Game Mechanics Skill Points rework

So, I've always had a problem with skill points due to how boring they are, and how mandatory some of them feel to pick. To this end, I wanted to make my own personal idea of a skill point rework. The purpose of this rework is to both make skill points more interesting to engage with but also to fix the boring designs of Dexterity and Agility as they are essentially just RNG versions of Strength and Defense, which makes them redundant and too RNG-reliant.

Skill points should be heavily reworked. To make them less mandatory, the effects of Strength and Defense should be reduced, and overall player damage and EHP should be adjusted accordingly, while Dexterity and Agility have different effects. I won't say that dodging and critical hits need to be removed completely, but they should not be a part of skill points. Critical chance could stay as both a basic stat on weapons (like Affinity in Monster Hunter) and as an ID for armor and other equipment, and it could even open the door to other new IDs such as critical damage. Dodge chance on the other hand should be exclusively an ID, assuming it even needs to exist at all.

To make skills more interesting to engage with, all skills also have a second effect and "milestone" effect. "Milestone effects" are on every skill and unlike other effects, they only activate once you have 10 points in that skill and will only increase for every 10 points in that skill after. Also unlike other effects, milestone effects do not have diminishing returns; they stack additively up to a maximum of ten times with 100 points in their respective skill. All of this gives incentive beyond basic stat values to put points into specific skills and adds a new layer of buildcrafting to the game.
Here is a list of all the reworked skills and effects:

• Strength:
  Strength revolves around the overall damage you deal to enemies with your spells and equipment.
  • Primary Effect: Increase the damage you deal with your weapon and spells (including with Poison and Exploding) by 0.7% with diminishing returns.
  • Secondary Effect: Increase the damage of your damaging equipment IDs* and powder specials by 1% with diminishing returns.
  • Milestone Effect: Increase the range of your weapon by 5% (2% for Mage and Shaman). Maximum bonus of 50% (20% for Mage and Shaman) at 100 Strength.
    For Archers, instead increases projectile velocity by 2.5%. Maximum bonus of 25% at 100 Strength.

• Dexterity:
  Dexterity revolves around the effectiveness of your abilities (from the ability tree).
  • Primary Effect: Reduce the cooldowns of your abilities by 0.7% with diminishing returns.
  • Secondary Effect: Increase the damage you deal with abilities** by 1% with diminishing returns.
  • Milestone Effect: Increase the effectiveness of important archetype mechanics*** by 2.5%. Maximum bonus of 25% at 100 Dexterity.

• Intelligence:
  Intelligence revolves around the casting of your spells.
  • Primary Effect: Intelligence reduces the mana cost of your spells by 0.7% with diminishing returns.
  • Secondary Effect: Increase your maximum mana by 1% with diminishing returns.
  • Milestone Effect: Reduce the mana cost penalty of repeated spell casts by 2.5%. Maximum bonus of 25% at 100 Intelligence.

• Defense:
  Defense revolves around the amount of damage you take from enemies.
  • Primary Effect: Reduce the damage you take from enemy attacks by 0.7% with diminishing returns.
  • Secondary Effect: Reduce the damage you take from enemy spells by 1% with diminishing returns.
  • Milestone Effect: Reduce the amount of knockback you receive**** by 5%. Maximum reduction of 50% at 100 Defense.

• Agility:
  Agility revolves around the ability to move about freely.
  • Primary Effect: Increases your movement speed by 0.7% with diminishing returns.
  • Secondary Effect: Increases your movement speed while sprinting or airborne by 1% with diminishing returns, stacking multiplicatively with the Primary Effect.
  • Milestone Effect: Reduce the duration and effects of all negative status effects on you by 5%. Maximum reduction of 50% at 100 Agility.

*: Damaging IDs are Poison, Exploding, Thorns, and Reflection.
**: This applies to any ability node that deals its own form of damage such as Burning Sigil and Fire Creep, and including abilities that directly replace other spells (such as Orphanim and Backstab). Replacement abilities' damage bonus stacks multiplicatively with Strength's primary effect.
***: This will increase charging speed for certain abilities such as Sharpshooter's Twain's Arc, resource generation for archetype meters such as Fallen's corrupted or Light Bender's healing, and also increase the amount of stacks placed on enemies such as through Battle Monk's Discombobulated or otherwise increase the effects of stacks such as through Shadestepper's marks or Sharpshooter's focus.
****: If the Paladin's Mythril Skin ability node is upgraded, this will instead increase the damage-to-healing value of Rejuvenating Skin by 2%. Maximum bonus of 20% at 100 Defense.

Anyways, this is my idea for a skill points rework. Naturally, these are not set in stone and I'm open to suggestions for changes, and I appreciate any feedback :)

 

Neat concept. My few gripes with this tho:

This description just feels weird to me. This would either become too niche or too confusing as I think this is a bit poorly described. Are they the IDs that are directly mentioned? (Wisdom for instance) What about the elemental damage breakdown of each spell?

I think the Milestone and Secondary effects need to be swapped, and the spellspam cost reduction should be 2.5%, with a 25% cap (it sounds miniscule but it can essentially allow you to spam a third longer than you normally would with high enough mr iirc). Also not to mention that I like having more than 150 mana and some of Arcanist's abilities would not be able to function as well (granted though, I've never played arcanist so i could be a buffoon here).

Otherwise I support this.

