I guess I'm a little confused. Many players use a blend of weapon and class skills, balanced according to whether they use magicka or stamina.

For example, my Stam Sorc uses a dagger and bow for her weapons when questing. Faced with a mob pack, she's shooting a hail of arrows (Endless Hail), then surrounding herself with hurricane force winds as she rushes into the middle of her enemies (Hurricane). Then she's slashing (Rending Slashes)and hurling daggers until they all die(Shrouded Dagger) while Surge keeps her healed from all sources of critical damage (Critical Surge).

On the other hand, my MagDK uses mostly class skills while she quests. Her Inferno staff's turns fights into a game of "the floor is lava" for enemies (Wall of Elements), while she chains, whips, and burns the mob to death (Unrelenting Grip, Molten Whip, Burning Embers/Engulfing Flames). Against harder foes, Elemental Drain fuels her magicka, letting her do more damage, longer.

In each case, their weapon and chosen class skills are all boosted by their main resource: stamina or magicka. Fights are a fluid rotation between skills that all work together to bring down the enemy quickly.

That depends a lot from class to class however. I mainly play stamblade, which in the siphoning tree have a passive which gives me x% bonus healing for each skill slotted on that bar. Since the best heals for my pvp char are rally & vigor, I have those slotted along with 2 siphoning skills to boost those skills. There's also a passive in the Assassination tree which helps me offensively and means I usually have 2 skills from that line on my main bar in PvE to boost damage there.

And then we have Fighter's guild which has a really fun passive when you just want to make your snipes hit as hard as possible.

Mixing between trees to find how to make your passives help you while using the best skills that you need is a big part for making a build. Weapon skills are a big part of it, while the passives are weapon specific, the actual abilities and buffs that they provide is an important factor.

As an example from my ranged pvp build, I use rally from 2h weapon tree in order to boost my damage on my bow bar, then race against time from psijic order to increase crit dmg, then I have a fighters guild skill that adds more overall damage to the bar it's on, which makes my poison arrow or bombard or bow ult hit harder.

Akisohida wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

I guess I'm a little confused. Many players use a blend of weapon and class skills, balanced according to whether they use magicka or stamina.

For example, my Stam Sorc uses a dagger and bow for her weapons when questing. Faced with a mob pack, she's shooting a hail of arrows (Endless Hail), then surrounding herself with hurricane force winds as she rushes into the middle of her enemies (Hurricane). Then she's slashing (Rending Slashes)and hurling daggers until they all die(Shrouded Dagger) while Surge keeps her healed from all sources of critical damage (Critical Surge).

On the other hand, my MagDK uses mostly class skills while she quests. Her Inferno staff's turns fights into a game of "the floor is lava" for enemies (Wall of Elements), while she chains, whips, and burns the mob to death (Unrelenting Grip, Molten Whip, Burning Embers/Engulfing Flames). Against harder foes, Elemental Drain fuels her magicka, letting her do more damage, longer.

In each case, their weapon and chosen class skills are all boosted by their main resource: stamina or magicka. Fights are a fluid rotation between skills that all work together to bring down the enemy quickly.

I could have said it better. I mean, like, the passives.

Dagger passives only help daggers. D.Staff passives only help D.Staves. Grave Lord Passives only help Grave Lord skills.

And many of these passives are 'For every <class> skill slotted, do <x>', so if having Grave Lord skills slotted increases my skill damage, why would I reduce that damage boost by slotting D.Staff skills?

These passives are so rigidly defined, that's there's little to no synergy with anything NOT of that skill tree.
I'm not a Dagger Necromancer; I'm a Necromancer OR a dagger user. Because the passives are weaker if I split my 6 active abilities between 2 trees.

I hope that makes a bit more sense?

I think it depends to a degree on how useful the passive is vs the benefit your gain from the other skills you'd be using. Passives that add up bonuses like that are usually small additional bonuses for using the skills you would be anyway.

For example, my MagDK has the passive Elder Dragon, where it "Increases your Health Recovery by 5% for each Draconic Power ability slotted." Well, extra health recovery is nice while questing, but I'm not going to stack a bunch of Draconic Power abilities to pump it up. Instead, it gives me a little extra 5% on each bar when I have one qualifying ability. My tank build uses more CC/protective abilities from Draconic Power, so I get more health recovery on the build that can really use it.

