Fun project: Everything wrong with skill trees

[Rien]

-Standing Snipe should at least give a certain buff where when you do a perfect JA attack on rifle while standing, you gain perfect chained hits on far away targeted enemies instead of doing spread fire. (Like come on, they're Rangers, they are trained to hit long ranged and accurately, not spraying bullets all over the place. AIM DOWN YOUR SIGHTS SOLDIER!) Right... I forgot about the 3rd Person Shoot or letter Z... Though I don't know if this hits accurately on long range though. I mean continuous 3 chain hits.

They're changing this with the ranger buff, so I wouldn't touch on that right now.

[gigawuts]

Class-defining things (PP revival up, gears, stances) should always be easy to get, at low levels. That means, as someone said, the gears should be right at the top of the hunter tree where you can always get all 3 for only 3 SP in total.

Stances should start strong, not start weak. Most skills should get their largest gain at level 1. None of this 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-15-25 kind of bullshit.

[Takatsuki]

- Buff Bow accuracy. Those things couldn't hit the broad side of a Big Vardha unless you're right next to them.

- Give Bow Tree a PP Charge Revival skill for PAs.

- Make Bows gain more PP per hit.

- Make Photon Flare a % based stance.

- Get rid of HU's Just Guard skill and make it always active. Daggers, Knuckles and Katana all have theirs built in, why not HU weapons?

- Get Sword Gear the heck off the Guard Stance tree.

- Give FI some JA Bonus skills.

- Not directly related to trees, but still relevant - Remove Demerits entirely from Tech crafting.

[Macman]

Correction: Adrenaline SHOULD BE FUCKING BUILT-IN WITH EXTEND ASSIST!

[musicmf]

Ignoring skill balancing, since that's a whole another can of worms...
(For instance, I really think Photon Flare, Wand Lovers, and Territory Burst should be 10 minute duration, 1 minute cooldown stances.)

All:
- Just Reversal is unlocked to begin with, placed at the top of the tree

Hu/FI/BR:
- Step > Step Attack (Removes the 3-Point Step Advance filler)

Hunter:
- Sword Gear should be moved over to the Fury Stance Tree (Easy to get with the rest of their useful skills)
- Guard > Just Guard > Just Counter (Removes the 3-Point SDEF filler)
- Reduce Warcry prereq for Iron Will (Lv2 or so)

Gunner:
- Reduce the number of Stat UPs in their tree that stand in the way of staple skills.
When going for the good skills normally, you have to run into 2~3x more of these than other classes.

Fighter:
Ranger:
Braver:

IMO, the above classes aren't that bad at all. Their trees are pretty straightforward and there aren't too many sunk points in them.
I think the major overhauls should happen in the Force/Techer Trees.


Force:

Flame Mastery > Mastery 2
                    > Burn Boost
                    > Flame Tech S Charge
Ice Mastery > Mastery 2
                > Freeze Boost > Freeze Keep
                > Freeze Ignition > F Ignition Boost
Bolt Mastery > Mastery 2
                 > Shock Boost
                 > Bolt Tech PP Save
Talis Tech Bonus > Photon Flare > Photon Flare Advance > Photon Flare Boost
                                             > Photon Flare After Burst
                                             > T-Atk High Up
                        > Normal Tech Advance
                        > Tech Charge Advance > Tech Charge Advance 2
                        > PP Charge Revival

Techer:

Territory Burst > Shifta Advance > Shifta Critical
                    > Deband Advance > Deband Cut
                    > Resta Advance
                    > Super Treatment
                    > Territory PP Save
                    > Extend Assist
Wind Mastery > Mastery 2
                    > Mirage Boost
Light Mastery > Mastery 2
                   > Panic Boost
Dark Mastery > Mastery 2
                   > Poison Boost
                   > Poison Ignition
Wand Gear > Wand Lovers > Wand Reactor
PP Restorate > PP Convert
                   > Elemental Weak Hit

Pretty much sticking all of the like-elements together, and giving the player the choice between damage or status effect.

If giving actual choice of build isn't strong enough for FO/TE, I would also reduce the max level for the skills since they have to spread themselves so thin.
FI/RA/GU can pretty much get all of their buffs in one tree.
HU/BR can max their important stance in one tree.
FO/TE.... can max out one element... then start working on a second... (Out of their 6 elements)

[Grady219]

For ranger it should work like this.

There should be 3 paths the the tree

Tech skills Bullets Traps


Tech skills would be the stuff that increases damage like standing snipe or stuff like killing bonus and the like.

Bullets would be the different types of bullets you can load like weak bullet or jellen shot.

