skill tree I'm kind of curious but does anyone think skill trees offer too much but also take away from the experience of the game?

[Mysterious box]

So I'm approaching this as someone who actually enjoys skill trees but also feels like the gameplay loop they encourage is kinda unfortunate. Here are a few things I do think is a bit of a issue.

All survivors simply mostly do all the same things even if slightly different between each. In a sense this is a good thing if you prefer to stick to a survivor based on personality but it also kinda feels like the roster is a lot smaller than it actually is mechanically due to that.

Survivor skills have become the new ruins rush. What I mean by that is that now a lot of times people are rushing to raid resources to immediately fulfill conditions for their skills. This isn't necessarily a bad thing per say as it does give goals and direction to some people who seek it but it does feel like it encourages a more selfish playstyle. Especially for characters who require less common resources early.

There's more I had to say on the matter but I feel like these are the more common.

Personally I feel like skill trees do feel good for playing solo or with a small friend group which I've done far more often as of late but it feels like as a whole they lean more so into more selfish playstyles rather than cooperative.

However perhaps this is just me what do you guys think?

[Jakepeng99]

I kinda agree but i dont understand your example.

Wanda, Wolfgang, Walter and WX are the only characters i can think of that have some perks locked behind the ruins and thats before skilltree.

[Mysterious box]

13 minutes ago, Jakepeng99 said:

I kinda agree but i dont understand your example.

Wanda, Wolfgang, Walter and WX are the only characters i can think of that have some perks locked behind the ruins and thats before skilltree.

I don't mean that they have skills that make them rush the ruins or even go there I mean that they have skills that encourage them to approach the world in a similar manner of a ruins rusher.

[Frashaw27]

I mean you are correct, but at the same time, that is what most people would do even before skill trees. Winona would rush to get a pock production system up to satisfy the catapult requirements, Wx would try and get specific circuits (ironically in the ruins), Wurt would try and get some merm progress, Webber would try and find a couple of good spiders to get switcherdoodles from. The difference is that the Skill Trees actually diversified what that looked like. A lot of the good stuff is still in the ruins like the Walter Thulecite slingshot piece and wurt getting a crown for her king, but there's also stuff like going out to lunar for glass slingshot ammo, finding the lunar grotto for the sonic circuit, finding volt goats for a upgraded morning star. Sure, it may be selfish but that's also what any type of "rushing" is. By prioritizing getting something asap you are inherently disregarding trying to help the group.

[Well-met]

simplest fix, just make tree progress tied to worlds.

[Baark0]

I mean, if you're trying to play optimally, yeah you should try and unlock as much of your characters as early as possible. Personally I think its really cool, especially in the early game, as now you can have bunch of extra points of interest and resources to look out for in your first autumn. Things like Wortox and Wormwood wanting bottles, or WX wanting lots of silk + trying to find every scannable mob. I don't think that takes away from the game at all, in fact I'd say they do the opposite, making each characters gameplay experience a unique one. Skill trees have breathed so much life into characters who really needed it, I know for a fact I'd never have played Willow or Winona if they hadn't got such fun skill trees.

Fair enough to feel like they lead to a more selfish experience, however I feel like that could be solved quite easily by just communicating with the other players in the world and helping each other get strong. I had an experience where I was playing WX and wanted a beanbooster circuit, so I asked a Woodie to help me kill her while I channeled the sonic-invoker circuit to keep the grumbles off him.

anyways I really like skill trees and I really hope Wolfgang gets an update to make his skill tree not suck (at the same time idk if we wanna start doing skill tree refreshes)

Edited May 10 by Baark0

[Echsrick]

depends on the character

[Jakepeng99]

2 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

I don't mean that they have skills that make them rush the ruins or even go there I mean that they have skills that encourage them to approach the world in a similar manner of a ruins rusher.

Yeah i agree. Since they are skills, and you picked them, you wanna make use of them asap.

[Evelo]

Yep. Thinking of completely leaving the Don't Starve community until DSE. It is clear DST is just not meant for me. I am hopeful DSE will be more difficult and tedious in every aspect.

Been playing Vintage Story with some friends (the multiplayer isn't laggy which is crazy enjoyable) and I really like how tedious everything is, I am having a great time with it. It gives me hope DSE will go in the right direction.

[Mike23Ua]

I think the challenge of the Dont starve franchise would be better suited if it were more like the video game Moonlighter, meaning:

You have a never changing hub world to chat with NPCs, trade stuff & decorate your house, but outside of that.. in the games “Dungeons” everything is random and chaotic.

This is what I “Hope” they do with DSE and they sort of tried to do already with Hamlet Temples.

But in short, areas to explore, gather & do combat in, to bring back home resources and craftables from to help you explore deeper.

