than X speed. Can't really call it logical though.