With the addition of skill-trees we have a few options about what to do with stats and equipment, it's time to discuss those options and see which you guys prefer. Keep in mind that with the skill tree changes combat and player ability will be much more transparent than the current ambiguous system where you never really know how much things are affecting you, or why a certain change in your damage just happened. For instance, speed will move from being a player attribute to a player skill, trainable through skill trees.
Remember that with skill trees we will have skill ranks out of 20 as well as a skill mastery rank of 21. With limited practices it will be impossible to ever know every skill or spell, or even a majority. People will be able to choose whether they want to specialize right into one little niche character, with which they might manage to train 4 or 5 skills up to mastery, maximum. Or they might choose to be a little more generalized and have no skills at rank 20 but a few more at rank 15.
Now, on to the discussion.
Option 1: Leave things as they are now - damroll, hitroll, strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, charisma are all player stats that we raise through equipment.
Option 2: Option 1 + 'skill rank' introduced as a stat available on some equipment. A weapon might have say, backstab +5 which would directly influence their backstabbing multiplier and maybe turn a 2k backstab into a 3k backstab.
Option 3: Option 1 except damroll is essentially swapped with skill rank.
Now, I'll say straight off the bat, Option 1 is obviously the easiest to implement, Option 3 is probably second easiest to implement and Option 2 would probably be the hardest. Option 2 or 3 will require builder work.
If this change were to go through with Option 2 or 3, it would allow for a lot more diversity in equipment, as well as removing the idea that there is a 'best set of equipment'. There would ideally be many times that a character would have to think hard about which of two items they wanted to use, and the decision would be different depending on what build a character was going for.
I think examples are the best way to explain this so:
Imagine you are a ranger and want to specialize more in firearms, but you still have a skill rank of 10 in backstab trained up. Your damage multi with backstab will currently give you about 2k damage per backstab, however if you were to add +5 backstab with some item, you might be able to deal 3k damage per backstab. Increasing skill ranks will be quite powerful, and so allowing skill ranks to be altered through equipment will require some sacrifice in order to force players to make choices. An item with +5 backstab might have to be 8d9 whereas a piercing weapon without +5 backstab might be 11d10. This means the ranger has to decide whether they should use an 11d10 piercing weapon or an 8d9 piercing weapon with +5 backstab, whereas a thief will always max out their backstab so they won't go for the +5 backstab, they'll go for the 11d10. However for the thief they might have to choose between an item that has +damroll or an item that has +speed boost.
Let's hear what you guys think about this.