What I do not like with DST are the hours literal real world hours it can take to accomplish the smallest of in game tasks.. which is why I say the franchise would fair out better if it were lend more into short term burst sessions of play, that can contribute to your longer-term base upgrades EtC.

[Antynomity]

This is why we need a telelocator focus buff + revamp.

[Szczuku]

My main gripe with skilltrees, besides them not belonging in ds/t/e and making characters too strong, is that they take away from the interactions between the player and the world of the game.

"I need to prepare for this dangerous boss battle, let me craft some life-giving amulets prepare spare chassis"

"The point of interest is on the other side of the map, guess I'll use the beefalo that I've tamed teleport there with my telebrela"

"Enemies! I better prepare to fight them by equipping vanilla armor and weapons and ready myself to kite decimate them with a skill!"

"Looks like the night is coming, luckily I have a lantern/moogles/miner hat/torch a skill for that."

The gameplay loop just becomes how a character interacts with the kit, rather than how a character interacts with the world.

Not to mention that in terms of combat, basically every character got turned into a combat character, which makes original combat characters feel obsolete

[Cheggf]

Skill trees makes every character feel very similar and changed the gameplay from focusing on the game to focusing on your character. Just look at the threads of people lamenting that their favorite character hasn't gotten a skill tree yet. Nobody cares about the game because Klei doesn't care about the game, everyone just cares about the characters. The only interesting updates they ever come out with are skill trees, which more or less are just different looking ways to make everyone really good at everything.

Basically everyone is a combat character, most characters are gathering characters, most of the recent skill trees have changed characters into traversal characters. There's very few unique things left about the roster, and so anyone who had these traits that Klei finds desirable, particularly Wolfgang & Wanda, just suck. Why would anyone play Wolfgang when similar damage is offered for far less effort in addition to 20 other things? Why play Wanda when several other characters have teleportation that's 500x better in every way in addition to 20 other things?

12 hours ago, Frashaw27 said:

I mean you are correct, but at the same time, that is what most people would do even before skill trees. Winona would rush to get a pock production system up to satisfy the catapult requirements, Wx would try and get specific circuits (ironically in the ruins), Wurt would try and get some merm progress, Webber would try and find a couple of good spiders to get switcherdoodles from. The difference is that the Skill Trees actually diversified what that looked like. A lot of the good stuff is still in the ruins like the Walter Thulecite slingshot piece and wurt getting a crown for her king, but there's also stuff like going out to lunar for glass slingshot ammo, finding the lunar grotto for the sonic circuit, finding volt goats for a upgraded morning star. Sure, it may be selfish but that's also what any type of "rushing" is. By prioritizing getting something asap you are inherently disregarding trying to help the group.

Not really. Characters wanting to do something for themselves was the exception, not the rule, and it took up far less of their time.

Wanda is one of the most egregious examples of characters demanding you to acquire something, and she spends well over 80% of the time completely unable to even acquire that resource so she just plays normally.

Most of WX's circuits were useless, so he didn't really go out of his way to do anything. You'd find Dragonfly as you were exploring the world so you just scan her. You'd find fireflies as you were exploring the world so you'd just scan them. You want to kill Mactusk anyways so you'd just scan the dogs while doing that. The only thing WX was encouraged to do is go underground, which you're already encouraged to do for a ton of different reasons. WX was just slightly more inclined to go to the ruins than the average character because 1 of his 4 good circuits requires you to go to the ruins. Plus, that was introduced with his rework, which is the precursor to skill trees.

[Catuna_]

I personally think the biggest problem with skill trees is that they never justify actually being a skill tree rather than a refresh. Characters like Willow and Woodie could have just had the buffs integrated into them nearly fully and it would've been a banger refresh without complaints about poo filler perks. I think that we should've just gotten the choice between affinities (and masteries for Woodie) instead of the insight system. Very little characters actually allow for variety within their tree, I can just name Walter who really just showcases how skill trees should (mostly) be like.

Characters have just gotten way too strong. Not in a way where they're strong late game like the new Winona, but they start off at their max power pretty much. A character like Walter needs to beat Bee Queen or Fuelweaver to unlock his powerful grips with more minor power spikes like silk and glommer grip... That's not a bad thing! Survivors having different goals to strive for to get their items is cool actually. But Wolfgang, Woodie and Willow pretty much spawn at their full power. Meanwhile a character like Wigfrid is the EXACT same character pre-tree up until the moonstorms lol. Many skill trees reek of this bad progression. Wurt's skilltree brought barely anything new to her, but gave her insane minion efficiency (effective health per minion) letting her pretty much solo any threat any time as long as she has like 10-15 merm warriors and her existence on a server just feels like there's no point to any other character anymore. The omnipresence of AoE in every character skill tree trivializes a lot of challenges within the game especially relating to hordes of mobs that let you just mindlessly muscle through them a lot of the time. Characters are a lot less committal to mistakes like deaths with things like WX's spare chassis revive and Winona's shadow "affinity" or Wortox's soul hearts. This doesn't really matter for experienced players who just don't really die a lot to begin with, but even thematically it really confuses me why dirt cheap revives are just being handed out like this. WX can now just scan and kill a knight and completely kills the one threat that's spammed in the ruins which is just so confusing to me on a design level. 

