Game Mechanics Skill Point Scaling (Minor Change for Int)

After seeing the heavy level of backlash about all the skill point changes (agility, intelligence primarily), I’ve been trying to think of a way to better balance these points.



Make all skill points scale linearly

"But internet stranger, how would that work? If 99 int points reduced spell costs by 99%, that would be broken!" Well, I'm glad you asked, hypothetical strawman designed to prove a point!




For every point in a skill, increase X by Y%
(values open to change)

This is based a combination of two things, which I'll begin by explaining. Firstly, strength and dex already work this way. For every point in str/dex, you increase your damage or crit chance (x) by Y%. Pretty straightforward!



Current System (1.20)

The question is how we would handle this for int/def/agi, which instead reduce a certain stat by Y%. For example, int on 1.20 reduces spell cost by Y%, def reduces damage taken, and agility affects dodge chance. Currently, there's some semi-complicated formula being used to determine the values for each amount of points. I believe 68 points totals to 50.5%, if I remember correctly.



Existing Implementation

For this post, the idea is based off of League of Legends's armor and magic resistance scaling formula. Each point in armor reduces the physical damage taken by Y%. However, the mindset taken for that game is instead the following: "For each point of armor, increase the amount of damage you can absorb by 1%. This means that if you have 100 armor, you can absorb 100% more damage! If you have 200 armor, you can absorb 200% more damage.
They've also implemented it for their own spellcasting. "For every 1 point of cooldown reduction you have, increase your casting rate by 1%." This allows Riot Games to also control the scaling of ability cooldowns in a similar fashion. They've had issues in the past before it was a scaling system, where they had to cap CDR at 40% for fear of certain characters having near-constant uptime on problematic abilities.
Using a formula (found at bottom of the post), you can calculate what values that would turn into. As stated above, if you have 100 armor, you can take 100% more damage. This means that you are twice as tanky as before, which means it will calculate to 50% damage resistance. If you have 200% armor, you can take 200% more, or 3 times as much damage. This will calculate to 66.7% damage resistance.

Let's apply this to our current system!



Wynncraft Implementation

Intelligence with linear scaling
For every 1 point in intelligence, you can cast 1% more spells. Simple, straightforward to read as a tooltip, and gives you a general idea of what intelligence does.
If you have 100 points in intelligence, you should be able to cast 1x more spells, for a total of 2x spellcasting. This would result in a 50% reduction in spell-costs. If we were to use the current system's max of 150 points, you would cast 1.5x more spells. This means you can cast a total of 2.5 spells, or a 60% reduction in spell-costs.
The fun part about math is that even though 50 points only got you another 10% spell cost reduction, your rate of spell-casting scales linearly! Similar to the old system, but somewhat nerfed and more intuitive to the user.

Note: I'm actually a big fan of how the 2.0 system increases your maximum mana pool, I'd love if that were to also stay in! Up to dev team discretion.

Defense/Agility with linear scaling
Putting these two together since they're pretty similar in function. For every point in defense/agility, you can absorb 1% more damage / dodge 1% more often. Same as above! If we were to do 1% per point, this works out to be a max of 60% dmg reduction or 60% dodge chance, but these numbers are super easy to tweak.


Benefits of this system

Intuitive
It should be easy on the user to understand what each skill point does and how it affects their character, similar to the current system. It's also easier on those who want the formulas behind skillpoints, as it'll follow a progressive curve, and is simply a matter of plugging into a function.

Easy to implement
I can't guarantee this one, but since it doesn't introduce any new mechanics or changes to the system, it should just be a matter of updating the existing formula for skillpoints.

Easy(ish) to balance
In this case, in order to adjust the scaling, it should be both easier to manage due to being a linear system, and since all that's needed is to change a single constant (the Y% per point), it should be a one-time update for a skill-point.

Consistency
With this system, all skillpoints would scale an aspect of your character in the same way. I saw on a recent post (I believe by Salted) that keeping skillpoints consistent was implied to a goal. This should help meet that goal. TL;DR at the bottom




Final Thoughts

I think this is a really elegant way to handle the current discussion around skillpoints, and ideally would be something that can be easily communicated to the user. I'm also a fan of the fact that this is a system already being used in other games such as League of Legends, to great success. As a result it's an already tested system, which should lend it more credibility.
It's very likely that I haven't spent nearly as much time thinking about how to rework skillpoints as compared to the Wynncraft team. I'm proud of this idea and I would love to get any possible feedback for this implementation on why it would or wouldn't work (if you've already considered this as an option, or if the scaling is too high/low, etc).



Actual Formula

100
----------------
100 + N * K


Where N is the number of skillpoints you have, and K is the modifying constant. If you (as a developer) wanted defense to scale 1:1, where 1 point increases tankiness by 1%, K would be 1. In this case, if you had 100 skillpoints, it would simplify to 100 / (100 + 100 * 1), or 100/200, resulting in 50% dmg reduction.
If you wanted say each point in intelligence increases your rate of spellcasting by 2%, you could plug in K to be 2. With 150 points (1.20 skillpoint maximum), you would plug in N to be 150, resulting in 100 / (100 + 150 * 2), or 100 / 400, or 75%. This is a 300% increase in spellcasting rate, for a total of 4x, which matches up with our formula.


TL;DR
Make all skill points scale linearly, not just str/dex. Each point has just as much value as the one before. 100 points in in, you can cast 100% more spells per second. 25 points in def, you have 25% more ehp. 30 points in agi, you'll dodge 30% more often.