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Skills
From Hellgatewiki.com
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Skill Menus
Each of the six classes had between 26-28 skills as of May 2007. With the alpha test about to begin, it seemed that the team was pretty well set on the skills and their function and structure in the skill menus, though they were still constantly tweaking the values of the individual skills. The cosmetic stuff, skill names and icons and descriptions were being worked over too -- each character's skill menu had at least five or six icons that were still placeholders, and the skill hover info varied widely in detail and formatting. Bill Roper told the community day attendees that he'd actually been working on those late the night before; clarifying descriptions and changing mentions of faction to class -- "Evoker" or "Summoner" rather than "Cabalist."
Skill Level Requirements
The above shot of the Guardian's skill menu is old, but it's useful to illustrate the general layout. And it's all we've got until Flagship releases some full quality skill menu shots. All skill menus are structured like this one, with about seven columns of skills sorted into six rows. The top row are level 1 skills, and then counting down the level requirements are 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 on the lowest row. Skills connected by lines are dependencies; you must put at least one (sometimes more than one) point into the skill higher up the line to use the one(s) further down. There are a few trees with related skills connected by dependency lines to the sides of the main line, but these are uncommon. In the entire game, there's only one cluster of skills where more than 4 or 5 are connected; the Engineer's Drone skills.
Skill Groupings and Dependencies
Skills are grouped by type, and their hover information tells you what group they're found in. Looking at the old Guardian shot above, the rightmost two or three columns are all auras, in two or three columns. Some auras that are closely related in function are in columns with dependency lines; others are simply grouped near them for ease of organization. This tree is has changed by now, but it's relatively simple in layout; others have larger clusters of dependencies and all have some odd connections. As you can see in this one, skills in a group are not always connected by dependency lines. There might be level 5, 10, and 20 skills connected, with a stray level 30 below them that's not on their dependency line. Other clusters have a main skill at level 15, two support skills connected by diagonal lines at level 20, and then another cluster at level 25 and 30, with no lines between them.
Individual skill displays have a lot of info about the skill. For example, here's a direct quote from the game skill hover info for the level 15 Blademaster skill, Aura of Elements, as seen by a character who was not high enough level to use it yet.
Aura of the Elements
Skill Groups: Aura
Requires AURA OF POWER Level: 3
Your level is not high enough to upgrade this skill.
Description: As more enemies surround the Blademaster he calls upon the very powers of heaven and earth to aid his cause.
Skill effects cap at 5 enemies.
Next Rank: 1/6 (Requires Level 15) Effect: Stun, Ignite, Shock, Phase, and Poison attack increased by one per enemy in the Holy Aura radius
This is actually one of the shorter skill descriptions; some of them have a lot more, with a paragraph or two of explanation, long lists of required skills, instructions to drag it down to make it an active skill, and more. It's all color-coded too. Requirements you haven't met are red, headers are yellow, the main text is white, and other skills had text in aqua and pink as well, to draw your attention to key aspects of using the skill. They were obviously still under construction, and in many cases the descriptions hadn't caught up to the changes that had been made to the skill(s), so even if we were permitted to post pictures of them, it would be important to remember that they were all likely to change somewhat before the final game.
Another new feature was the fact that some skills appeared to require multiple points in a dependency skill to active. Note that the Aura of Elements description says it requires level 3 Aura of Power. Not just 1 point in Aura of Power, but three! Presumably any +skill equipment you had on would count towards this, which could make for some interesting equipment decisions. You might like that new helm you found, but if you take off your +1 to all helmet you're going to lose not only the +1 to all, but several of your skills will no longer be usable at all, since you won't have enough points in their prereqs to keep using them!
Skill Synergies
There are no skill synergies in the game at this time. Dependencies yes, but no skills currently amplify the effect of other skills by the number of points you put into them. Like everything else, this may yet change, but if they've developed the game this far without using any dependencies, it doesn't seem real likely that they're going to throw a bunch in at the last minute. Synergies are heavily used in v1.11 Diablo II, and while they are popular with some players, others dislike them since they force extreme specialization in character builds. Flagship wants to allow a lot of variety in builds in Hellgate: London, which is one reason they're not going with synergies.
Skill Caps
Another big change in skills are the very low and varying skill caps. No skills in the game now allow more than 6 points to be invested into them. Most only allow 3 or 4 points. This is subject to further tweaking, but as of now most skills can be maxed out with just a few points. Furthermore, the hard cap for skills is usually just two points higher than the soft cap. So a given skill might allow 5 points to be placed in it, and have a maximum possible value of 7, if you had +2 from your equipment. This is a huge change from Diablo II, where every skill went up to 20 and it was not difficult to add 10-20 more points on top of that from equipment. Furthermore, in Diablo II most of the skills were either usable at Slvl 1, or increased forever with more points and were always better at a higher level. This became even more true once extensive synergies were included in the game.
