Poll of what makes a good skill tree structure

[aidancode]

I'm curious what people actually want out of a skill tree since there's many different kinds of skill trees and at least for me I definitely have a favorite. This is purely in terms of the structure, not in terms of the features added. Obviously, more interesting new abilities is better, and straight stat buffs are worse, but in terms of how tree-like we want our trees, what do you think?

(if my wording is bad I'm sorry I tried my best 😭)

[AliceShiki]

I actually like straight stat buffs, tbh. They feel nice to play with~

Each perk doing its own thing is generally preferred, I'd say... I have no issues with having 3 levels of a skill with the subsequent levels just further buffing it, but it's obvious that it's more fun if you only have the level 3 perk and can invest your other points on other stuff~

[Evelo]

None of the above. Good skill trees, imo, are minor buffs to existing characteristics that are long and really force player decision. If certain abilities are going to be given through skill trees, make it so it is impossible to get that skill with any other skill because it rewards investment. Have branching start early and make sure it goes for a while. If we are only given 15 points, make skill trees where 10 of the points must be spent into 1 branch to get the ability while the remaining 5 points can be spent on stat increases.

But DST is not a good game to have skill trees in because of the type of game the foundation is built upon. It can be done, but the game as a whole ought to be re-balanced with it in mind. Additionally, skill trees really need to be restrictive. Players should not be able to change them whenever they want at the Celestial Portal for a fairly cheap cost (yes Moonstone and Purple Gem is cheap, not dirt cheap, but it is cheap). Because freely changing your skills removes the element of choice as players are more than capable of just changing it out in any given situation that suits them the best.

[DegenerateFurry]

Walter's skill tree is by far the best skill tree, in my opinion. How does it achieve this? It ditches the "invest three perk points to get this one semi-decent perk" thing the others (especially Woodie's) do in favor of just making all of the perks at least somewhat decent and letting you largely pick them in the order you want, but requiring a bit of investment in each category to get really good stuff. 

Do you want Woby to be the ultimate helper dog or do you want to maximize your combat capabilities? Do you want your early-game exploration to be at its absolute best or are you willing to sacrifice that for something else? Are band upgrades worth it to you at the start of a world when the best one's post-rifts or would you rather put that perk point into stickies/shockscrap for a pre-ruins cheap enemy-slowing ammo? You're probably taking the ammo perk that gives you two different cheap AoE options because you're not playing Wendy and that's such a non-question, but most of the rest of Walter's perks are at least worth considering taking or leaving for one playstyle or another.

When all of the perks have genuine use cases and none of them feel like a waste of a point you're forced to do to get a must-have, you get the best of both worlds: meaningful player choice and freedom of choice. Walter's skill tree is peak for this reason. 

The ability to reinvest perks with the portal actually works quite well with rifts existing and gating off necessary materials for certain perks to be useful, since it encourages you to take those early-game perks and then reinvest them once you've slain Fuelweaver or Celestial Champion and taken out a few Ink Blights or Deadly Brightshades. I like to take the Woby drying rack perk to produce Woby treats as I go early on, then reinvest it into Pure Horror rounds once I've killed FW and have some drying racks up in base.

 

Compare that to Woodie's skill tree. If you have literally any interest in fighting raid bosses, you're just going to take the full Weremoose tree, that's how it is. If you don't fight raid bosses, you're probably taking Werebeaver for the resource gathering, or maybe you're one of those rare weirdos who mains Weregoose. Before you tell me that you play Woodie and fight raid bosses on the regular as him but never use Weremoose even for the Shadow Pieces, and you also don't use either of his other transformations: I am laughing at you, pick a different character. 
You're also going to take the trio that lengthens transformations and Curse Embracer, because those just make the Woodie experience better. That plus the Weremoose (or any other wereform) branch is eight out of fifteen perk points taken, over half filled by must-haves because of the "invest to unlock the one you actually want" model. They are boring filler, simple as. 
So, now we get into Woodie's actual choices.

• Early-game, his wood crafts are pretty decent, especially if you're playing beefaloless. The wood cane may become outdated solo on day one of winter, but that's not as true in a populated server since it helps mitigate the demand for tusks. Hat carving is also good on public servers if there's no Wigfrid since it lessens the need to rush pigskins before they're all taken, and lets you save them for setting up a pig farm instead. Woodworker would be better if it fully replaced the boards recipe for Woodie so you don't accidentally craft the wrong boards and waste logs.
• Then there's the treeguard feller branch, which should frankly be two perks and not three, but Woodie's skill tree is based on the investment filler model. It's sort of worth it if you want to make a ton of staffs early-game or if you intend to make mushroom farms, but otherwise it's not great.
• The final meaningful choice is the affinity perk, since both are pretty good: the lunar one lets you not hate existing during moonstorms while the shadow one lets you avoid that dangerous situation where you're trying to turn human again at low sanity as something other than Weremoose while two terrorbeaks are chasing you. And then, for the people who're bad at investing their perks properly, there's quick picker.

[flamboyant wolf]

Walter and Winona are in my top 3 faves in general atm, so I am biased, but like. Idk, Walter's tree especially is just great. I keep changing it up every now and again, and none of the configurations felt bad so far, really. 

I do like Wortox's too. While it's not quite as flexible, there's still at least 3 "main" builds I could use. (realistically I just do good-maxxing in coop, and neutral in solo, also I never take his affinities and rarely touch full-neutral skills, but hey, it's something).

Anyway, hope we see more Walter-like skill trees in the future.

