About Keystones and Cornerstones

Well, as you may know, we will be getting keystones soon.
I hope i dont have to explain those.
As a fine addition to these i found it would be nice to have a little distraction to them.

My defintion of a Cornerstone:
- They are the edges of a characterbuild, while keystones would keep the role of a possible main-defining build characteristic.
- Completing a cluster/circle provides a free cornerstone, you dont have to invest a passivepoint in it to get it.
- They are allowed to be integervalues, cause they are free.


History-lesson:
9.2 passivetree had many integervalues in itself.
9.3 got rid of em, its now a pure percentage-based one.
Its GGG´s definition that "people like percentages", where i want to disagree and say "people just like big numbers, ecpacially when they are over 9000"
It doesnt matter if its achieved the percentageway or the integerway.
Atleast less manual calculating would go into these free passives.

If i look at the 9.3 tree, i can clearly see a crossword puzzle, many empty places to be filled, 85 to be exact.
I marked them with yellow-dots.
pic: http://imgur.com/oeZ2m


These many circles should yeald a reward, if a circle is completed. The reward is measured on the amount of passives to be taken and on the attributes of the circle.
For example: six +%accuracy passives would automaticaly provide a +60accuracy bonus.
Or taking all of the middle 4x minion passives would grant a "faster minions"-boost
Taking the witches crit-cluster could yeald a direct +2 crit chance.
I could even imagine some sort of predefined tree-teleportation cornerstone.


The downside of all this would be another little redo of the tree again, and again.
In the end balancing-wise its the same as the current one, just with a stronger feeling to take all points of a cluster.


Tldr: forgive me my english, its late here. I think i repeated myself sometimes.

bumpy examples:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/717/examplecornerstones.jpg/

And if you have no clue about what im talking, write a +1 here:

What is a keystone anyway?

i could'nt find any information on them ?

http://www.pathofexile.com/news/2011-11-14/dev-diary-carl
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/11455/page/14

well based on these 2 articles, i can only drive assumptions about them.
The second article drives me to believe that there are only a handfull of them, so they seem to be some bigger passive on the outer side of the tree
(<-Assumption).

Basing new suggestions on theoretical not yet finished Gameplayelements is what i have done earlier, atleast this is a window for the devs to get different ideas for the same thing.

Time for some thoughts on this.
I like this idea a lot. It provides bonuses to both specialized and generalized builds. Specialized builds will get even more of their specialty by taking full clusters. Generalized builds will get extra bonuses to their many skillsets, without getting large bonuses to any of them.

Given the choice to pass up the final node in a cluster, many people will skip it in favor of heading for another cluster to get the more powerful nodes that start it off. If finishing a cluster gave an extra free bonus, more people would be enticed to spend the extra point instead. Having them be integer bonuses would supplement the percentage bonuses the tree currently consists of. It gives another aspect to character building, which could only improve build diversity.

This would need careful balance, of course. Since 0.9.4 reduces the number of attribute nodes, people will be able to take more passive bonuses to begin with.

perhaps last bumpy examples:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/832/example2cornerstones.jpg/

Synapse:
Allows to grab the cornerstone from one side or the other.

Unlocker:
If you complete one circle, you are allowed to grab one of the unchained nodes. If you manage to complete both circles, you can grab two.
There is no way to grab all 4 unchained nodes.

bump
+1

EDIT: Just read some posts and found an interesting idea. Classes aren't very distinct. Any class can do what any other class can. I do like that, but to give them a bit more distinction I had the idea of class specific cornerstones! The bonuses you get are different for each class. This could be very simple: maurades gets larger armor and +dmg bonuses, witch more int, etc.

Sounds interesting
i´ll try to rephrase with an AoF-example:
(yes i know change incoming for AoF)

-Templar clusterbonus : +10%Elemental damage bonus for weapons for each cluster/cornerstone
This way Templers propably will pick only 1 keystone and try to max the cornerstones. Comes with the removing of the small eledmg-cluster.
Atleast this way archers wouldn´t be that good with AoF.

or
-Templar clusterbonus : +100 Accuracy for each cornerstone
A good accuracybuild when not aiming for many keystones.
Why accuracy, because he is most lacking in this department. Should come with choice wheter to aim for +30DEXnodes or the cornerstones.

or a combination of 3 different bonuses and you have to aim for specific clusters, somehow reduces the amount of choice for builds.
Hmm, not happy about that.


Well, while thinking about it, yes we would get more classidentity, but it would also force us to play the classes in a specific way. Loosing some tree freedom.

I think im back to searching for better examples what mods to put into cornerstones.