Character power creep is not necessarily bad! I personally enjoy the mobility creep brought into the game because it expedites the slowest part of DST (walking at 6 speed gets miserably boring...). But if you're doing this, you need to amp up the threat of the game by either adding environmental hazards that don't revolve around combat which Klei rarely does, or amplifying the threat of mobs which they kinda just consistently fails to do with their new enemies and bosses outside of just adding knockback with a very predictable kiting pattern. We're currently in a game where we have armors that block 80-95% of damage, healing is extremely cheap, and characters are just bonkers at combat.

 

 

[Electroely]

7 minutes ago, Catuna_ said:

I personally think the biggest problem with skill trees is that they never justify actually being a skill tree rather than a refresh. Characters like Willow and Woodie could have just had the buffs integrated into them nearly fully and it would've been a banger refresh without complaints about poo filler perks.

I partially agree with this - certain characters definitely have things that should've been integrated into their base kit (Winona's Portability skill being the main thing) and a lot of the older skill trees feel as though there's only one good upgrade path, so getting to choose is pointless.

However, I don't think this applies to some of the newer characters' skill trees. Wortox, Walter and WX-78 have really good skill trees that are full of desirable perks. You can't take all of them because of the 15 point limit, so you have to think carefully about which skills you prioritize. I do hope they eventually go back on the older skill trees and bring them up to this level, though I acknowledge that's going to be multiple years from now.

[Catuna_]

4 minutes ago, Electroely said:

However, I don't think this applies to some of the newer characters' skill trees. Wortox, Walter and WX-78 have really good skill trees that are full of desirable perks. You can't take all of them because of the 15 point limit, so you have to think carefully about which skills you prioritize. I do hope they eventually go back on the older skill trees and bring them up to this level, though I acknowledge that's going to be multiple years from now.

I don't understand the variety with Wortox, I think that it's a very one-note tree since soul healing efficiency perks on a character who can pretty much infinitely hoard souls feels so odd to me. His lunar affinity sucks and soul pierce isn't great either. I do agree that the inclination system would be tricky to make work though without a tree. I think you could play around with exclusively nice wortox vs exclusively naughty wortox.  

As for WX's skill tree... It has a lot of filler via incremental perks no? The highlighted red perks could've just either been base kit or integrated into the previous perk rather than being split. I don't think WX adding chassis and drones really goes against the premise of "This could've been just all added to their refresh". In a hypothetical scenario where characters just pick between affinities and other gimmicks they may have I think that it's not unreasonable to just let WX power up their circuits in another manner and add everything else into their kit. 

[0rutyna0]

The main problem with skills is that, unlike character traits, they only grant strength, but no negative effects. Water starts restoring health? Without water, dehydration sets in and health deteriorates. Emit light? Increase your food intake. Master a new spell? Gain paranoia.

[Ridley]

3 hours ago, Catuna_ said:

As for WX's skill tree... It has a lot of filler via incremental perks no? The highlighted red perks could've just either been base kit or integrated into the previous perk rather than being split. I don't think WX adding chassis and drones really goes against the premise of "This could've been just all added to their refresh". In a hypothetical scenario where characters just pick between affinities and other gimmicks they may have I think that it's not unreasonable to just let WX power up their circuits in another manner and add everything else into their kit. 

The "filler" perks exist to make the more desirable perks cost more or are convenience fee. The ones I have circled blue are perks made for your convenience. You have to choose if you want perks that make you stronger or these perks that make things simpler.

I've also drawn a perk cost on some of the others to show what they are essentially costing you. The chassis perks are a little weird since there is overlap in the beginning, but the rest are straightforward. I think you could argue the Off by One circuitry perk really has no "filler" perks before it and stands alone as a perk worth the skill point. Probably should of made it at least a 2 or just left it out.

So basically, if it is annoying getting everything you want from the skill tree, it is probably a good skill tree. 