With your Grave Lord example, I see it "increases your Critical Strike Chance against enemies under 25% Health by 10% for each Grave Lord ability slotted." That means its more beneficial to stack your primary damage bar with Grave Lord skills to take advantage of the execute phase damage. But your back bar is still available for other skills, such as weapon DOTs, buffs, or debuffs that boost your overall damage in other ways. In fact, depending on your build and the content you are doing, it might be more beneficial to lose 10% of critical chance during execute phase in exchange for picking up a non-Grave Lord skill that gives you another DOT or otherwise fills in a weakness in your build.

Starlock wrote: »

Can you give an example of a cRPG (or even a tabletop RPG) that works in the manner you are asking for, Akisohida?

I don't agree with your assessment that using a different weapon "means nothing" if you don't have one of the skills slotted. It means less than it does in other RPGs, yes, but there are still differences in aesthetic, wind up times, damage, resource recovery, and in some cases a few other effects like bleed or damage type.

I'm not aware of any RPG that allows distinctly different skill types to augment unrelated skill types. A character with 10 skill ranks in climbing doesn't get to just apply that to crafting arrows. A character that specializes in greatswords shouldn't expect that to have any impact at all on spells they cast. Being good at algebra doesn't mean you somehow are good at drawing. That sort of thing.

To give an example: Necros, in Diablo 2, have dagger-based skills.
Not quite the same but on the same block.

I'm not saying it's bad or wrong; just that it feels oddly restrictive.
And I'm learning that maybe it's just me needing to learn more.

I dunno. I guess the way I would have done it is have weapon skills for each class.
IE: Necros get necromancer-themed dagger or sword trees.
Nightblades get skill trees for swords, daggers, and bows that work with their class trees.

It's just my input, and I put it out there to see if people agrees, or if I was wrong and/or missing allot of information. My highest level character is level 21 DK. I'm currently playing a Magi-Necro with friends (DPS, not healing). So I don't have much, if any, end-game information or all the info on how builds work.
Hell, I'm not even in a newb-friendly guild.

So I dropped this thread to discuss and learn.

OP I agree mate and I think your suggestion would open up additional builds, especially because magicka players are forced to use a staff, whereas stamina players have much more options available.

Maybe having a magicka and a stamina morph option for each weapon type?

For example, the following would be good:

- Magicka based arrows (think Hank out of the TV cartoon series of dungeon and dragons)

And so on ...

I have learned that Wall Of Elements is really good for AoE as a Grave Lord Necro.

Admittedly, I also put a point into Render Flesh for self-sustain when soloing.

Edit: Does Magica Damage increase the damage of EVERY Magica-based skill? Even weapon ones? Or should I up Weapon Damage to make Wall Of Elements shine?

Akisohida wrote: »

I have learned that Wall Of Elements is really good for AoE as a Grave Lord Necro.

Admittedly, I also put a point into Render Flesh for self-sustain when soloing.

Edit: Does Magica Damage increase the damage of EVERY Magica-based skill? Even weapon ones? Or should I up Weapon Damage to make Wall Of Elements shine?

Unless it says it scales off of health, magicka-costing skills scale off of max magicka, spell damage, and spell critical. Stamina-costing skills scale off of max stamina, weapon damage, and weapon critical. (There are relatively few health-scaling skills because it tends to do odd things to the balance of health-stacking tanks.)

If it helps, I think of staves as "magicka weapons" whose light attacks scale with max magicka and whose heavy attacks return magicka resources. In the same way, bows, one hand and shield, dual wield, and twohanded are all "stamina weapons" whose light attacks scale with max stamina and whose heavy attacks return stamina.

One important thing you missed, OP, is that Light and Heavy attacks count as weapon skills, and those passives apply to them as well, and who in their right mind ISN'T using some combination of Light and heavy attacks during combat?

Akisohida wrote: »

I mean..It just seems like, if I'm not using weapon skills (say, I use only Daedric Summoning, or a Necromancer skillset), then my weapon means nothing.

And if I AM using weapon skills, I'm gimping my chosen Class Tree.
It just feels like I could be a sorcerer using a bow, or a Necromancer using a dagger, since every skill tree is 80-100% ONLY that skill tree.
IE: Dagger skills/passives won't help my Necromancer skills or even my Nightblade skills.

Everything just feels so...rigidly walled off from each other. I can be 1 of 3 Necromancer skill trees OR a Destruction Staff user. Because D.Staff passives don't help non-D.Staff skills.

Note: I do know some, very few, weapon passives don't help ONLY weapon skills, but they seem to be the exception, not the rule.

So you think the game is too rigid for adding passive to a skill set that benefits only that skill set, instead of other skills skill sets? Dude, if they did it your way, then people would not have the flexibility to create whatever character they want and they'd be more rigid with what class, weapon, and skills they'd pick.