If I could change one tree...

[Keilyn]

Fighter/Techer is my favorite, and I use fighter as a model for what a tree should look like as the whole tree is fantastic.

Ok so what would I change in Force?

Don't get me wrong, anyone who knows me has known me for HUnewearls/FOnewearls in PSO-1, Masterforce in PSU with all techs maxed....Hell I remember beating "The Magashi Plan" as Basic Force for the luls in PSU. In PSO-2 I find the Force-Tree to be one of the most idiotically designed trees.....and it had to follow up with the techer tree's three elements...

So this thread is about redesigning and recreating trees... As something fun.

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So here is what I would do for our beloved Forces

Some skills will have a main effect, and a sub effect. Both effects come in the player mains. Sub effect comes only if the tree is subbed.

Force Tree (what I would do)

Entry-Skill:
Mental Strength: Main Effect: increases passive PP regeneration, and +5 T-ATK every point. Maximum 10

The tree will then enter three lines, with two stances:

Charged Combat: All Charged Techs will hit for +20% damage, however uncharged techs will hit for 1/4th their total damage.

Uncharged Combat: Uncharged Techs hit for 50% of their Charged Damage. Fully Charged Techs hit for 80% of their damage.

The third line would focus on non-tech weapons with slotted techs. This line would increase offensive abilities to a weapon but still have a high level of tech dependency and sub dependency.

Skills for Weapons:

Rod Gear: Attacking an enemy directly (S-ATK) will increase the gear count by 1 for each hit made. Consume the gear from double-tapping shift. The AoE Radius of your next spell increases by 5% and your chance at proc'ing a status effect increases by 2% for each gear. The total is +25% AoE Range, and +10% Condition Proc Rate (if you have rod mastery).

Rod Mastery: Increases the maximum Gear count from Three to Five. Converts 25% of Rod S-ATK into T-ATK.

Talis Gear: Attacking an enemy will charge the gear. Increases the range of a tech that is fired from the talis and the speed of the tech itself. Does not decrease tech charge time. The gear is consumed when a Fired-Talis ends.

Talis Mastery: Allows a Tech-Attack to charge the gear itself, increases gear performance by 20% (Range and Speed), and when the gear is consumed it drops to 50% rather than 0%.

Style Skills (style skills that are turned on like wand reactor, but can only have one active at a time. So we can have a stance, and a Style Skill turned on at once)
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Element Specialization (Skill): Increases damage by 20% vs enemies weak against an element, however a tech will hit for 80% of its damage if an enemy is affected that is not weak against your tech. (This skill would be turned on and off like Wand Reactor).

This skill is designed in mind as a way of having the concept of element specialization we all know and love as something conditional, rather than investing in each element to increase tech damage, one invests in a style of play...rather than the tech damage itself...So those +44% damage from Fire, Lightning, Ice techs, that would cost 60 points0 to get all three. Instead, we focus more on the style of play where players want to do Element Weaknesses.....as always..should be conditional. ^_^

Elemental Weapon (Skill): This skill allows you to slot techs in the PA slots of Melee and ranged Weapons (like Bouncer Jet Boots), and will grant a tech-damage increase based on a portion of the Elemental Attribute of the weapon equipped. This additional damage is saved into a separate damage pool and applied only if and only if a tech-PA is combined with a non-tech PA. It will not work if two-techs are fired back to back.

This skill is designed to bring the idea of Wartecher, or Guntecher. The idea of combining a style of play that focuses on the weapon rather than the tech. Once again the damage is conditional because when we combine weapon PAs with high multipliers like gunslash PAs with Techs....we do not want to undermine the entire class from one powerful skill or make everyone dependent on that one skill.

Skills Dependent on Uncharged Combat stance:

Broken Cap: Techs no longer fully charge, but have their full animation at better intervals and a +10% chance to proc a condition. In short they behave in the same way (but without the damage) for a charged tech.