[Mr Giggio]

Doing a ruins rush for the 8363672725 time when I start a game or try a new route that's fresh and offers variety on a 10 year old game, lemme see

 

 

How this comes to be a problem dude lol

[Cheggf]

4 hours ago, Electroely said:

I partially agree with this - certain characters definitely have things that should've been integrated into their base kit (Winona's Portability skill being the main thing) and a lot of the older skill trees feel as though there's only one good upgrade path, so getting to choose is pointless.

However, I don't think this applies to some of the newer characters' skill trees. Wortox, Walter and WX-78 have really good skill trees that are full of desirable perks. You can't take all of them because of the 15 point limit, so you have to think carefully about which skills you prioritize. I do hope they eventually go back on the older skill trees and bring them up to this level, though I acknowledge that's going to be multiple years from now.

But what is gained from making it a skill tree instead of a refresh? He has three times as many circuits equipped, he has a bunch of new gamebreaking circuits like "Scan one knight then ignore all the threats in the ruins for free for some reason", he can teleport all around the map, he can do so much. There is no way anyone would see WX doing all of this and be completely fine with it, but if they instead just updated WX to do this stuff without having you be like "Do I want this very weak skill to have my battery charge faster when the battery is full 99% of the time... Or do I want this very weak skill to be able to unplug any circuit when circuits aren't being changed 99% of the time?" and made both of those features base kit suddenly it's a problem and WX is overpowered.

He does not have interesting choices in his skill tree. He does not play notably different based on your choices. Especially after they removed several skills from it so you can get almost the entire thing. You say he has a lot of really desirable perks that you want, but even if you want to get all 7 circuit skills and the teleporting you still have enough points to pick 3 from the list of scouting drone, improved range, item drone, improved item drone, and affinity. You choose what 2 things you don't want, and 2 of the 5 things are upgrades to other things. 

[Z5doubleAA]

I just find it really strange in the case of wx that unlike any other survivor if you don't interact with the skill tree at all wx still plays quite a bit differently it's almost like they added a skill tree and did a soft rework which I do find a little bit off I don't mind the skill trees when they are purely optional content but with the new skill trees I feel like klei is doing a lot more then they need to

[Nikki Darks]

The skill trees are great IMO.

Are they nothing like actual skill trees and are only skill trees in the name? Yes.

Do they help fix old characters that were previously horrible while also adjusting better characters with qol? Also yes.

Are they perfect? Nyo.

I can't imagine Willow or Woodie staying the way they were before the skill tree, absolutely sad.

[MrsBoris]

21 hours ago, Well-met said:

simplest fix, just make tree progress tied to worlds.

I dont think thats a simple fix cuz trees were design with permanent insight in mind, some trees will get a lot weaker with you not being able to access some early game perks out of the gate.

[YouKnowWho142]

To put it simply, I would’ve stopped playing DST a long time ago if it weren’t for skill trees. The fact that characters are so different from each other now and how each character interacts differently with the game is what I find so appealing about them. Before the skill trees every character fell under “Wilson but x”. I did multiple runs pre skill trees but felt consistently burnt out after a while since every character functionally played the same.  I realized that no matter who I was playing I was basically just doing the exact same few things each run, and that made me stop playing entirely for a good while. 

Now, I’m doing my fifth all boss run this year, and I’ve never had more fun with the game. For someone like me, I needed skill trees to rejuvenate the game and bring life into characters I never would’ve given a chance before. I love playing around the characters because it ensures I never have to play the game the exact same way every time. I don’t have to use weather panes in every fuelweaver fight, I don’t need to use pan flutes for bee queen with every character, I don’t need to tame a beefalo or walk with every character. The game as a whole is just significantly more pleasant to someone more casually oriented like myself.

[Mysterious box]

2 hours ago, YouKnowWho142 said:

To put it simply, I would’ve stopped playing DST a long time ago if it weren’t for skill trees. The fact that characters are so different from each other now and how each character interacts differently with the game is what I find so appealing about them. Before the skill trees every character fell under “Wilson but x”. I did multiple runs pre skill trees but felt consistently burnt out after a while since every character functionally played the same.  I realized that no matter who I was playing I was basically just doing the exact same few things each run, and that made me stop playing entirely for a good while. 

Now, I’m doing my fifth all boss run this year, and I’ve never had more fun with the game. For someone like me, I needed skill trees to rejuvenate the game and bring life into characters I never would’ve given a chance before. I love playing around the characters because it ensures I never have to play the game the exact same way every time. I don’t have to use weather panes in every fuelweaver fight, I don’t need to use pan flutes for bee queen with every character, I don’t need to tame a beefalo or walk with every character. The game as a whole is just significantly more pleasant to someone more casually oriented like myself.

Are the really different though? Like animation wise sure but how many truly unique abilities have skill trees introduced it's less skill trees made characters play differently and more so characters expanded on what they can do.