The Drunken Lizard Pub

It has been a while since I played Book 1 but I remember that you didn't really know when you had reached the maximum useful value for a skill. It may be too late in development for Book II (or I may have just missed the applicable forum post) but I would like to see some type of in-game information that describes the benefit of putting the next point in a given skill or perhaps a hard-cap on individual skill increases when further points are meaningless.

Regards,

DanS

? bump ?

Adding to a skill is less about becoming meaningless than not seeing a significant benefit. Cartography, alchemy, and a few other skills don't give much after you reach a level either 10 or 15. Combat skills give you less improvement in chance to hit and damage after you can almost always hit a target. So you have to decide whether acquiring a new skill is more useful than getting a slight improvement in what you have.

Book 2 seems to emphasize getting both. Getting up to 20 in a skill, especially combat, gives you new abilities with the skill. With a larger game there is time and levels to achieve more skills to have more combat options.

We don't release the technical details on skills- but I think all the formulas and tables have been figured out and posted on these forums at some point in the past 2 years. You people are clever players, you are! FYI, skills fall into two categories:

[1] Skills that are based purely on a mathematical formula. This includes all weapon and armor skills, hide-in-shadow, lock picking, trap disarming and a few others. With these skills you should see a small change almost every time you put one or two points into the skill.

[2] Skills that are based on a look-up table. Cartography is probably the best example of this. Without revealing the full structure of the table, you gain a little more map detail with each of the first 2-3 levels, then after that you get more detail about every other level into the upper teens. It caps out around 18-20 I believe. Some of the more useful aspects of the skill, like highlighting containers and entity locations, don't become active until the later stages. That is what encourages players to keep pumping points into it.