The New Skill Trees Thread

Lynx7386

Showcased below are my own suggestions/ideas for additional skill trees to be added in future updates. Feel free to post your own.



Weapon Skill Tree: Fencing
Based on the concept of utilizing a one handed weapon without a shield or offhand weapon, this is a popular and highly requested feature for the game. Currently wielding a one handed weapon with nothing in the offhand defaults you to the 1h+shield skills, most of which cannot be used without a shield equipped. Fencing aims to solve that by adding a mobile and agile skill tree.

Active Skills:

Lunge: A short range 'charge' accompanied by a stab at the target. This attack deals moderate to high damage and gains bonus armor penetration.
Morphs:
Over Extend: Increased Range.
Follow Through: Lunge grants major empower, increasing the damage of your next attack by 20%.

Parry: Functioning in a similar manner to defensive stance, Parry is a 10 second buff on yourself that automatically deflects the next melee attack directed at you.
Morphs:
Riposte: When parry deflects a melee attack, the attacker takes X damage (equal to your weapon damage).
Defensive Method: Parry can deflect an additional attack during its duration.

Coup De Grace: A stab to the heart that deals up to 300% additional damage against low-health targets.
Morphs:
Mercy Killing: Deals additional damage to bleeding opponents.
Skewer: Ability now ignores the opponent's armor rating.

Feint: A two-hit attack that leaves the opponent disoriented and offbalance.
Morphs:
Fleche: Feint causes the target to bleed for additional damage over 10 seconds.
Disengage: After using feint, your next roll dodge costs no stamina.

Fencing Method: For 30 seconds, you gain Major evasion and Minor Brutality increasing your chance to dodge attacks by 20% and your weapon damage by 8%.
Morphs:
Bladework: Fencing Method now provides major brutality, increasing weapon damage by 20%. No longer provides minor brutality.
Footwork: When activated, Fencing method also grants Major Expedition, Increasing your movement speed by 40% for 6 seconds.

Passive Skills:

Fencer's Armaments: Grants bonuses based on the type of weapon you are wielding. Axes cause additional bleed damage over 6 seconds. Maces gain 20% armor penetration. Swords deal 6% additional damage. Daggers gain 10% increased critical strike chance.

Perfect Balance: Reduces the stamina cost of Fencing abilities by 20%.

Opportune Strike: Fencing abilities deal 15% additional damage on targets below 25% health.

Efficiency: Reduces the stamina cost of bash, roll dodge, and block by 10%.

Thousand Cuts: Your heavy attacks while fencing cause the target to bleed for additional damage over 10 seconds. This effect can stack up to 5 times, refreshing the duration the bleed damage dealt per stack.

Lynx7386

World Skill Tree: Brawling
Unarmed is another combat type a lot of people want to see. Personally, I dont think unarmed combat - at least on its own - would ever stand up to weapons due to the type of combat environments we see in ESO. There simply isnt room for a shaolin monk flipping around knocking everyone out with palm strikes. However, adding several unarmed skills that can be used while any other weapon type is equipped, as supportive abilities, is perfectly sensible, especially from a historical combat point of view.

The Brawling skill tree gives abilities which can be used regardless of what weapon type you have equipped, whether it be a sword and shield, daggers, agreatsword, a bow, or a staff. These abilities do little to no damage, but are designed to compliment other builds by adding status effects and control.

Active Skills:

Backhand: A powerful backhanded strike that stuns your target. This attack has a "windup" period similar to wrecking blow, so it is not instant.
Morphs:
Swift Backhand: Backhand now casts instantly and has no windup period.
Spiked Gauntlet: Backhand now causes some initial damage and bleeding damage over 10 seconds.

Leg Sweep: A spinning sweep that knocks down all enemies within melee range.
Morphs:
Debilitating Sweep: Enemies are afflicted by Minor Maim, reducing damage by 15% for 5 seonds.
Disorienting Sweep: Enemies are stunned for longer when knocked down by Leg Sweep.