Uncharged Chaining - Gain a Damage increase of 5% (maximum 20%) for each uncharged tech that overlaps the area of the field.

Meltdown (MAIN ONLY) - A field is generated affecting all players around the field. For each condition an enemy suffers, they sustain +5% damage up to a total of 20%.

Example of Meltdown would be in fighting a boss, and finding out that Jellen Shot (Attack Down), and Shock is affecting the boss. Everyone in the field would get a +10% damage increase. In fact, there are enemies Ive fought against as Fighter/Techer who have had 3 - 4 conditions stacked on top of it.

Innocent Recovery (main only) - Recover up to 20% of PP used towards casting uncharged techs after casting.


Charged Combat (Stance Dependent Skills)

Magical Barrage: Condition Proc -10%, +1 hit on fully charged Techs, +20% Speed. Leaves a three second pain zone.

Celestial Aura: +10% PP Consumption, Increases Charge time of techs by 15%, Increases damage by 25% of Charged Techs, Increases Pain Zone duration from 3 seconds to 5 seconds.

Ravage (Main Only): Hit +1 on pain zones from techs, painzone hit interval -.3 seconds. Recover PP for each enemy that dies in a painzone. A field surrounds players allowing anyone in the field to get the benefit.

Innocent Annihilation (main only): +10% damage in pain zones which have at least one element overlapping.

Ok, this takes explaining....

The way I see Charged Techs working is that each Charged Tech would leave behind a Pain Zone after initial damage is dealt. Magical Barrage would help those Charged Techs connect to their target by allowing them to hit faster, also allowing an extra hit increases damage without needing too many multipliers and dependent on the idea of mass nuking hoards of enemies.

We then have Celestial Aura to increase the damage of the Charged Techs themselves at a penalty of Charge Time and PP Cost. The idea is that Charged Techs are Slower to cast but really hit hard due to multipliers, this increases the pain zone to 5 second duration as well. Each second in a pain zone an enemy takes damage, and can proc conditions. Ravage not only adds more hit, but reduces the painzone hit interval from 1 second to .7 seconds...increasing damage by tons. The PP recovery is nice too....as Charging Techs would use tons of PP..

Finally, Innocent annihilation would make it so that if two pain field are on top of each other, the two of them proc together....and hit for +10% more damage each. Considering that Ravage already lowers the hit interval to .7 seconds, A Force going this route would be extremely brutal.

In short, its either "Slower but Brutal, or Quick and massive" meaning that Slower but Brutal allows for HIGH Damage Numbers, less techs on the field, but one or two players can do it well in Charged Techs. Quick and Massive allows for 4+ techs to use each other for synergy and just dump everything uncharged on top of each other to nuke the field...and they function as conditionmancers as well.

Charged is better for Full Force and Super High Tech damage, while Uncharged would be better for those going Elemental Weapon/Arms as well.

Skills that are not stance:

Dissolve: For each point, up to 10. Condition-Damage and Condition Duration goes up by 10%.

Second-Wind: A skill that triggers as a passive once every 30 seconds. Recover 25% of your health and 25% of PP if you kill an enemy with your health below 50% and PP below 25%

Second-Wind is a force version of Super-Treatment for the Self...but oriented towards the class. If the force consumes his or her PP, and takes a hit.....the reaction is usually to either Get Away or Fight (Flight or Fight) since we look at ourselves and see that at below 50% health we can take one more hit and die....so the idea is that if you can kill any enemy...be it a trash mob while fighting that powerful enemy...your health and PP would recover by 25% giving you enough ground to open up your options to survive. It would work in ANY Force Style since generally forces have low health and burn PP extremely fast. At 0 PP, a force is a sitting duck.

Preservation: Regenerate PP while Charging a Tech, and retain a charged tech evading.

Preservation is not in the stances because the stances can be switched on or off and one can actually use a normal playstyle. Also, if one goes the Elemental Weapon Route, the option should exist independently rather than in a stance. All the stance skills are there to enhance the stance, but it doesn't mean uncharged or charged skills should only be in the stances...

