Mastering your skills!

Some time ago on McFluffin’s twitch channel someone came up with an idea for “mastering” skills. When you get to skill lvl 20 you would be able to select an option that would change how the skill works, IMO they would be centred around the class masteries, so for the Sentinel’s skills, they would have one void/timey-wimey one (Void Knight), one support/fire/phys (Paladin) & one tank/phys/control (Forge Guard).

Examples could be:
Warpath –
• Damage is converted to Void & Warpath hits have a chance to spawn a redundant timeline copy of yourself which has a chance to taunt mobs (the copy moves around & can either do damage or not depending on balance)
• Warpath is turned into a raging inferno (conversion to fire) that melts mobs armour (fire shred on hit)
• Mecha Warpath! After channelling for X seconds, gain additional armour (flat armour buff) & mobs hits bounce off your armoured hide (armour pen reduction)!

Smite –
• Every X seconds, Smite hits are caught in a temporal loop and repeatedly hit the original target even if it’s dead (doesn’t proc Time & Faith after the initial cast)
• Smite is turned into a moving pillar of fire from the sky lasts X seconds & you can only have Y active at a time
• Every X seconds, Smite’s initial impact causes enemies to fumble their hits (chance for mobs attacks to miss, kinda like dodge but a debuff to the mob rather than a buff t othe player)

Devouring Orb –
• DO casts Void Rifts that increase in frequency over it’s duration with increasing damage (rather than every time a mob dies), cannot occur if you have the Dark Moon node
• Converts damage to fire, void rifts have a chance to ignite, void rifts grant health regen for X seconds to the player & allies hit by them for Y seconds (stacks up to Z)
• Devouring Orbs are replaced with SpiderBots! The spiders attach themselves to enemies & pulse with damage when attached (equivalent to void rifts, but physical damage), the damage pulses alternate repulsive and attractive forces

Abyssal Echoes –
• No idea what to do with this one since it’s already pretty void-y, maybe make it a channel? After channelling for X seconds, if a mob hits you for more than Y% of your hp you escape through a rift to a safe space
• Instead of damaging mobs, yourself & allies are clothed in fire damaging all mobs within X distance of you & you gain Y health regen for the duration, both effects stack
• Damage is converted to physical, the earth is shattered beneath mobs feet slowing them down, if they get hit by X Abyssal Echoes the ground swallows them! Abyssal Decay damage is converted to bleed, bleeds inflicted by Abyssal Echoes have increased duration

Shield Throw –
• Shield Throw no-longer ricochets, but sticks to the first target & sucks other enemies to it. Pull strength is increased based on the number of ricochets that Shield Throw would have had. Shield Throw explodes after X seconds, additional shields that hit the same target increase the explosion damage
• Shield Throw is turned into a burning fragment of the sun & leaves a burning path, dealing additional fire damage to enemies hit (damage reduces with further ricochets)
• Damage is converted to phys (overrides any other conversion, such as the fire conversion node & the idol), mobs hit by ricochets are impaled and chained together, taking physical damage over time (like the DoT from Rive’s third hit), chained mobs can’t move apart from each other & the chains explode after X seconds dealing phys damage

Manifest Armour –
• Every time the Armour is hit, it explodes with void energy, it also gains a pair of void bear turrets on it’s back
• Manifest Armour is converted into a shining beacon of hope & renewal (healing aura & cleanses every heal tick) but such is the strength of it’s manifestation in our realm it has a “short” duration (10-20s) & a longer cooldown that starts after it has departed this mortal coil
• Resistance is futile! The armour can inject mind-controlling drones into enemies and subvert them, forcing them to fight for your cause (every hit has a % chance to convert a mob that increases the more it hits a single mob, converted mobs are healed to full but have decaying health, like Wraiths). Enemies are aghast at this abomination and will fight harder against the Manifest Armour & it’s diabolical minions (ever time it converts a mob, it taunts enemies in a small AoE)
• Bonus points – Manifest Armour is converted into a mobile toilet that does, erm, splash damage… The Manifest Toilet can’t climb stairs & screams “EXTERMINATE” at random occasions.

Hammer Throw –
• Hits have a % chance to summon a rift into the deepest darkest void that spawn Nurglings, er, Termagaunts, no, Voidlings(?) that swarm nearby mobs. The rifts are unstable & explode with void energy. Every X rifts, you attract the attention of a horror from the even deeperer darkerer void that reaches through the rift with it’s tentacles hitting mobs & drawing the smaller mobs back to it’s home to feed
• Your hammers are infused with the fury of the raging Tempest! Your hammers periodically strike out at nearby mobs with lightning (the more hammers you throw the higher the frequency of the strikes) and your melee attacks gain additional lightning damage based on the number of hammers thrown recently
• Instead of throwing hammers, you throw grenades. They fly in a parabolic arc and explode on contact.

Sigils of Hope –
• Sigils of Despair, the sigils pulse with malign energy inflicting all sorts of unpleasant ailments on your foes foolish to come into range (Time Rot, Damned but converted to Void damage, some others)
• Your Sigils explode with fire whenever you fail to block a hit, dealing fire damage. Any allies hit by the explosion deal additional fire damage. This effect has a 1s cooldown
• When your Sigils expire they are converted into Forged Weapons, this effect has a 2s cooldown. A Sigil being replaced by a fresh Sigil (either manually or via Last Wish) counts as expiration.