Hellgate: London, on the other hand, will encourage (and require) players to use a wide variety of skills, and by capping the skill levels so low there will not be any uber powerful skills that can overpower the demons. Also, many skills improve with more points, but not necessarily in terms of the damage they do. Additional points will increase the range, or lower the cool down time between casts, or cut the power cost; not just up the damage, as was usually the case in Diablo II.
Adding Skill Points
Another tweak to skills in Hellgate: London is that some of them do not allow you to put more points into them every level. So a great clvl 30 skill would let you put in one point at 30, but not allow a second point until lvl 32, or 33, and a third point until 34 or 36. This makes the common Diablo II strategy of saving up points to dump them all into higher level skills as soon as they became available useless in Hellgate: London, especially since Hellgate: London's initial level cap will be around lvl 50, and the level up pace should become quite slow by level 25-30.
Skill Scaling
Lower level skills should remain much more useful throughout the game, thanks to skills scaling. Every skill in the game now scales up as your character levels up. For example (hypothetical figures), a level one spell that initially does 3-5 damage might do 12-20 when you're at level 9, 32-50 at level 21, and so on. You would gain proportionately if you added more points to the skill. It's unlikely that clvl 1 skills will beat clvl 20 skills long term, but the lower level skills should have a lot more longevity than they do in most games, and with the variety of tactics and low skill caps in Hellgate: London, the Hellgate Team wants to balance the game to make as many skills useful as they possibly can.
Skill Level Increases
Yet another unique feature of the skills in Hellgate: London is that more points often does not add more damage. Instead, the additional points will increase a skill's range, or the frequency with which it triggers, or lessen the cool down time, etc. There are a huge variety of skill bonuses and functions, and while some simply up the damage, the majority do other interesting things that will make the skill more effective, but in unconventional ways.
Skill Respeccing
"Respeccing" means redistributing skill points at some point in a character's life. Load up points in one build, and if you get bored with it or the game changes in a patch, remove those points and put them into another skill or skills. Some games do not support this (Diablo II) while others do to varying extents. It's a hotly-contested issue, with strong arguments on both sides of the issue. That's unlikely to change any time soon, but I can reveal that there is currently zero skill respeccing in Hellgate: London, and from what the team said, that's unlikely to change. The guys are clearly on the "making new characters/builds keeps the game fun" side of the debate, while the "I don't have that much time to play and patch changes ruined my character!" argument is a valid one, they're not much swayed by it.
The issue was brought up during the presentation, and Bill and Tyler were like, "Respeccing? Um... oh yeah that. No we don't support that in Hellgate: London." It sounded to me like they hadn't really given it any thought; like it was so far off their radar that it didn't even bear mention. From this and other comments, it's pretty evident that the team looks at Hellgate: London as a game with relatively fast leveling up, and one designed for replayability with different builds, rather than a game where a high level character is an investment of months of time that should be tweaked to remain viable as the game changes over time.
Skill Variety
Finally, most skills are meant to be used in specialized situations, and should be good at their designed purpose, and not so good in other ways. For instance, the Cabalist Evoker has several attack magics with very different effective ranges. One flamethrower like spell does very high damage at short range, but is useless from a distance. Another Evoker spell does heavy damage at medium range but doesn't works very well up close, while a third is most effective from a substantial distance, but does very little up close. This is the case with most skills in the game; they're very good at one or two things, but can not be effectively used in all situations, and the game is designed to reward intelligent, attentive play. You will not prosper at Hellgate: London if you play lazy and try to just use one skill in every situation.
Early Skill Development
The basic skill layout has changed quite a bit over time. The team initially planned on around thirty skills per character, arranged in three skill trees, just like Diablo II. As the game has evolved though, they've moved to different skill arrangements and numbers. The most recent layout can be seen here; Blademaster skills from March 2007.
The newest plan is to offer all of the skills in a sort of menu, without dependencies or other skills acting as requirements (though some skills do require your character to reach a higher level to enable them). The skills will apparently be divided into two skill trees per character, one for each of the Category:Classes, as seen above.
The first images of the Hellgate: London skill trees had the skills in hexagonal clusters, with lines pointing between the icons. Over time the layout has evolved, and evolved again, through a branching tree layout, and then into maps with all the skills on the same page. The following quotes are all completely inaccurate for the state of the game today, but it's interesting to read how things have changed.
"Actually, we're not doing the "skill map" anymore, either. We use a very organic methodology of game design. This means that we're constantly working on systems, playing them, evaluating them, changing them in both grand and minute ways, and then going through the whole process over and over again. We started with the concept of moving from a "skill tree" to a "skill map", but found the concept to be incredibly complex to navigate. We have moved towards what would probably be best called a "skill menu".
"Currently, any skill that a character can possibly learn is available if that character meets specific requirements. These are not just prerequisite skills as in a skill tree, but other statistics such as level, personal stats, rank, etc. We want to allow players to build exactly the type of character they want so, just like the menu at a restaurant, if you can afford it, you can have it. This also means that some players may elect to "save up" skill points and not take any skills for a while if they think they can get by on their abilities as players so they can go straight for the top end skills they want as early as possible."
