Skill tree and new players.

There should be many more options for making the skill web more readable and less daunting for new players. Allow the hiding of nodes. The web looks entirely overwhelming and dizzying at first glance. This is an unnecessary barrier to entry/easing into the game.

*edit* Never mind the Hiding of nodes. The larger point is about ways in which to make it easier for new players to get into the game and not make them say "FFS i don't have time for this" at the threat of messing something up and in a way, having wasted time.

Hiding nodes ?
This would server no purpose for players who don't understand the skill tree to begin with, even worse it would only make them make more mistakes potentially.

If the skill tree is that much of a problem to you, there might be other games less complex that you would like more imo.

You always start in a small starting area with decent nodes in it.
Why is that not simple enough?

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Wilhelm_Scream wrote:

There should be many more options for making the skill web more readable and less daunting for new players. Allow the hiding of nodes. The web looks entirely overwhelming and dizzying at first glance. This is an unnecessary barrier to entry/easing into the game.

Ignore Fruz rude comment which where more or less sounded as a GTFO, as a new player myself I took help by downloading an app which have more tools to make a build or at least make it more clear which path leads where and how many skill points you need to get there. There is a passive tree on your characters account, but that tool can be a little harder to navigate around with as it is inside of your browser.


Hiding some path or nodes would probably not help that much as one need to play a bit to get deeper understanding into what different options there is. As an example there is Unique (from armour and weapon) items that have same features like Iron Grip (Keystone).


Best way is to spend some time in wiki to get a grasp on how some support gems can replace Keystones that otherwise would need a large investment in Skill points to get there.

There is trade off's that take time to learn like Elemental Equilibrium (weakness to one element, buff to damage in another elements) or Chaos Inoculation (set your health to 1; immune against chaos damage). CI can be hard to use as you need to have health in balance and defence (resistance), so you don't dip into 0. As new player it probably better to go for things that isn't that powerful and learn how thing work and improve on that.

Those keystones and some minor one can give large buffs, but also have downsides that one need to take into consideration.



A new player should focus first on what kind of class and weapon that she/he would want to use. Some weapon have a short range (melee) and other have a large range, but those characteristics can be changed with active skills (from gems) and support gems, so a melee weapon become more of a ranged weapon and with teleport skills a ranged weapon can become melee. You will find that those changes can also be built on through how one pick
basic, notable, jewels that you put into empty sockets in tree and later ascendancy which is another layer later on for passives.


Here one need to look at both short and long term goals which is part of how this games passive tree work. You get some points that you can use to remove skill points during quests, so you don't need to make a perfect build from the very start.

Hiding things might make things less overwhelming, but it would just postpone problems for the future as you would not be able to see long term goals for how to build and might even have to start all over with a new character and sometimes it really better to just start a new one instead of grinding those respec points.

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Passive_skill
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Path_of_Exile_Wiki
https://poeplanner.com/


//RexyCat

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RexyCat wrote:

Hiding some path or nodes would probably not help that much as one need to play a bit to get deeper understanding into what different options there is.

Which is what I said, NP.

Thanks for the obnoxious comment though, big guy.

Complexity is one of the ( if not the ) main aspects of the game, the thing that appealed to people to begin with and the reason why so many people like this game, so yeah ... this might not be the game for somebody afraid of complexity, as the skill tree is just the top of the iceberg.

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RexyCat wrote:

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Wilhelm_Scream wrote:

There should be many more options for making the skill web more readable and less daunting for new players. Allow the hiding of nodes. The web looks entirely overwhelming and dizzying at first glance. This is an unnecessary barrier to entry/easing into the game.

Ignore Fruz rude comment which where more or less sounded as a GTFO, as a new player myself I took help by downloading an app which have more tools to make a build or at least make it more clear which path leads where and how many skill points you need to get there. There is a passive tree on your characters account, but that tool can be a little harder to navigate around with as it is inside of your browser.

Why are u antagonizing fruz?
He is 100% right here.

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This would server no purpose for players who don't understand the skill tree to begin with, even worse it would only make them make more mistakes potentially.

and here too

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If the skill tree is that much of a problem to you, there might be other games less complex that you would like more imo.