4 Likes

Rebuke –
• Whenever a mob hits you while channelling Rebuke, the mob is frozen in time & when the channel finishes they are thrown back by a damaging wave of timey-wimey-ness
• Whenever you get hit while channelling Rebuke you emit a wave of healing energy that heals your allies. When Rebuke finishes, all of the healing that your allies received is reflected back to the nearby mobs as a firey wave
• Every time a mob hits you while channelling Rebuke they are knocked back and take physical damage

Judgement –
• Summon fallen heroes from redundant timelines to help you punish the guilty (the mobs that attack you in the mastery quest, but bigger), the highest “quality” of the mobs you hit with Judgement determines how many you summon (bosses summon more than normal mobs), the summoned minions can’t be resummoned until they expire (so only one set out at a time)
• Mobs that are hit by Judgement are afflicted by their guilt, the higher the “quality” of the mob (normal/magic/rare/boss) the more they are affected by the weight of their crimes. Normal mobs grant life on hit to the valiant players that punish them, magic mobs have a chance to explode on hit (chance increases as their hp reduces), rares have a chance on hit to be targeted by normal mobs, bosses evil empowers the player granting increased crit chance. Gives Judgement a cooldown (such that the effect has a ~50% uptime)
• The very ground seeks to punish those you Judge, Judgement’s consecrated ground has the added effect of slowing those mobs within it & dealing a physical damage over time

Holy Aura –
• Instead of empowering the player, the aura saps those enemies in it’s area of effect for twice the value that it would buff the player (eg, Shelter from the Storm reduces affected mob’s elemental & poison protections, Demoralising Aura increases your movement speed, Fanaticism reduces their attack speed, etc)
• Holy Aura no longer affects the player, but it’s affect is doubled for allies
• Casting Holy Aura periodically stuns mobs in it’s area of effect. Those closer are stunned for longer, normal mobs are stunned for longer than bosses.

Healing Hand –
• Enemies caught in the area gaze into the abyss (stunned for a duration, higher quality mobs are less affected, bosses are not stunned but get a damage debuff instead)
• Any enemy in the healing area is burned by the hero’s purity (the burn continues until the target dies, stacks but at reduced effectiveness)
• Summons a healing ally that follows the player round & applies a small/moderate heal on the player for a duration

Forge Strike –
• What’s better than Forged Weapon? Frickin’s Void Bears with Frickin’ lasers on their heads. Instead of summoning swords, you summon up to X void bears (with frickin’ lazors!)
• Hits from Forged Weapons have a chance to return X life & mana, capped at Y life/mana per second
• Forge Strike summons turrets that shoot swords instead of swords that hit things.

Smelter’s Wrath –
• You drain the life out of any nearby mobs and add it to the frontal cone
• Charging Smelter’s Wrath for the maximum duration gives you a firey aura for twice the duration
• Instead of charging up for an attack, you deal damage to mobs in front of you while petrifying them over the duration of the charge time. Adds X second cooldown, does not affect bosses (applies a damage debuff instead).

2 Likes

I like the idea of mastering skills. It introduces another layer of complexity and customization. Maybe even having 2-3 options to choose from to add another layer of customization.

Also to piggyback off your idea, maybe mastering a skill makes it permanent - no respeccing OUT of the skill (can still move points around). I find that to be a good balance of having the ability to test with different builds and yet introduce a level of “this character is x” to the game.

I like the skill permanence idea. Adds another layer of difficulty for the ARPG genre.

i like this idea although it looks like it would require a great deal of work to introduce and balance, what about something much similiar, such as skills get “paragon” levels where after level 20 they start collecting levels and each level increases all the effects of all nodes by 1%. THis can of course be capped to prevent power creep infinitely, but ideally at 100 levels (take alot of time) you would get 100% more out of your skill in all aspects

1 Like

It would involve a lot of coding, art & balancing, but it’s more interesting than a flat stat increase (which would be significantly easier to implement). If they did like the idea, I doubt they’d start working on it before launch (& in order to not have scope creep, they shouldn’t).

that is true, but yes i agree i would like to see alot of skills change and be more specific to your mastery.

I approve of this idea.

Voted!! :smiley:

really like the idea, but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT have infinite scaling on anything. The Paragon system in D3 is not something that should creep into LE. Otherwise the game will become infested with bots and impossible to balance as you cannot balance a game with infinite power creep.

I really liked both ideas (Llama8 and Boardman21) and would be awesome if both got implemented.

I would just like the ability to convert skills to other damage types that aren’t currently available to those skills. Maybe that could be done through unique items though.

I like the idea of more on top of skills, but it should be something that adds variety and customization rather than just another level on the skill.

I like the idea, that’s something intresting for an addon in the future from my point of view :). Right now I’ll be a happy panda if the game releases fully with all classes and MP in mid 2021 ^^. A good idea but right now I don’t think we’ll see something like that.
On the other hand this idea can be converted into uniques as well, so far it simply looks like some easy steroids.

I love this idea, of course it means endgame would need to be made harder and a bunch more super bosses should be added to keep up with the power creep. But it sounds very good.

Accidental thread Bump. Oops.

Because this idea is awesome and needs more attention. :slight_smile:

1 Like

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