Tactical Retreat: Leap backwards away from your target 10 meters.
Morphs:
Tumble: Roll when you land, gaining an additional 5 meters from your target.
Escape: Tactical retreat now frees you from stun, knockdown, and root effects.

Shoulder Charge: Charge forward 15 meters, knocking down and disorienting any enemies in your path.
Morphs:
Stampede: Shoulder charge has a wider knockdown radius and you now travel 20 meters forward.
Charging Bull: Enemies hit by shoulder charge take some initial damage and bleed for additional damage over 10 seconds.

Guard: (Toggle on/off) While toggled on, you assume a defensive posture, gaining Major Resolve and Major Ward, Increasing your armor and spell resistance. While active, your weapon damage and spell power is reduced by 20%.
Morphs:
Counterattack: While Guard is active, 20% of damage taken from melee attacks is returned to the attacker.
The Best Defense: The damage penalty for guard is reduced by 10%.

Passive Skills:

Martial Prowess: Increases your experience gain with the 1h and shield, dual wield, two handed, and bow skill lines.

Deflection: Increases your armor by 2% for each piece of medium or heavy armor equipped.

Strength of the Bear: Reduces all incoming damage by 5% for each enemy within 10 meters, up to 3.

Strength of the Wolf: Increases your weapon damage by 5% for each ally within 10 meters, up to 3.

Combat Tactics: Any time you successfully bash to interrupt or successfully block a heavy attack, the stamina cost is refunded.

Lynx7386

Reserved For future skill tree

Lynx7386

Reserved for Future skill tree

Lynx7386

Reserved for Future skill tree

Lynx7386

Bump

Akavir_Sentinel

You had me at pimp slap......

Storm_knight22

When spears are implemented (lets be optimistic for once!) they need their own skill line. Using a spear/halberd is VERY different from using a great sword or maul and would need different animations anyhow. Thee are in part already done, certain NPCs practice with spears, though they don't use them in combat : ( .

Maybe spear and pole arms could be two different skill lines, spears as one handed (so you could fight as Leonidas or dual wield spears like Hircine. Pole arms could be two handed like halberds.

Crossbows will need a skill line of their own as well with different passives to boot (faster reloading for example)

Lynx7386

I'd add polearms to the 2h tree, just have different animations. 2h needs a weapon subtype with crit anyhow.

Crosdbows, as well, could just as easily use the bow line (renamed archery or marksman) worry unique animations.

New skill trees are really only needed when there is no possible, conceivable way to fit a weapon into an existing line.

MorHawk

Your friendly reminder, as I've been saying since this frigging game was announced, that new skill lines cannot circumvent the normal itemization process. Want fencing or other types of one-handed combat? You'll be needing a sheath or something to go in the off-hand, or at least have the weapon fill both slots a la two-handed. Unarmed? You'd better be planning on crafting some gloves.

Without the above, assuming these lines did comparable damage, everyone would take them. Why bother dual wielding when you can just slot the one item and be done? If it provides better defense than shield, then what are you doing lugging that big hunk of metal around?

Oh, and the whole unarmed thing being usable with any weapon? Lots of goodies there that make your choice of weapon line rather redundant.

Lynx7386

MorHawk wrote: »

Your friendly reminder, as I've been saying since this frigging game was announced, that new skill lines cannot circumvent the normal itemization process. Want fencing or other types of one-handed combat? You'll be needing a sheath or something to go in the off-hand, or at least have the weapon fill both slots a la two-handed. Unarmed? You'd better be planning on crafting some gloves.

Without the above, assuming these lines did comparable damage, everyone would take them. Why bother dual wielding when you can just slot the one item and be done? If it provides better defense than shield, then what are you doing lugging that big hunk of metal around?

Oh, and the whole unarmed thing being usable with any weapon? Lots of goodies there that make your choice of weapon line rather redundant.

The loss of an enchant/trait/set bonus slot is already a reality with any two handed weapon. Dual wield and 1h/shield always have that benefit over other types - does that cause people to never use those other weapons because they dont get that extra perk? No.

