Perkline choices and sacrifices

There is one thing that has always bugged me about the perk system of today, and that is that you are able to choose EVERY perkline available to you at the same time. You can choose perklines that focus on offense, and at the same time choose perk lines that focus on defense.

With the balancing changes, I propose that Funcom introduce perklines that lock out eachother, so that the player have to make a choice and a sacrifice. As an example: today an adventurer can choose both acrobat, bio shielding and spatial displacement. Three major defensive perklines, that together gives the adventurer godlike survivability.

What I would like to see is that if you perk bio shielding, you cannot perk acrobat or spatial displacement. The player would have to choose 1 of the 3. The description of L1 in acrobat would then read something like this: User profession = [profession list] User Level >= 30 Perk Bio shielding (L1) untrained Perk Spatial displacement (L1) untrained.

I only used the example profession (adventurer) and the 3 perklines above to illustrate my point. This is something that I feel should be introduced to all professions, so that the players have to make a choice to be really good at one thing, but then need to sacrifice another. If you want a massive absorb and a damage shield, you cannot have massive evades and immunity to roots/snares/stuns at the same time.

I think this is an excellent idea, and I think Shade SL perks and Trox Enfo AI perks are good examples of non-cookie-cutter setups.

Shades have several setups available depending on breed perkline; some like drains, some like stuns, some like pure defense; etc.
Trox Enfo also picks between genome perks and mutate, which I think is also a good idea.
Bump for perklines specializing your character rather than just boosting it.

I have no idea about advy perk lines, but... when advy's choose to perk acrobat, bio shielding and spatial displacement don't they loose out on offensive perks?

I would also like to see more profession only perklines, that introduce this locking. If we take the soldier as an example, they could get these 3 completely new perlines:

Perkline 1 adds reflects, have reflect specials and reflect damage boost specials (this cannot stack with TMS/AMS as it would give soldiers WAY too much reflects).
Perkline 2 adds more attack rating, have AR boost specials, and direct damage specials
Perkline 3 adds nano resist and immunities, have NR boost specials and removal specials

These are just perklines I pulled from the top of my head, strictly to illustrate my point, so dont focus to much wheter they are valid or not.

Each of these perlines lock out the other, meaning the soldier have to choose one over the other. What we get then is soldiers with different perk builds. One soldier may have chosen to get more AR and are thus sacrificing reflects and nano resist as a result, while another have chosen to get more NR and thus sacrifice AR and reflects.

We should get something like this for every profession. Then we might see some variation in different builds, and you are not guaranteed that the particular profession you face atm have the exact same strenghts and weaknesses as every other. Choice and sacrifice.

Ideally each profession having a similiar number of perk lines to choose from and then letting them decide where to put them would be best, shades for example, they can choose a set up by placing the perks but they dont really have enough perk points to perk absolutely everything, so it comes down to a choice.

Some professions dont have such a wide choice, they have 1 or two lines that they will definitly get and then are left to find what else works well. In this case additions of new lines to give other set up choices would make them have to decide which lines they actually want and which they do not.

Locking perk lines because others are chosen isnt terribly good, would limit the set up variability, offering valid choices so that you can choose to be offensive, defensive or middle ground or something completely different but would have to choose which to drop and which to use would be better

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Originally Posted by Xenotric

Locking perk lines because others are chosen isnt terribly good, would limit the set up variability, offering valid choices so that you can choose to be offensive, defensive or middle ground or something completely different but would have to choose which to drop and which to use would be better

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The way I see it is that with locking, you can introduce some really powerful perklines, without the fear of the profession getting overpowered by the combination of another powerful perkline. Acrobat and bioshielding together is an example of this (very noticeable at tl5). It is a way to make sure that if you choose to be really strong at one thing, you must be weak in another.

There is of course another way to balance this, and that is to not make powerful perklines at all, and just let everything be mediocre. However, mediocre is boring, and powerful is fun. I would very much like to specialice my profession in one direction, and then get really really good at that. But in order to do so, I have to make some sacrifices and create weaknesses in my setup.

A good decision of a bunch of seemingly mediocre factors can produce outstanding effects, and is much more fun then just choosing clearly powerful lines and being "that spec" (ala WoW, yes I said it!)

Also I've never beleive adventurers should have both acrobat and bioshielding as choices, I mean bioshielding makes sense what with the adventurers having a decent background in shielding and such, but acrobat? considering adventurers had little to no evasion support or any real background in being terribly acrobatic? I still think it should be removed.

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Originally Posted by Mekh

I have no idea about advy perk lines, but... when advy's choose to perk acrobat, bio shielding and spatial displacement don't they loose out on offensive perks?

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THe last ten can go into either Edged Mastery or Pistol Mastery, so...