Elemental Arms (Main-Only), requires Elemental Weapon: The game's first Gear-Based Skill within a playstyle, and Not a weapon. Acquire a gear each time a hybrid combo (tech/non-tech) is used. Overall weapon and tech damage is increased. When the gear fills up, it enhances the attributes of your primary weapon's gear by 10%. If using a gunslash, it will increase its attack speed by 10% (if I made it 20%, why use any other weapon in the game?)




Other Skills:
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These two skills are designed for players who have a preference on range, and should be included:

Short-Range Combat: 5 points = +15% damage. Increases damage if an attack is fired from short range or blow.

Long-Range Combat: 5 points = +15% damage. Increases damage if an attack is fired from long range or extreme range.

No Penalty is given except the skill not triggering if for example a short range attack is fired from long range. The two skills already allow a player to pick on their playstyle. All of us have a preference of either playing short or long range depending on situation. If you do both regularly, you dont spend any points on it...

...but if you are force who loves the Short-Range Gi-Tech Annihilation, or love Talis + Ra Techs...they really would help with playstyle. This also would help with survival as a player could focus on either staying long or short.

Super Skills
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Magica Rapture: Cooldown 90 seconds. 30 Second duration - Your Health Drops to 50%, PP can not be depleted, AoE Blast Radius +100%, Status Resistance -50%. Your Techs ignore the Hit-Box Limits on Monsters.

Have fun using RA and GI techs to eviscerate everything..How about a RAfoei hitting All hitboxes of a Fang Banther or Fang Banshee at the same time?

This skill would be dependent on having different skills leveled. A Super Skill should never be an independent skill...otherwise players would just skip everything and grab it. My own damned fault. (Maybe a Condition of "Must be Max Level" or so)

Aura Magi - Cooldown 90 Seconds, Runs out when PP runs out. PP Degeneration -2, Nullify Knockback/Launch/knockdown attacks against you, Condition Resistance drops by 100%. When an enemy is hit by an attack or tech, an elemental explosion results. This causes some PP Lost, however if a condition affects the player, it is instantly cleared and applied to all enemies at a radius around the caster (100% chance on enemies capable of being proc'ed that condition). If an enemy dies with a condition, the player's PP regenerates at a certain rate per enemy kill.

This skill is a super version of Wand Gear/Wand Reactor, etc.....except it also applies to techs as well. Under this skill the player will be fighting to retain PP as each explosion consumes PP as well as having constant PP Degeneration. A player will end with 0 PP, leaving them weakened for a bit....A skill like this would be stellar for AQs where enemies pop out everywhere...and its easy to run out of PP in an extended fight. Also a great control skill too.

Skills for Evasion:

Two Skills:

Mirage Step - We love the invincibility frames to this...

Forcefield - This skill would be bought and would be slotted, so it could be used for any weapon a force equips, but its only for FORCE-MAIN. Cooldown 30 sec. PP Degeneration -2. A second lifebar (the forcefield) affects the player. This forcefield lasts until the Lifebar is depleted (and it explodes, knocking out the player) or PP runs out. The forcefiled has no resistances and will sustain normal damage from all attacks. It uses its own defense power so Defensive Build can not manipulate it. Most of the time 2 - 3 hits will destroy the forcefield.

Skills I have not included:

All the numerical skills I have not included. I would have a skill that would increase T-ATK, but more importantly I would have a skill that would increase Tech Resistance by up to 10%, since traditionally spellcasters have taken less spell damage in games with the rationale that they know more about the spells they are fighting against, since they fight with the same spells. However, it would be an option.

Finally, I would put in more skills for Weapon/Tech Hybrid, but if I did its sub would make it stronger than anything out there...so the option is there, while the hybrid would enhance it further...since we do have subclasses. The main point really is addressing the Charge/Uncharged playstyles.