The skill tree isn't an issue for ME because i had and took the time to figure enough out to at least get me started. I have stopped playing but due to technical reasons. There were however many times where looking at it was truly overwhelming mostly because there is no real way of resetting points so there's a strong sense of mistakes being easy to make. Many times i would have liked to be able to hide, as an example, all totem related nodes or all weapon nodes not related to one handed maces, cut off portions of the map mainly to do with Int or Dex. To narrow the possibility space such that i can actually fit it all on screen at once. Then start learning the game in an active manner (playing it, not reading about it) via a basic but functional character.

I'm basically encouraging the developers in a direction of thinking. There has to be ways of easing new players into the game without messing with anything that the more experienced players value. Patience is a virtue, this is true. But why put off players who's only point of conflict with learning the game is the time requirement for watching videos or reading articles. For experiences players it's easy to say "just do this, this and this" because they already know what a new person should be looking up. But if one is new to the game then they just have an endless depth of community guides, wiki pages and videos but they've none of the knowledge to make sense of it.

The Vendor recipe system/Inventory(loot drop) management is another issue for new players but I don't really know what the developers could really do that is better than the wiki page for that topic but that is still like a shotgun blast of arcane knowledge to the face. But again- for myself i was able to largely solve that issue.

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Wilhelm_Scream wrote:

The skill tree isn't an issue for ME because i had and took the time to figure enough out to at least get me started. I have stopped playing but due to technical reasons. There were however many times where looking at it was truly overwhelming mostly because there is no real way of resetting points so there's a strong sense of mistakes being easy to make. Many times i would have liked to be able to hide, as an example, all totem related nodes or all weapon nodes not related to one handed maces, cut off portions of the map mainly to do with Int or Dex. To narrow the possibility space such that i can actually fit it all on screen at once. Then start learning the game in an active manner (playing it, not reading about it) via a basic but functional character.

I'm basically encouraging the developers in a direction of thinking. There has to be ways of easing new players into the game without messing with anything that the more experienced players value. Patience is a virtue, this is true. But why put off players who's only point of conflict with learning the game is the time requirement for watching videos or reading articles. For experiences players it's easy to say "just do this, this and this" because they already know what a new person should be looking up. But if one is new to the game then they just have an endless depth of community guides, wiki pages and videos but they've none of the knowledge to make sense of it.

The Vendor recipe system/Inventory(loot drop) management is another issue for new players but I don't really know what the developers could really do that is better than the wiki page for that topic but that is still like a shotgun blast of arcane knowledge to the face. But again- for myself i was able to largely solve that issue.

I am just imagining what anyone who can't figure out the skill tree in a game would look like if they walked up to a route map on any big city metro hehe. I mean ,at what point does someone look at something and say...hmmm maybe we should change this for dumb people. When did we, as a society get to the point where we consider the vast majority of people helpless, and in need of extra help figuring out mundane things.

When I was a kid I always wondered why there were instructions on shampoo. Wet hair, lather , rinse, repeat. Who wouldn't know this by the time they could read?

We are devolving.

I mean let's be honest, i don't deal with such public transportation systems in my day to day and when i travel to places that do use them, it IS...not quick and simple. But it's the exact same thing. Coming to an entirely unknown system and having to make sense of it but in the case of PoE it's just a game and doesn't actually matter so people bounce off of it if they don't have the time to put aside for not actually playing the game but rather learning about it. The game is great. I want more people to play it and the developers to do well. I feel no need to punish people for having busy lives. But please allow me to repeat- what i'm talking about is not a change to the actual game.

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Xtorma wrote:

I am just imagining what anyone who can't figure out the skill tree in a game would look like if they walked up to a route map on any big city metro hehe. I mean ,at what point does someone look at something and say...hmmm maybe we should change this for dumb people. When did we, as a society get to the point where we consider the vast majority of people helpless, and in need of extra help figuring out mundane things.

When I was a kid I always wondered why there were instructions on shampoo. Wet hair, lather , rinse, repeat. Who wouldn't know this by the time they could read?

We are devolving.

This, so much ...

About the bolded parts, that's probably because of some absolutely dumb system in a certain country that allows people to sue others for whatever bloody reason.
So many things that are baffling to me over there ...

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Wilhelm_Scream wrote:

But please allow me to repeat- what i'm talking about is not a change to the actual game.

And allow me to repeat : allowing player to hide nodes would potentially end up with (some) inexperienced players hiding some nodes that would be useful to them ( because they don't know ), and then just forgetting about the nodes that they probably should have taken because they have hidden them in the first place.
There is already a search function for nodes, to isolate centers of interest, the human brain can process that much information, it isn't that difficult.