From my understanding, based on information provided a month ago, the new skill trees that are coming out soon will lock you into a build. Those skill trees may provide structural benefits, weapon boons (such as weapon range, cooldown, or heat), or possibly benefits currently provided by modules. Modules outside of consumables are going away. You will be limited on your total skills, similar to how most RPGs limit your build. The maximum number of skills will cost approximately the same XP as it takes to master a Mech now. You also only need 1 variant of a chassis, so that will make targeting specific Mechs a lot easier. In order to respec, you must pay either C-Bills or MC. If you pay with MC, you simply remove X number of points for Y MC per point, and then put those points elsewhere. To respec with C-Bills, you take off X points for Z C-Bills per point, and then you need to have the experience to learn new skills. This means respeccing not only costs money, but if you want to do it on the FTP model, you must either prepare by farming up excess XP, or change your build and then level up the new points. Now, you can have different builds on different Mechs of the same variant, but you also will have to level up each Mech instead of each variant. In other words, if I buy 2 CPLT-A1s with the intent to run LRM5 spam on one and Splat Cat on the other, I need to level up each Mech and I can put in different points. Which begs the question: what are your plans? I personally like running several different builds on some of the same Mechs, such as: Spider 5D with 3xML, 2xMPL+Tag, ER LL + TAG, LL + 2xML, or ER PPC Stalker 5M with a 5xSRM6 or 5xSRM4 splat build, 5xLRM5 or 5xLRM10 spam build, 5xLL fire support, 5xLPL brawler King Crab 0000 with a brawler build (lasers and SRMs), a close-in fire support (dual AC/20 and 4 ML), a large energy boat, or an LRM platform Cataphract 1X with a laser vomit brawler, laser vomit fire support, or AC/20 build Yen-Lo-Wang with 2xML + AC20 or the vastly different 2xMPL + AC20 Granted, today, you may have to pay for Endo-steel, Ferro-fibrous, or Artemis (or going back to standard), which incurs a cost. You may need to purchase additional weapons (not too bad), engines (bad), or modules (oh god, why), if you don't have them already available. So there is still some cost to rebuild, but a lot of builds (particularly those that use the same upgrades or don't use missiles that would be affected by artemis) can be done back and forth with 0 overhead. The way I see it, going into the new age, there's a few options available: Keep 1 copy of each Mech, pick 1 build on it, and stick with that build Keep 1 copy of each Mech, and play the ones you want to respec a lot so you have banked XP on them Get multiple copies of each Mech so you can run different builds on them Rely on MC to respec your Mechs What are your guys' thoughts on this?
I am pretty unsure atm... Let's see what PGI will do first. I can see where you're coming from, though.
I kind of feel like if Mechs are like legos, the skill system will be supergluing your legos together.
For most mechs no, Considering I already own 2 of every vindicator (favorite chassis) I don't think I need any more duplicates
Well, i got a really bad feeling about this.. i wish us all the best.. From the first look it looks terrible by all the dependencies to unlock specific "boosts".. And what i've read so far is that you need a lot more time to "master" a Mech. All the owned Mechs should be reset and we get some skill points for all the spent xps in exchange, but you just need to read about the exchange course and you get a feeling about how expensive the Skills will be.. I don't to want to start thinking about Balancing Matters..
The official word is that you won't need any more xp to master a chassis than you do now. Not being able to respec really sucks though. It'll make a big difference with my clan mechs for sure. Used to be able to keep just one of most and swap out omnipods and modules as needed. Any mech you like to tinker with is going to take a lot of xp to maximize.
The numbers they posted at the moment are just placeholders to my knowledge. It won't take any more XP to master, but it will take more to re-master.
Well, now that they've released the numbers... 91 skill points, 100k C-Bills + 1500 XP per point, and 25k C-Bills or 10 MC per point to respec. That means a fully mastered Mech will be 9.1 million C-Bills and 136,500 XP, compared with the current cost of 0 C-Bills and 56,250 XP. A full respec will be ~2.3 million C-Bills or 910 MC. When this comes out, most of my Mechs will be useless, because they'll be only 1/3 the way through the XP and I won't have the C-Bills to use that XP, even with all the money I'm getting from modules. I play this game like Pokemon (gotta catch em all) and I will probably quit if the numbers stay like this, as it will be a huge nerf to how I play the game.