Of course this thread is a combination of creativity, pet peeves, Frustration, etc.


Do you have a favorite class that you would like to redesign its tree? Simply reply with your opinion and what you would do. It doesn't have to be so perfect. Just a sign, since I wonder about these things.

I just believe that trees should focus on overall playstyles. of course I would overhaul techs and everything too...but just an idea I wanted to throw in. :P

[Keilyn]

Well the current problem with the tree is that SEGA thinks that PLAYSTYLE is according to the element you choose. In doing this a player is forced into buying multiple trees. This is done due to the fact that its three of the same...

Each Line that Force has is an Element, Fire, Lightning, Ice.
What happens is each line gives the following:

+44% Damage (20 Points) when using that Element
One Skill to increase Proc Rate of Condition Tied to Element
Two Skills to actually separate the element by giving it some opinionated unique characteristic like (Fire is fast, Lightning should be cheap, and ice should do more to frozen enemies)

That is the bottom half, the Top-Half of the Tree...is convoluted as well.

We have Numerical Stats, but then we have a Series is Skills that are 10 Points for 10% damage. This kind of aggravates me.

The tree is all about element, but 0 about playstyle. This makes the Force Great in one or two maps, Lousy in all others. So what is a force to do? They go Fire.......and take the entire Fire Line and then run with Element Conversion + Talis Boost Damage and just blow everything up.

The tree is reduced to One Style.

So, the first thing I would do is eliminate all of the Element Based Skills that cost 10 points for 20% damage. Chance those 60 points to a single conditional Skill. It does less damage, but applies to all elements (regardless the techs you use, so it would bring Wind, Light, and Dark into it too).

The skill is Elemental Specialization (which we would activate as a skill in our bar) which says "You deal +20% damage vs Elemental Weak monsters, but only hit for 80% of your total damage against non-weakness" which makes a million times more sense than having players spend so many points on a tree where each section is only viable in one or two maps.

I then took an idea of doing a Charged Build, and Uncharged Build...

So players would focus on going the Charged Build Route, or Uncharged Build Route...Which is a Stance and Four skills that can go to Level 10. That right there is 50 Points. Same with Element Specialization, would be 10 points...So that already is 60 points spent out of 80.

The last 20 points spent, would go more towards customizing your weapon (Rod or Talis Gear, along with Mastery) and the remaining points might go towards a super skill if you go all-in. and things in between. Consider also the Entry skill too.

So what would our damage multipliers look like?

We would have 20% increase vs element weakness. We then have 5 - 20% increase in damage for overlapping fields, around with 5 - 20% increase in damage for multiple conditions on an enemy.

So if we maximized, we would have 50% to start on Uncharged Combat Stance to have 50% of our damage. Bring in a Level 3 Elysion for the 75% increase. This would bring your base tech damage to 80%, then we have a 20% increase for Elemental Weakness which would be 1.08%, and then we have conditionally between x1.05 - x1.44 more damage for Uncharged Techs...bringing the multiplier to 1.13 - 1.55 For Uncharged Techs.

Now take Elysion away from this and you get around 0.86% which is 10% lower than being FORCED to grind an elysion just to be able to play with Uncharged Techs.

The balance here is that the conditions of the techs are causing damage and more forces will increase the damage...so the damage actually would be balanced out and it won't be super-powerful, unless there were 4 forces actually chaining everything uncharged together, which would actually be...stellar and show synergy in forces.

Current Build allows a player to do I think 1/3rd of the damage with uncharged techs, Force an Elysion upon a player, and then get +10% damage using uncharged techs....on top of a +44% damage increase on using it...so here we get... So we start with .57%, then we throw in the +44% more damage .8316, then 10% more, we have .91476. Like I previously mentioned. Under the new tree, your damage without elysion but with the stance and abilities would be .86%,and have conditions applied...However, Currently without Elysion, you hit for around .51% which is why I started the stance at 50% damage :P

Now what happens is that the damage increase uncharged wouldnt come from A lot of Multipliers, it would come from actually stacking techs on top of each other and having the damage from conditions and damage from the techs combined to do damage to retain the Uncharged Condition of being Fast with the techs..