 

Sorry, it was a bit hard to explain this part. Basically, any ability node that goes like "For every (x amount of a certain ID), you gain (bonus)."
I think a simpler explanation would be like, "Increase the IDs that are mentioned directly by your ability nodes", in fact I might change the description to exactly that.
For example, Fluid Healing gives you more healing when you have Water Damage. And because you have Fluid Healing, Dexterity buffs any Water Damage IDs on your equipment.

 

This is a nice rework. However, some of the ability powers feel out of place or just strange to be on ability points.

Yeah, this one is a bit weird. I like the range boosting and I think it fits in with strength (obviously bonus damage as well), but attack speed boosting? This feels... not like a strength thing. (Also, creating more varied attack speeds would make trying to calculate damage even weirder.) If there were to be a skill point for that, I'd assume dexterity or agility. Though more probably dexterity.

If you don't play an archetype that has massive cooldowns, this is next to useless. The milestone effect doesn't do anything unless you actually care about an ability conversion. The only four that I can think up that would be benefitted are traveler (Archer, walkspeed), vehement (Warrior, raw melee), wisdom (Mage, spell damage) and toughened skin (Warrior, health regen). Then, these abilities are few and far between and a lot of archetypes don't even have them. For instance, take Acrobat. There are 2 that you could take in the tree realistically. One of them blocks out an acro node (Poisoned Blade and Double Slice), one of them is just a random trickster node that would give mana steal if you have stealing, and neither of them do anything. These abilities are too niche on their own, and even if there were 2 for every archetype and they all did something useful, dexterity still wouldn't shine because they probably wouldn't do much. If they did enough on their own, there would be no reason to use dexterity unless your entire build was based on something they wanted. Overall, this feels like the strangest possible way to nerf dexterity.

Look at what Da Homeboi said. That sums it up.

The one I don't have any issues with.

Four blocks of jump height at 100 Agility. This would make building for jump height easier (and probably a lot less fun). Something you may not know: Certain Wynn parkours are designed for +0 jump height and cannot be completed with any form of jump height. (After playing acro with psithurism for so long, trust me on this one.) If they can, they are excruciatingly difficult and tedious unless you have access to flight. Even so, most of them are in tight spaces which does not help. Acro can survive the parkours because it can fly. However, if every agility focused build suddenly gets ~4 extra jump height that it cannot get rid of, the parkours will be extremely hard if the agility player cannot fly. (My main concern is archer.)
The rest of agility, I am fine with. As an airborne player, I appreciate how it boosts air speed as well as sprint speed.

Overall, I think this a solid rework that may require some tweaking because of the way this will work in-game.

(also, do skill points still boost specific element damage or not)

 

Thank you for all the feedback.
Originally my idea for Strength was different. Spell damage would be its primary and weapon damage was its secondary, while range was still its milestone. I wanted to put attack speed onto Dexterity but then had the idea of it being based around the ability tree as an archetype.
Overall I think there's better ways for Dexterity to interact with abilities that aren't so situational.
For Agility I only gave it jump height because I was afraid that it might be too weak with only the movement speed. I realize now that the jump boost would probably be a detriment to the player and would kind of suck to play with in parkour sections.
Anyways, I've swapped the Intelligence effects and removed the jump height from Agility, and I'm thinking about changing Strength's attack speed and Dexterity.

Oh, and I was actually going to ask for everyone else's opinion on whether skills should still boost elemental damage. It's a pretty weird system that Wynncraft simultaneously suffers and benefits from.

 

This is actually an idea I had a while back but never got to posting it because I couldn’t come up with an ability for anything except agility xD. I really like this concept though, and as others have said, there are specific things that would need tweaking, but other than that it all seems really cool. As an acrobat player using Weathered (so high agility) I especially like the inclusion of airborne speed with Agility instead of just walk speed.

 

Great concept but the skill point abilities are bound to be unbalanced between each other, which might cause an even more polarizing element meta

 

I have updated the thread according to everyone's feedback.

Strength:
Strength has been changed a bit to be simpler. Its primary now increases spell and weapon damage while its secondary increases the damage of IDs. Before anyone says it, yes I do realize that the secondary is situational. But the reason for that is because of how universally useful the primary is.

Dexterity:
Regarding Dexterity, the secondary has moved to the milestone (due to the fact that it involves abilities that classes get somewhat later) and the previous milestone was removed because of how incredibly weird and situational it was. Dexterity's new secondary simply increases the damage of all ability nodes that deal damage.
I realize that there is some sentiment of how useful Dexterity would be compared to the universality of other skills, but as someone who plays games like FFXIV and Destiny, I think people are sleeping on how good that much cooldown reduction actually is. I know Shadesteppers would love a lower Vanish cooldown, and Paladins would love a lowered Provoke and Radiance cooldown. Not everyone is built equally of course, but the whole point is to add a new layer of buildcrafting that benefits the way you want to play, rather than how the game wants you to play. Just like how Agility is there if you want it, but you never actually need it because you could for all intents and purposes just build Intelligence and use your movement spell to get around instead. That's what buildcrafting is all about: player expression.

Intelligence:
Particularly the easiest change was swapping the milestone and secondary of Intelligence as having more mana scaling would feel better to play with.

Agility:
Jump height was removed from Agility; it was only there because I was afraid the skill would be too weak without an extra effect added to it, but as it turns out people seem to unanimously like the new Agility stats already without the boost, and the jump height might actually make it feel worse rather than better.