[Ohan]

I really dislike the structure of wormwood’s tree. Its only salvaged by the fact that the bottom two branches are bad and extremely ignorable. 

[flamboyant wolf]

1 hour ago, Ohan said:

I really dislike the structure of wormwood’s tree. Its only salvaged by the fact that the bottom two branches are bad and extremely ignorable. 

Plant crafting branch is so bad, and mushroom branch isn't the most exciting either, which is sad cause left-side affinity is kinda fun. Wormwood's is among the trees I would like to see tweaked/reworked most, currently, cause there's good potential and possibilities there, but it's just kinda lacking imho.

[Ohan]

1 hour ago, flamboyant wolf said:

Plant crafting branch is so bad, and mushroom branch isn't the most exciting either, which is sad cause left-side affinity is kinda fun. Wormwood's is among the trees I would like to see tweaked/reworked most, currently, cause there's good potential and possibilities there, but it's just kinda lacking imho.

I actually really like the mushroom branch for the most part:

Spoiler

Mushplanters are a huge asset to worm: blue mush if u fight on beef, green mush or moonshroom to fuel dreadstone armor/batbat/CC crown etc, red mush for extremely lazy food production and all the caps combined for super easy mushcake access. 

Moonshroom cloud is also one of the absolute highlights of the entire skilltree.

The only real stinkers in this branch are the two entire skills dedicated to making the planters 0.75 days faster .

If it was up to me i would merge this boost with the skill that makes it so u always get 6 shrooms per planter. 

 

this would free up two skills one of which should be reducing the HP cost of L-log creation to like 15 instead of 20. Huge synergy with mushplanters since they need to be fertilized frequently. 
 

the other skill could be something interesting like boosts to the mush hats maybe. 

 

But yeah i definitely agree, nice potential but the majority of it is rather lacklustre. 

Edited January 9 by Ohan

[DegenerateFurry]

13 hours ago, Ohan said:

I really dislike the structure of wormwood’s tree. Its only salvaged by the fact that the bottom two branches are bad and extremely ignorable. 

Yeah, plant crafting branch sucks. Let's take a look at it.

Sapling crafting.

• Marginally useful in twiggy tree worlds, but you could just go get saplings from lunar, and there's no way to know if your world's a twiggy trees or a saplings world before you join in unless someone tells you. 
• Completely useless in any world with saplings because there's always enough for you to just go dig some up, and replanting them restores more sanity than you lose doing it. Yes, you can just replant and dig up the same sapling over and over to slowly gain sanity as Wormwood, it's funny.
• It takes five sticks to make one sapling. It takes two sticks to make one shovel that gets me 25 saplings. It takes four sticks to make a golden shovel that gets me 100 saplings. I have just proven mathematically that this perk is useless in any world where saplings are present (which is every world since lunar has saplings guaranteed).

Berry bush crafting. 

• Same problems as sapling crafting: whether or not it even could be useful depends on what type of world it is, and you have no way to know unless you wait to invest perks until after exploring both the surface and the caves.
• Berry bushes are plentiful, easy to relocate, and not exactly an incredible food source anyway. 
• You are playing Wormwood. That means you have access to multiple much better ways of producing food that also work during winter. Berry bushes shouldn't be your thing.

Juicy berry bush crafting.

• This had to be a separate perk from normal berry bushes? Really?
• Same problems as its normal counterpart.

Monkeytail crafting.

• While it could've actually been pretty cool, requiring bananas as part of its recipe makes it not worth taking. Cave banana trees are about the same level as inconvenient to get to as Moon Quay's banana bushes, and if you go to Moon Quay to get banana bushes, you can already get monkeytails. 
• Will become outdated the instant you set foot on Moon Quay, which you will eventually do, so this is at best a perk you replace later. 
• Why are bananas required to make reeds? Shouldn't that be a banana bush recipe?

Lureplant crafting. 

• Actually has some synergy with Wormwood since lure plants are non-hostile towards him, so he can use them in certain cases like as a way to fight Bee Queen. 
• An interesting perk that lets you craft lureplants before spring (and thus get a reliable source of leafy meat) and mass-produce them, making more with each harvest.

So, you have to invest five points total for four mediocre-to-useless perks to get one that's kind of neat, benefits the whole team, and actually plays into the character's strengths.

10 hours ago, Ohan said:

I actually really like the mushroom branch for the most part

Moonshroom cloud is also one of the absolute highlights of the entire skilltree.

For sure. Did you know you can actually make Klaus completely unable to cast his spells with proper moonshroom cloud use? If you're able to stay on top of it, you can make the Klaus fight way simpler for your fellow players by just keeping his deer asleep the whole time. Just don't let him get too far from them or he'll enrage. 

Edited January 9 by DegenerateFurry

[Mike23Ua]

Considering skill trees absolutely butchered the ease of playing certain characters while using an Xbox Controller? I would say I wish they had never happened at all.

But then again: Wigfrid got a cool lightning spear & Willow got neat fire mage powers.

Edited January 9 by Mike23Ua

[wormwood123]

10 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

Considering skill trees absolutely butchered the ease of playing certain characters while using an Xbox Controller? I would say I wish they had never happened at all.

The only character I can think got negatively affected is Walter which is a shame but it is an easy fix (just make it so when you press circle with the slingshot out it prioritises using the alt fire instead of calling woby) and I’m honestly surprised they haven’t done it sooner but I do feel like the game in general has benefited from skill trees be it characters that were bad or boring becoming good and fun E.G Walter and willow. (Wolfgang also may have been negatively affected I dunno I haven’t played him in years)