The difference between my tree and the current tree?

My tree (for the uncharged) works for all elements and its focused on the uncharged playstyle and its not Elysion Dependent. The current tree focuses on ONE ELEMENT at a time, and its elysion dependent. If you were fire element and cast a fire tech you would get the .91 damage, but what if you all of a sudden need to cast a light tech without elysion? All of a sudden your damage plummets to .36 damage.

The more you layer techs and have synergy with other members, the more damage you do combined with conditions and not just raw multipliers. Element specialization would work when any element you have hits a weakness..

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Ok so Lets go now to the Charged Category and its Four Skills....Lets say we put in points in the same way. Except we went charged.

What do we currently have in FORCES? What did I do differently?

First and Foremost, I eliminated the FIRE SKILL that allows a player to charge fire techs at half speed. Half Time of Charging a Fire Tech already DOUBLED YOUR DPS. Since it meant casting two fire spells in the time of one...So that is gone by the wayside.

Instead, The four skills do the following for your DPS:

We start with Element Specialization (the tree we like to have, and not stance dependent for your 20%). We then go into the stance itself. Already we are at our 1.44% multiplier mark from putting in 20 Points...but unless that can go to 2.88 its still half the DPS since we don't have the Casting Speed on Fire anymore... (this is not counting the 1.1 * 1.1 from charged tech masteries, Element Conversion, and other stuff FORCES have to increase tons of damage currently)

So We can cast a fully charged spell at +20% damage, and combine it with Element Specialization to actually hit an enemy weak to the element for x1.44 damage. So far so good...

We then have Magical Barrage, which is going to create a pain zone. However the pain zone itself has the hitbox limit you know....and by the time you destroy small monsters they will become irrelevant as anything destroys trash mobs. Also your Condition Proc Rate goes down. The hit count does go up, but it wouldnt be a Super Stellar Pain Zone Proc. In fact you would need the other skills to strengthen it.

Now we go into Celestial Aura, This forces us to spend 10% more PP and 15% more time charging a Tech in order to increase our damage by 25% and actually increases the painzone duration.

Our multiplier is now at 1.8 (1.44 x 1.25) However, Our casting speed is 15% longer. So if we use base 100 to think of casting times...Base 100 we use Integers to represent percentages. So in Fire we have 50, and in our casting in the new system we have pain zones and 115. We then divide and find we arrive at 2.3...Under the current tree you can cast 2.3 fire spells in the time of 1.

Now to make up for that Loss, what we have are now hit intervals and pain zones occurring. They go from 1 second hits (5 hits). to .7 seconds (7 hits). You also get +10% damage increase from the actual pain zone damage. The result is that you actually get Similar DPS without having to BURN ALL YOUR PP AWAY...

...but once again, this works for ALL ELEMENTS, not just a Single Element.

The result is actually having All the Elements on Par with one another, and this would cause fire damage to be reduced due to the Spell Fire Rate. It would force the use of the Super Skill which would be the one time you get Super Nuking Damage unlike anything you have ever seen before...

However, You have no Fast-Casting in Nuking anymore. So if I went fire....in our current tree, We have on our multiplier...

1.2 * 1.2 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.25 (element conversion) * 1.2 (Talis if we use it) for 2.61. We also get 50% reduction in cast times on Fire, Now multiply that by 2.3, the number in terms of fire rate, and you get a 6.013 DPS factor.

However, thanks to actually hitting in a Pain Zone seven times, and having +10% damage in overlapping pain zones, and not having FAST CASTING, our multiplier is actually 1.8. (1.2 *1.2 * 1.25) and then if we have Rod Gear and Mastery, we would actually have....a lot more T-ATK converted and once every five spells you would have +25% more AoE range..