Same goes for fencing, I'm sure more than a few people would use it even without a stat stick in the offhand. If you absolutely need one, I suppose a buckler would work, but then you're basically right back to 1h/shield.


Also, the "Brawling" skill tree I posted should not be mistaken for unarmed combat. It's a set of abilities that can be used with any weapon equipped (just like fighter/mage guild abilities, or undaunted abilities, or soul magic, so on and so forth). You dont need gloves on to backhand someone, or leg sweep them.

Sharakor

This is completely useless, I'd rather have Zenimax working on updates, fixes and improvements than what you call "highly requested". By what, 2 or 3 people?

MorHawk

In short, jst as with

Lynx7386 wrote: »

MorHawk wrote: »

Your friendly reminder, as I've been saying since this frigging game was announced, that new skill lines cannot circumvent the normal itemization process. Want fencing or other types of one-handed combat? You'll be needing a sheath or something to go in the off-hand, or at least have the weapon fill both slots a la two-handed. Unarmed? You'd better be planning on crafting some gloves.

Without the above, assuming these lines did comparable damage, everyone would take them. Why bother dual wielding when you can just slot the one item and be done? If it provides better defense than shield, then what are you doing lugging that big hunk of metal around?

Oh, and the whole unarmed thing being usable with any weapon? Lots of goodies there that make your choice of weapon line rather redundant.

The loss of an enchant/trait/set bonus slot is already a reality with any two handed weapon. Dual wield and 1h/shield always have that benefit over other types - does that cause people to never use those other weapons because they dont get that extra perk? No.

Same goes for fencing, I'm sure more than a few people would use it even without a stat stick in the offhand. If you absolutely need one, I suppose a buckler would work, but then you're basically right back to 1h/shield.

Also, the "Brawling" skill tree I posted should not be mistaken for unarmed combat. It's a set of abilities that can be used with any weapon equipped (just like fighter/mage guild abilities, or undaunted abilities, or soul magic, so on and so forth). You don't need gloves on to backhand someone, or leg sweep them.

Yeah, 2H should get the extra set bonus, but the damage is still balanced to offset the loss of the extra weapon. What I'm trying to explain is that this 'fencing' line would need to be treated the same way. Block out the off-hand slot and treat it as just a different kind of 2H, with comparable damage levels (in this case, it would be appropriate to simply increase attack speed to contrast against 2H). Proceeding as you have proposed using normal 1H weapons with the off-hand simply left empty would be unbalanced. Again, either these skills are better than DW or S/S, making the use of the extra weapon redundant, or more likely they are equivalent or inferior, putting you at a handicap. Not balanced. You want a new skill line? You need a different weapon type. You cannot proceed using what already is in-game without breaking the system in some way.

And yes, I get that you wouldn't need gloves as an item if 'unarmed' were treated as a World skill. My point again is that many of your proposed skills are either copies of weapon abilities ('Shoulder Charge' would make the charge abilities in 2H, SS and Templar rather redundant) or horribly unbalanced (Combat Tactics: free bashing and heavy attack blocking? Whaaaaaa?). It's also very heavily focused on one playstyle.

TL;DR: I'm not against new skill lines, and a variant of 2H that compensates through increased attack speed instead of higher damage is interesting, but I'm simply saying that it needs to be done right.

NotSo

You're not against new skill lines but you'll argue that any new skill line is either redundant or overpowered. . .

MorHawk

NotSo wrote: »

You're not against new skill lines but you'll argue that any new skill line is either redundant or overpowered. . .

Wrong. The *latter* line is redundant and overpowered. The former is not itemized properly. Also, I made it fairly clear that I think the idea of Fencing as a skill line is interesting. Please read the whole post, repetition is tiresome.

Rastafariel

Supported.

I'm in favor of any form (almost) of a 1 handed weapon skill line.

lathbury

against 1 handed weapon skill line.
especially the OP given as an example.