Thursday 12 February 2009

New 'Method' of skill training on the cards?

It seems with the talk of respeccing your attributes once every 6 months, there will be a new way of managing your skills - no longer will you be limited to what you can get with implants and skills, but instead you can alter your attributes to get the best training speed in any given 6 month window.

If you want to train ships for instance, you will raise up the Perception and Willpower, and let the other attributes lower, as theoretically, you wont be using them.

This means a couple of things:

1) Old timers will notice the skill gap decreasing as more and more people get the lower ranked skills finished sooner (i.e. instead of training at 1750 sp/min, some people have managed 2500 or more with optimised stats on the test server)

2) People like me who tend to chop and change through skills are going to be disadvantaged if I don't take part in this sort of skill training method, as theres no other way to get such speeds without reducing other stats to compensate. It means I will have to start to think about longer running skill plans, and get what I need from the skills before moving on to something else, as it seems that its only going to be possible to alter the attributes once every 6 months. If you've minimised your intelligence for instance, you better hope you dont need to train an engineering skill in the meantime, as it will be s-l-o-w.

3) The implants market could get affected - people wont need to carry a full head of attribute implants if you're deliberately only concentrating on the skills that 2 attributes can provide. You therefore only need 2 implants at any given time.

It would be quite a nice trick to get a lot of ships and T2 weapon systems trained for nice and quick (perception/willpower based) but it means my Industrial side will stagnate in the meantime. It still remains to be seen if 6 months feels just too long for attribute respecs, but personally, i'd rather see it be fairly time-unlimited (i.e. you can respec once every day or so much like jump clones) but pay an increasing amount per go, until 6 months passes and the costs are reset (or else, you could end up pricing yourself out of changing after doing a few modifications)

2 comments:

Bahamut said...

Interesting observations. I'm hoping this decreases the gap between older and newer players a little.

Leumas said...

I'm afraid that I will end up being one of those that bounces around too much for this new feature to be useful for me.