So the combination of the AoE Range creating the Pain Zones, more enemies being hit at once in your nuking...and a skill to allow to hit Multiple Hitboxes on a single enemy, one makes up the damage...Since two painzones overlapping means 7 hits occur from each pain zone at +10% damage each hit.

What would happen is Overall Fire Damage on a single tech would drop, but all the other elements would fall in line and offer their d amage pools. Fire Damage would decrease due to losing that DPS from fast casting, but the damage of all the other elements would increase to fall in line and be usable again.....and not just using a single tech in one element due to knowing how OP it is.

...and once again, the tree I would use would be style based so the more to your style you play, the more damage you would do when thinking abotu how to improve your style of play rather than trying to do the standard PSO-2 thing of increasing your own ELEMENT DAMAGE and focusing on having 90% of casters fire.

So the DPS Factor would make it so that current forces hit for Four Times More Raw Damage from a Tech....But when when two forces fire Techs together, to find that there are now Four Pain Zones, One from four elements. We now have 28 pain procs, chance for condition proc....weaker but steady damage over a 25% wider areas to nuke down creatures......and Elements have been freed up so that one can play more than just fire.

I always hated how in order to improve Wind, Light, and Dark damage I am forced to go techer to get a repeat of the FORCE tree, so right off the bat, half my techs do shit damage unless i get two classes to 70.

So actually....

This tree will do LESS DAMAGE than our current Force Tree in terms of RAW TECH DAMAGE, but overall due to the mechanics of the tree, it would work for ANY ELEMENT instead of ONE Element, and it would destroy the dependency to Fire, and Finally....You make up all the damage from the increased synergy with other classes and from Actually Striving to play the style the best way you can and not powergaming the style like we see in all current forces.

Today, a Force/Techer goes for max T-ATK in a brute force set up where weapons have +16% damage...and are usually DARK OR FIRE, ignoring the other elements,

...This makes as much as I love Force/Techer, the lack of flexibility pushed me away to Fighter/Techer.....and as much as I love forces, every other video games gives me better spell flexibility.

PSO-2 is the only game I play where if I want to run with TECHS.....I am going to get a damage bonus for one element, be fucked everywhere else.....and then be told "Your techs suck until you customize all of them" just to turn around and be told "oh wait, you gotta go Max T-ATK Mag and g et +16% Element based weapons or +20% Hunter-Potentials like Dragon Hunter.....to actually do well...

...then when you are done, you are like "yeah, peace at last...I think I will use Dark MAGIC in a Dark WEAK AREA...and then "oh wait a minute...I dont have dark, so I am going to now have to raise techer to 70 to use DARK magic well........So I brute force 2 elements because the game is not balanced at making use of a STYLE of play rather than an element.

[isCasted]

I'll be honest: I stopped reading after first 3 skill ideas. This already sounds too complicated for this game.

I agree that elemental masteries in a way they are handled right now suck ass. But... To dish out damage on tier with other classes you don't need multiple Fo and Te trees. Game allows you to get 2 masteries on Techer's tree without losing out on PP and support skills, third one might be simply unneeded. On Force tree you only get one for top damage in all 3 elements, but you can use subs other than Te for areas that don't cover elemental weakness.

Now, a lil bit dreaming:

A better way to handle masteries would be reworking element mechanics entirely (simply put - make different game). 2 things that make tech useful outside of damage are status effects and tech's execution mechanics. Former is obvious and useless right now (Ultimate has chance to fix that). Skills that make latter in the game are Fire Tech Charge, Bolt PP Save, Poison Ignition and whatever Ice has. Those are skills that actually form playstyle without excessive damage multipliers - more skills like that instead of masteries would improve the game. Also, Wind can move around enemies in a desired way - that's execution mechanic that makes Wind preferable in certain situations no matter the damage. Skills that boost mechanics instead of throwing random numbers should be top priority in ARPG.

P.S.: Gonna throw more notes later.