. . . next time, at least.
Remove the “skill wheel.”
Problem solved. If the game still had the skill system it launched with, henceforth called “the better system,” their initial plan for HoT would not have been all that terrible. The problem with how they ended up releasing it is that you had to unlock your weapon first, heal second, a few adept traits, then a utility, and so on, on a fixed schedule, one that meant that even if you only liked one of the Utilities, it might be the last one unlocked, or you might play a Daredevil, who’s core traits are all GM level and couldn’t be touched until you unlock a half dozen traits that you might never use.
It meant that for many builds, not only did it take 400 points to unlock everything, it took 300+ points just to make the spec worth trying.
The solution is to have a more ala carte option. Keep the requirement at 400 points, but weigh different skills and traits differently, and let players choose whichever they like, in any order they like. That means if a player only has 100 points to put in, instead of having to buy the weapon, heal, and some junk traits, maybe he buys all the utilities first, so that his Herald’s skill tray is filled. Or maybe he buys one adept, one master, and one GM trait, so that he has one full line of options instead of having to run it with 2/3 of his potential active traits.
Once a player is allowed to push through to the “primary” options he wants, he will be less upset about having to really put in an effort to pick up the remainder. Let people specialize fast, diversify slower.
Now it’s obviously too late to apply this to HoT, you guys already reduced the costs and putting them back up would cause a kittenado, but you can apply these lessons learned to the next similar release. And you can’t say that nobody warned you if you don’t.
(and as a side note, you could have headed off a lot of this by warning people months in advance that they would need to unlock ALL previous skills before starting on the elite spec, or even better yet, NOT doing that. A lot of us were counting on being able to spend saved up Hero Points from frugally not buying skills or trait lines we didn’t intend to use. On most of my characters, they would be in the same place in the 400 point system as they are now in the 250 system if they’d been able to spend their free hero points on the Elite spec instead of having to spend them filling out the core trees).
“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”