The only advantage I see is that a full set of modules now costs more than the 9.1 million. But it's more money up front, when you're trying to get just basics. And I have no idea how they justify saying the XP cost would be about the same when it's 3 times as much.
Yes, a full set of modules...which a lot of players swap back and forth between Mechs. I can have maybe 8-10 Mechs configured with modules with what I have right now, out of about 80 Mechs I have configured with the rest of their equipment. I think their logic is that you only have to master 1 variant, so it's the same per chassis. It's not the same per Mech, especially if you double up on Mechs.
Well, to be fair, my friend who has like 5 Mechbays isn't really able to get 3 variants of a chassis he's leveling. I have a few heroes I bought when they were on sale that I don't have another variant for, or Mechs I got as loyalty Mechs that I didn't have the other variants of. In all of those situations, or simply if you want to build a Mech and don't want the other variants, its good. While I like that I won't have to get all the variants just to level one, there are a lot of Mechs I want more variants of, and I usually have fun with them (except in a few specific cases, usually involving lights). My issue, though, is that I played for a while and then quit. Right before I quit I ended up buying a few Mech packs. I was the frugal player who had his Mechs kitted out with all weapons and upgrades, but swapped engines and modules from Mech to Mech. Now I'm trying to get them fully set up with engines, but not modules. The result is right now, I've got probably a couple dozen Mechs from packs I haven't even played yet, I've got about half of my 150 Mechs in a playable configuration, and I can string enough modules to get 10 Mechs configured. Most of my Mechs have less than 20k XP banked, and to go from currently mastered to mastered in the new system would take an additional 80k experience. With the modules, I estimate a return of around 150 million C-Bills, which is enough to get 1500 skill points. Assuming I could get around 40 skill points per Mech that I've leveled, I wouldn't even be able to unlock the points I have XP for on much more than 3 dozen Mechs. This is in addition to still working on getting all of my currently owned Mechs configured. So I'd be reduced to half of the effective Mechs at half effectiveness, and it will take more time and grinding to catch up and/or buy new stuff. Sorry if this comes across as a rant, or a petty complaint, but I'm looking at what I have and what things will cost and it's depressing.
Definitely not a petty complaint. I've been a pretty frequent player the last year or so and I've got an awful lot of mechs that aren't going to have nearly enough xp to be "finished." No clue on how many cbills I'm going to get back but I tend to only buy modules for mechs I have a good bit of success with.
It should be a full refund of the cost for every module in your Mechs/inventory (aside from consumables), no matter where you got them from. Any LTD editions of those modules will give you an extra 1M C-Bills. I did the math and put it at 128M for me, but that was before I got a few in supply caches and found out that LTD editions were 1M bonus.
LOL, I have a 143 Mastered Mechs and 12,000 battles. If they think I am doing that again they are pretty stupid. S!
I haven't seen anything official but word on the MWO forum is that the skill trees have been pushed back a month. Is this going to be a repeat of Energy Draw?
https://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/245172-upcoming-update-to-the-skill-tree-pts-build/ They have so many different places they put announcements it is impossible to keep track of everything. I found this on twitter (first time I've actually used twitter). https://twitter.com/russ_bullock According to them the feedback has been mostly positive (yeah, right, /sarcasm), and they are pushing it back a month to take some of the ideas into account. I personally thought it was absurd they were going to have a 2 week beta for such a huge change. I've come up with my own plan for how I would handle this: 1) Remove the rule of 3 2) Change pinpoint to a 10% armor buff 3) Done. No new skill tree, no paying to respec, just leave everything else as is.
My suggestion: Don't do a Skill-"TREE", do it as a Skills-Grid, no dependencies, just invest some XP-Points to unlock the Skills, and then simply invest XP-Points into Level Ups with a hard Cap of possible Points, so you cannot overpower the Mechs/ have to make tradeoff decisions. And make it a lot better with the exchange rate for the Transition. You can't expect long-time players to grind again and even more, than they did before with all the slow grind speed. This is fun breaking. To say it best: "We're too close to the timeline jump to be screwing around with easily game-destroying tectonic shifts like this."
