Some thoughts on Atlas Tree design

Passive trees to me have always been about choices and interesting interactions. The current atlas tree is boring, more so with the ability to have 3 of them now.

- League mechanic specific nodes are exclusive to that league, and very rarely have interactions outside them. The few outside interactions you can have are very rare (Ghosts, Altar mods etc.) and are easily solved. You either take them and it's better or you don't and it's worse.

- The usual strat on league start is to run a mapping/atlas completion tree focused on just that. If you needed to farm a specific mechanic for crafting/items you'd have to split between your mapping tree and that mechanic and respec later. I don't think that was particularly enjoyable gameplay/choice, but now I guess you can have a mapping tree and a league specific one which somehow feels worse, because you get everything and have to interact with the atlas less. Anyway, this might be skewed toward a small percentage of the playerbase, but my point is, I already have an abundance of points (usually 90% of the atlas) before I really start farming league mechanics.

- Since you have an abundance of points, you usually get all the wheels for most mechanics. The choice lies mostly with which mechanics are efficient to run together. You could make the argument that there was an opportunity cost into investing into a specific tree, and you had to farm unmakings to get something from another mechanic, but with 3 trees you can have almost everything you want even in an ssf setting.

- A lot of nodes are purely scaling the reward value. I feel most of these are redundant. I have the points, I'm doing the mechanic. Ofcourse I'm taking them.

What I'd like to see:

- Since league mechanics nodes are mutually exclusive, just split the tree for each mechanic into it's own page. Or alternatively a tree where you start at the center and each mechanic has exclusive branches.

- Get rid of most if not all the reward quantity scaling nodes. Provide more nodes that let you select and modify or block reward types (the harvest crop rotation cluster for example). Nodes that modify or transform the league mechanic itself in interesting ways (Cassia's Pride, Crop Rotation). Have the nodes interact with each other. Limit the maximum points you can invest in each branch. For example having 25-30 node league exclusive trees that I can invest a max of 15 points in should make choices more interesting.

- Bake reward quantity into the map tiering and map modifiers. Currently I'm never running a mechanic without any of it's reward scaling nodes and if I'm running a mechanic I have all of them.

- Have mapping/bossing/kirac and meta branch that provide more global modifiers that affects other league mechanics.

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HazeSyndrome wrote:

- League mechanic specific nodes are exclusive to that league, and very rarely have interactions outside them.

This is something I'd like to see some variation on. The character passive skill tree is always more interesting when you have notables that do more than one thing, which provides opportunities to plan effective synergies and prods you to consider complimentary options you may otherwise not have.