Would you like skill trees to be... removed?!

[whiteking]

16 minutes ago, Bumber64 said:

It's potentially worse than that. I voted "no" just because we wouldn't get the time back. Doesn't mean I've got a positive opinion of them.

You've got Willow, who isn't anything special without her tree. And then you've got Maxwell, who surpasses skill tree Willow without having one yet. Walter's skills are all crafts, and Woby's badges could just as well be WX circuits.

This wasn't a viable way to balance characters, and I can't imagine what Maxwell and Wickerbottom's trees will even look like. (Wickerbottom loses slightly less sanity from reading books. Okay, what else? A bunch of skills to buff each book separately?) They're already interesting and complete characters after their reworks. You'd have to take things away first, which defeats the whole point.

But maybe the forums aren't representative of the player base. You're probably more likely to join to voice an opinion of something you want changed than just to give praise. Maybe people are just being dramatic because they don't like the tree their character got stuck with, and would rather nobody got any.

Still, I can't see how giving strong characters completely meaningless skills is better than just fixing the incomplete and weak characters. If the intent was a sense of progression after starting new worlds, it's a good idea with a bad implementation. It can't work with survivors so unbalanced in power.

Perhaps you have noticed that DST's positive review rate on Steam has decreased significantly this year. At least for the first time, I discovered that DST would lose its bottom line of 95% positive reviews (after a few days of discounts, a large number of positive reviews brought it back to 95%)
Actually, if you don't limit your focus to a single character, I don't think adding a skill tree is a bad thing. But designing a skill tree for each character is a very time-consuming task, far beyond redesigning a farm. KLEI has spent over a year here and it has not been completed yet. Meanwhile, many things have been put on hold. You cannot deny that this year we are severely lacking in significant changes like the farms of a few years ago. And almost all new content takes effect at the end of the game, not in the first autumn.
When you make major adjustments to a character, it will significantly change the gameplay of that character. At the same time, players of other characters find it difficult to improve. The last time all roles were changed, because transitioning from DS to DST required new designs to adapt to the DST environment, which was necessary. But when there are no problems with the game characters, I think DST should prioritize changing the world in which the characters are located rather than adjusting them.

[Bumber64]

Yeah, at this point I'd prefer that Klei grab some of Winona's trusty tape and patch something together so they can go back focusing entirely on content updates for everyone. (Give Warly a bit more attention, though, because he's still a swap character.)

[Falkenpelz]

I was never a fan of them because on top of character specific items, abilities and craft menus they just added more of exactly that, just obtained through a different system. For example, Wendy has her own crafts to buff Abigail and now she has a skill system to also buff Abigail in different ways. To me, it just feels a bit chaotic and lacking an internal logic of "why is this trait in the menu and this trait in the skill tree?" The fact that Wendy makes her minion faster with base craft, yet Willow makes her minion faster with a skill just seems random.

And I don't like Willow being a straight up firemage, but I seem to be in the minority, so it's okay. I just ignore the skill trees and let others have them.

[0rutyna0]

First add bosses to the game that are difficult to defeat alone, then make all the characters easily able to do it alone.
You can't get all the upgrades. "You have to choose, you're either a fish that gets a boost from water, or an architect."
I hope one day the developers decide what this game should be like.