Game Design Increased Ability Tree Freedom

The concept's honestly really simple:

New Upsides

• Most Abilities can be activated without needing prerequisite Abilities and/or meeting the Archetype Requirements (X of Archetype's Abilities to unlock)
• You can keep going down the Ability Tree by activating things below the Ability you unlocked early for the usual prices if you meet their requirements
• Effectively allows you to skip over any Abilities you don't want (*cough* Backstab *cough* Double Bash *ahem*)

New Downsides

• Activating an Ability without having the Ability before it unlocked increases the AP cost by 1
• Not meeting the Archetype Requirements increases the AP cost by 1
• Cannot access Abilities which are Locked by other Abilities
• Cannot access "upgrading" Abilities without first unlocking the Ability they improve (IE: Can't activate Escape Artist without having the Escape Spell unlocked)

These changes would allow players to pick and choose the upgrades they want, and in general allow for more Hybrid Ability builds.

 

if that would be to happen, people would just unlock all of the red abilities in the tree. It would be way too overpowered, and can't really be balanced.

 

For those who don't know you actually can skip backstab (I think without losing any other shadestepper abilities), but forfeit the ability to do massive, single hits of damage in doing so. In regards to the idea, while I would like more freedom in unlocking things, I wonder how much tweaking this would need to be balanced: some ideas should probably stay locked to people with a certain archetype. That said, I'd love to be able to pick up timelock despite wanting like 4 ideas outside of riftwalker, and to not be penalized for taking ideas that better fit my build because as it stands right now it feels like you have to stay in the tree with no creativity, or skip on the most powerful ideas, which defeats the purpose of a skill tree in my opinion.

 

cough cough 20 more point cost for each one for each skipped ability + 10 more for not meeting archetype reqs by a huge marigin + who would do that when there are some minor abilities on the tree that would be way better to unlock first before going straight to red

 

Or there is a way to effectively disable an ability so it won’t work for example spin attack would work like usual but u can still go down acrobat tree and use lacrate