Suggestion: Skill Tree Markup, Planning, and Summarization

This got some traction in global chat, so posting here.

A few people mentioned the lack of a skill planner, and most games either don't recognize the need for one or they just trust the community to generate some crappy javascript skill tree. Neither of these options is ideal.

Because the skill tree here is absolutely massive and because it's very pretty to stare at for extended periods of time, I immediately went to the thought of marking up the skill tree in-game.

Allowing people to markup maps is very personal and fun. Inspirations would be Etryian Odyssey floor maps, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass world map, Alien Swarm mission maps, and Super Robot Wars and other SRPG's battle maps.

But enough idle chat, here's my thousand-hours-in-paint version of Skill Tree Markup.


v1
Right-click on nodes to highlight them, and if highlighted nodes touch, highlight the edge between them. This has no in-game effect other than letting you draw out whatever path you want to take, highlighting "target" skills, or drawing dicks on your grid. Storing highlighted nodes per-character isn't a whole lot of space and it would be a huge help and would be very pretty.




v2
Instead of just storing highlighted nodes, sum up all the bonuses and show that in a corner. For that matter, it would be nice to show the sum of the _assigned_ skill points somewhere. This just confirms that the path gets the bonuses you want and lets you experiment.




v3
Name connected trees in the forest, not just nodes. Name them so that they can be seen from a distance, and shown in the summary more accurately. If you highlight AB and CD, that's two paths and two path summaries. If you then highlight E (B->E->C), the path ABCDE is summarized as one.




v4
Make it have in-game effect by allowing an "auto-assign" option that will take the next node on a chosen, named path. Feature is ~complete here.




I'd also like to suggest a search, but without even looking I'm sure there's already such a suggestion. Tying it in with this would mean "search for x" and "make the shortest path to x for me". For another time.

tl;dr: Drawing dicks on my skill grid is fulfilling, fun, and required.

Dicks on Skill Grid imbalanced

I second this request: without much experience or direct exposure to the grid, poring over it to locate things is tedious and distracting. Losing my place after I've already found my target grid destination is even more annoying.

This would be a great QOL change. bump

+1
I concur & endorse the above statements.

+1

Just came up with such a idea, too. It would be great.. not because the Skill Tree is way too complicated, but it's annoying to search your path every single time. I have looked at the Skilltree a lot and know the paths I want to go, but I have to search them over and over again sometimes, which way I wanted to go, or forgot some other points I wanted to use..

This feature would be nice and useful as hell! Allowing people to make Screenshots of suggested builds for classes (as guides) or helping you finding paths and passive skills way faster so you can also skill in combat or on combat maps without dying from random mobs that suddently jumped on your char.

It would be nice to be to have a summary of your passive bonuses.

If this is hard to implement in game fast, prehaps a temporary version on the site would help out wonders, especially if you have access to the website but not the game.

This would be awesome. More information would be great to see how all the passives stack together.

And then being able to plan out characters and being able to see it in game would be even cooler.

+1

I would be sad if I could put it on auto. Manual is much better since I do not plan a build beforehand. At the same time auto-assign is really removing a lot of the strenght of the huge tree - The diversity. People who want cookie-cutter builds will choose the same paths anyway.

As for the possibility of seeing the stats chosen I am all for that and even to see how a rollover node will affect the character would be really helpfull.
The fiddling with 2 or more nodes ahead could be relatively easy to make on a homepage, like this one.

Please, do it, great idea.

There is not a single thing wrong with this idea.