Although it is reasonable that characters cannot just jump in and get an advanced skill right away, there are dangers in having to buy skills that might be ”worthless” to evolve to something else. If the skills you have to take to advance has nothing to do with the skills you unlock it becomes non-intuitive and strange And it streamlines type of characters. This is a reflection about what to think about when it comes to skill trees in any game. So what happens if you apply this to Battlebrothers?
There are six skills in tier I to choose from and you have to choose 3 (50%) to advance to get the skills in tier II. This puts a high demand of useful skills to choose from that are flexible enough to be useful for many characters.
The offence category work in tier I. All characters have use of to be better against armour, get bonuses if missing the first hit and so on. Being better at crushing shields or at area attacks are more specialized, but still choosable by many. In all thumbs up. The defence one is similarly useful, although two skills are dedicated to shield only, which basically leaves you to choose 3 out of 4 if your character plans to not use shields.
The problem is really the utility section. In order to become a captain in tier II, you are forced to pick three skills out of six that are useless for many characters or way of playing. Let’s say I have a character with a bill hook that I want to stay behind the line. He has no intention to switching to other melee weapons as he needs to reach, and he has lousy archery skill or I just think archery is ineffective or don’t suit my playing style (I will address that in another post).
The game forces me to pick skills that either boosts my inventory (quick hands and bags and belts) or boosts my shield that I don’t have (bashing) or taunting the opponents to attack me… don’t know how that is supposed to work when I am behind my friends. Pathfinder is surely always useful, and student would be if there wasn’t a level cap.
Does this mean that the utility category is bad? Not really, just tier I. It feels like the developers here have compensated that you are forced to take skills that are either useless or you have to build your character around for specific use… in order to get the very interesting tier II. Like halving stamina loss for armor, captain, and so on. Why “rotation” is in defence and not here is beyond me, but that is an effect of categorization. Even tier III is great here. So a sucky tier I is the price to pay?
So what is my suggestion?
Theoretically you can overhaul the categories and tiers to avoid this effect. In reality you cannot succeed if you want a bunch of rather specified skills available. Or you could vastly increase the number of skills you can choose from at each tier… or allow characters to only choose one to go on to the next. In utility there is about one I would choose for most characters. Two, if there were no level cap. But that is not really smooth either.
A) Don’t use a skill tree at all. Just offer skills based on level and unlock them. This is principially a skill tree as well, with just one branch. You could simply take all skills you have now and let me choose from them. Then at level 3, 6, 9 I can pick tier II skills and at 7 and 10 I get to pick tier III skills. This allows for an endless combination of different type of characters as well as the freedom for developers to add any amount of new skills.
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