BardBlue
commented
8 years ago An easier, more gradual way to do this might be to expand some 5 point skills to 8-10, and make each successive point give you a bigger bonus. So 1 point in fast attack might be 4% more damage, the next might be 5%, the next point 6%, etc. Or decreased damage while dodging could scale similarly. Of course, usually you get diminishing returns for investing many points in one skill, so this is very much the opposite of that, an incentive to dump lots of points in one skill if you want.
Just increasing the max points of lots of skills would be enough to let you progress past level 28, since it would take more points to fill out the skills you have slotted.
Another interesting idea would be if you could make some kind of point investment to make a skill not needed to be slotted. Like, 3 points maybe. Not sure if that's possible.
We need to think about how we can make the levelling / skill tree model more interesting. I was thinking something like this:
For select skills, Levels 1-(max-1) will act normal, possibly scaled so that they act like the max level at max-1 the max level will have a modifier on it, increasing its effectiveness, but disproportionately increasing its skill point cost. So, something like strength training might give 14-18% strong attack bonus at level 4, but level 5 might cost 5-15 skill points and increase strong attack damage by 24-32%. Giving rough ranges here because I'm not sure how I want to scale them. It might also be possible to increase their effectiveness in other ways (see http://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/869/?) than just straight scaling.
The basic idea is that we would have high cost skills which are very powerful, but you can't equip more than a few of them due to their cost. That would force the player focus their build around one or two in order to be really effective. Assuming you finish the game at level 30 with 40 skillpoints, you really wouldn't want to have more than one or two 10 point skills, as it would severely limit your flexibility for the rest of the build.
It would still allow people to be a jack of all trades if they wish, but also let people do something like have a witcher who attacks really fast, dodges attacks and takes no damage while doing so, causes bleed damage, but can't take any damage. On the other hand, a witcher who specializes alchemy might have to make severe compromises in attack and signs if they want to use those skills that make them so OP in vanilla.
For higher level scaling, it would essentially allow you to continue progressing because as you get more skillpoints, you can have more of these special skills at once.
I'm not entirely sure how to do all this yet, of course, but I think it could make for a larger variety of builds and more interesting progression. I really think that we shouldn't go back to having every skill equipped, but there needs to be a way to progress once you have all your slots filled out - I think that the bonuses and increased cost for some max rank skills could be that.