Traps should be completely redone. The first skill in the trap tree should give you access to all types of traps. From there it should split off to let you put in up to 5 points to increase the max number of traps you can hold of each type of trap. The next section for each trap should increase it's effectiveness.

Traps should also be turned into a skill rather than an item and you should regenerate 1 trap after a certain amount of time passing.

[Dragon_Knight]

This turned out a bit longer than I expected, if you want to skip to the idea I have for the techer class scroll down just past the dotted line.

Techer tree- Supposedly a healing/support tree yet only one of its branches is support and due to the high cost of skills (min 3 SP/max 5SP to advance down the tree) it takes 64 SP to max healing boosters like resta advance, super treatment, PP regen, territory burst, and territory PP save. This leaves 11 SP to be divided up between extending buff duration and shifta advance. To be a full healer you have to be near end game. Even then you still must forgo fully realizing your full light tech damage capabilities and you weak point bonus damage. You become a stationary healing battery ever trying to keep up to the people running away from your healing.

The biggest problem from this is to get the healing skills you MUST dig past light mastery. Which needs needs a min of 6 SP to even unlock. Second you must spend 5 SP in light mastery to advance to resta boost OR you can spend 11 Sp (5...five....FIVE!!!!!!!11111 of which MUST be spent on confuse boost) to unlock super treatment. Mind you confuse boost isn't the worlds greatest effect. Even if it sticks, the melee users are always the closest targets and so confuse is nullified, so how can you justify spending 5 points on it?

The other trees have similar issues, to be any good you MUST focus on the tree. But due to the high cost of the abilities you must also give up ever maxing your dps. If you want to use wand gear AND have weak hit (buried deep in the support tree of all places) to "max" it you must spend 71 SP to do it.

I also hate how techer and force are the two most costly classes, techer has a total of 297 points and force 282 points. Hunter isn't much better at 279. While braver is the cheapest by far at only 208 points. Braver is not surprisingly the one with the least and cheapest fluff in its tree.

.................................................. .................................................. ..........................................

Now what I would want to see of the tech tree might be a bit strange, but I want to see: DPS, Support, stat boost. With everything branching from your basic dodge skill. Since it automatically has 1 SP assigned to it, all three branches are available to start down right away. Each ability costs between 2-3 SP to advance. Some skills I would cut down to 5 SP total while keeping their current power. Though I haven't decided which ones yet. Also the basic Shifta and Deband boost would lump both together in one category since they both get equal power as is.

Spoiler!

Its a quick and dirty tree set up, but it still has the tree feature that makes you dig for skills while not making you completely fail to just be a techer. Tell me what you all think about it.

[UnLucky]

Pretty much everything is wrong with every tree.

Stat Up skills are trash. And the first half is even more trash while also being the most common prereq for non trash skills.

If the goal is to encourage generalization by forcing players to spread their SP across various skills then they fucked up. Those 3-5 points in trash are completely wasted because the vast majority of the skills' worth are in the last 5 points.

You are never going to notice +7% crit rate, or +18 Def, or 1.05x SE infliction rate whatsoever. Hell, you wouldn't notice +20% crit or +50 Def or 1.1x SE, but that's another story.

Throwing away a third of your total skill points on worthless garbage shouldn't be the standard.
Fully investing everything in a single tree branch shouldn't even be possible.
Splitting between two separate aspects shouldn't make you less than half as potent as focusing on only one.

[Sanguine2009]

shifta and deband up need to be a % damage boost or reduction, none of this % of a % of our base stats bs we have now
extend assist needs to increase the amount of time each tick adds to the buff in addition to adding to the max time
at least one of territory burst and wand lovers need to be a proper stance
wand gear should hit more than one hit box.
extend assist affect techs other than shifta/deband
this is not even getting into the god awful layout of the techer tree but its a decent start at some of the problems with its skills

[Angelo]

Be more specific. Like, I know the entire techer and hunter tree is flawed as hell. I just want to see it written out.

Also Adrenaline belongs on the Techer tree because unless you're a fo/fi it makes zero sense for Adrenaline to even exist on the Fighter tree. I know what it does, and it doesn't seem right that a Fighter would just randomly have a skill affecting technics which they can't even cast without having/being a subclass.

Its for partying. I have it in my HU/FI build because it makes the buff last longer. TEs right branch is for team support, why give them a skill that only effects the buffer? I don't think you understand how it works. I'm a Hu/Fi with adrenaline, my Te/Fo teammate casts deband on our party, The buff lasts longer for myself because of adrenaline.

I think what you're wanting is something that extends the duration of buffs for the whole party, which is probably what "Long Time Assist" will be.