--Bill Roper, Fansite Interview, January 2, 2006
As for the skills themselves, expect 30 skills per character class, split evenly among their three disciplines. No big surprise that with experience, you earn points that you can allocate toward improving abilities. Unlike the Diablo games, Hellgate lacks skill caps. Keep leveling up and you can keep upgrading those powers for as long as you like.
--CGW Magazine Preview, May 2006
Some info about how skills work.
"In relationship to weapons, skills currently modify the way players use them. For example, the Circle Slash skill (not the real name, but it gets the idea across) allows a [Templar] wielding a sword to strike at any demons within a 120 degree arc in front of him. The Speed Slash would slightly reduce damage, but do a flurry of hits.
"While some spells may be their own damage types, others will affect demons by reducing their abilities, slowing them, and so forth. Please note that this is an AMAZINGLY early and HIGHLY incomplete list of ideas and are presented for demonstration and comparative purposes."
--Bill Roper, Fansite Interview, September 3, 2005
"Right now we grant multiple points per level up that can be spent to increase skills. These points are separate from those used to improve character attributes. One skill point is also currently worth one skill rank or acquisition.
"Specific skills do not get bonuses from attributes, but an attribute like Accuracy, which increases critical likelihood, will obviously apply to offensive skills.
"Skills do not get bonuses from other skills, unless said bonus applies across the board and thus applies to another skill. For instance, I initiate a passive fire damage bonus skill and then apply my whirlwind attack skill on an enemy force. Naturally, the fire damage bonus will apply.
"It's impossible to use more than 10 active skills at one time since we have users binding them to the numeral keys. It's likely you'll use around five at any time, though. This also depends on class."
--Ivan Sulic, March 2006
That was true in March. By May, at E3, it was back to one skill per level up, and they seem to be sticking with that, though there are quests that award extra skill points as well.
Skill Nodes and Randomized Skills
An interesting feature that did not make it to the final game, skill nodes were going to offer semi-randomized skills to truly customize players. They did not make the final cut, and while there has not been, nor will there be, any official announcement. Here's what Ivan said:
"I am not privy to exactly why random skills were removed, but I seem to recall hearing that it had something to do with a combination of balancing and players wanting to outfit their characters in specific ways with predictable skills."
--Ivan Sulic, October 2006.
So they're gone. Here's what they were going to do.
"The skill nodes are basically ways for players to "find" skills, in addition to training them up. They are like anything else randomly created and dynamically placed into the world in that they have levels of rarity associated with them. We want players to experiment with their characters, and currently we allow players to swap lots of things in and out as they please. That means they can pop a mod into a weapon, try it out, and then remove it with no negative effect. We also don't remove a skill from a player's list so that they can get new ones, try them, and find the mix that works best for the situation. We want our system to be fluid and not restrictive whenever possible.
...
"An important note is that just like the rest of the game, we're looking to bring the randomization and rarity elements to skills in Hellgate: London. This means you may randomly find a skill during your adventuring (as opposed to training it up in the usual way) and there is also a chance it will have some random, rare property about it. For example, instead of just having a Fireball, you might find an Exploding Fireball, or a Homing Fireball, or perhaps a Toxic Fireball. This will mean that characters that have followed the same skill path may still be quite different and unique."
--Bill Roper, Fansite Interview, September 3, 2005
More.
"Skill Nodes are randomly dropped items that can teach players with the proper requirements basic skills. These will be especially valuable for a character that is saving up for that first big skill since he won't have to invest any skill points on learning whatever the Skill Node has to teach.
"We are also using all of the randomization algorithms for the generation of these skill nodes, which means that a character could learn a rare version of a skill or spell. For example, instead of just learning Fire Ball, you might find a skill node that can teach you Exploding Fore Ball, or Tracking Fire Ball, or Spectral Fire Ball."
--Bill Roper, Fansite Interview, January 3, 2006
For all the thought and work they put into skill nodes, they were still willing to drop them completely when they didn't work out.
"We didn't want to have skills that supplanted earlier skills (as was the case in Diablo 2). We wanted to make early skills useful throughout the entire game. So higher skills require more concentration, and using them comes at that cost, and maybe even the cost of some equipment, since some equipment requires concentration points as well.
"Randomized skills too. They drop, just like items. Similar to existing character skills, but with benefits. Group lightning shield instead of personal one, or one that does damage back as well as defending. 2 Templars could have different versions of the same skill."
--Bill Roper (paraphrased from Gamespot interview #2, October 2005)
We wondered how these nodes would be balanced; wouldn't you just save them up and give them to a new character so they could start off with perfect skills? Could they be traded? Were they like shrines that had to be clicked and used right then and there? We'll probably never know...
Categories: Skills | Classes | Basics
