Well I said in my earlier post I wanted to talk a bit about perks/perk trees balance, so here that is I guess:
Perception:
Overall I think this tree is in a pretty good place, it's both useful as a 'sidespec' tree for Salvage Operations/Lucky Looter/Explosives/Penetrator (at least once Penetrator gets fixed to actually do something again), and it's at least okay as a main spec tree, since Rifles and Explosives are good (although ofc you probably want to use something like shotguns for POI looting, but frankly no tree stands well completely on it's own). The biggest issue with main speccing this tree is Spears still suck even with the magazines for them (like they seriously suck and aren't remotely on the same level as Clubs/Sledges/Fists atm).
One change I would suggest would be to make the spear perk buff power attack damage by an additional 10-50% (maybe even 15-75% or 20-100%? Sounds crazy but honestly that might be what it takes to put Spears on the proverbial map) beyond the flat buff to all spear attacks, to make thrown spears truly devastating at high ranks, although I think even this wouldn't be enough to put spears on a similar level as the better melee weapons.
Also, Treasure Hunter could probably be doubled to 20/40/60% (honestly I could see this being buffed to 40/80/120% as crazy as that sounds), as you don't get that many treasure maps on average and the digging bonus only gets weaker as you get better tools. You get far more dukes/value out of putting points into something like barter or mining then you would putting them in Treasure Hunter anyways, so a massive buff wouldn't be out of place.
Strength:
Strength is sort of a strange tree balance wise. It's weapons are all in a great spot (clubs/sledges are basically the thing all other melee weapons are compared to), but Strength is already nearly mandatory unless you almost never mine or play MP where someone else mines for you. As it stands, this tree will almost always get taken in SP just for mining, so I'm not really sure why Heavy Armour was moved here, there is already enough attraction for 'side speccing' just due to mining existing here. I don't think this is a huge issue however, as to become 'okay' at mining requires only a 1 point investment in the attribute itself (with a cigar, that gives you STR 3, unlocking 3/5 mining/motherload and 2 ranks of tyran).
Pack Mule could probably be compressed down to 3-4 points for the same effect to make it a little better, as it's already sort of optional due to mods/vehicles existing.
Master Chef is fairly weak, at best you MAYBE take 1 point early to make teas/coffee and then just get all the recipes with schematics. I would suggest something like: compress the perk down to 4 points, make the grandpa elixirs not have schematics for them, and then change the melee/exp grandpa elixirs to have a longer duration (basically change the melee one to be more like the new Recog, weaker but longer duration so it's actually usable). In addition, although idk how easy this would be to do, you could do something like for every rank in this perk you get 20% more buff effect from the related recipes. For example with 4 points, you would get 80% more buff from the elixirs, or an 80% bigger stamina buff from the foods. Maybe even add extra buffs to some of the foods like max HP buffs or crit resistance to make this a bit more relevant. Or maybe tie some of these extra buffs to having ranks in this perk (ie if you have for example rank 3, you get an extra +10 max HP buff from eating high end foods).
Having said all that, unless I am mistaken, doing stuff like this would require adding a bunch of different versions of each buff, which would probably be a ton of clutter/work. But it's just some ideas, I'm sure someone else can think of something better/easier to implement.
Fortitude:
I know this is going to sound like heresy, but I honestly think the Fort tree is the overall worst perk tree period (worst doesn't mean useless or 'unviable' ofc). I never put a single point into any of the perks, even in the late game. The weapons are okay: Fists are legitimately good now with the magazine to make beer last longer/not make you dizzy, and you can actually fight groups of radiated with fists + beer now if you take all the melee perks. Would even say Fists might be slightly better or at least on par with Clubs now if you can source beer. Automatics are obviously strong, but guzzle resources like crazy (so they are pretty bad on horde every night for example unless you want to mine all day every day), with their only real advantage being raw DPS (which isn't very useful in this game, and even if that is what you want the SMG comes pretty close and is much cheaper to make ammo for, and is also more accurate). So Fort is probably fairly well balanced in terms of it's weapons with the changes to fists, but it's sidespec potential is IMHO awful. I'll go into more detail:
Huntsman was already unneeded even before the animal buffs, now it's just completely overkill, even if animals were somewhat toned down again (maybe compress it to 3 4 points?). Would make it better for MP at least.
Living off the Land to me is pretty much pointless (and I mine a LOT, so it's not a question of not needing food/buffs), but I know people do like it and use it, so it probably is fine as it is.
Healing Factor has become MILDLY useful with increased healing from crits, but frankly the regen was always a joke. Before you get it to rank 5 (which takes Fort 10 and is a MASSIVE investment, even if you were using Fort Weapons), the regen is basically just out of combat regen to deal with minor injuries. The problem is healing items and healing foods (boiled meat is very good for early game healing) are absurdly common, even just from loot. Even without crafting a single healing item and never taking any fort perk I have stacks and stacks of healing items just sitting around in the late game. And even if you get rank 5 Healing Factor, the regen is still too slow to be that meaningful in combat: if you are actually in trouble you would still need to pop a medkit or bandage to stay alive. However I know some people swear by this perk, so I'm not really sure what else to say about it, I just feel it's a waste of points (even if you already had the prereq Fort for other reasons).
Iron Gut is just... yeah. Idk why this one still has 5 ranks (should be like 3). Alternatively, the buff duration bonus could probably be increased to +100% (or maybe just +75%) and then it would actually be pretty good for Recog/Candy buffs/Beer if you went Fists.
To make Fort a little more attractive, and make pure melee builds more viable, there could be some kind of crit resistance perk added to fort that is tied to using melee weapons (for example a stacking crit resist buff that gains a stack every time you hit with a melee weapon, and loses a stack if you use a ranged weapon). Would mean that if you invested in all 3 melee perks (Tyran, Flurry and this one), a pure melee build might actually work pretty well and be really fun, esp with the buffed fists. Or it could just give a flat crit resist buff when you have a melee weapon equipped.
Agility:
Handguns were already very strong in A18, and in A19 are even better with the buffs to the Magnum, and the Desert Vulture being an even better Magnum that basically fixes all of it's problems. In A18 this was just the Pistol/SMG tree but now the Desert Vulture is probably even stronger (seriously this gun is crazy and might be the best gun in the whole game; high DPS, resource efficient ammo, penetrates targets, accurate on hip fire and almost instant reloads). However Knives/Bows were pretty weak in A18. With the change to make them deal way more stealth damage, they might be a bit better, but both are still quite bad at straight up combat (but you do get explosive arrows/bolts at least, if you don't want to side spec Perception). So weapon wise, this tree is a mixed bag, with arguably the best gun skill but a very weak melee option and bows basically being a stealth/explosives only weapon.
In terms of side spec potential, this tree is a bit weak but not terrible, more detail below:
Run and Gun is sort of a weird perk in Agi, since the only Agi weapons that actually meaningfully benefit from this perk are Crossbows and the Magnum (the other weapons generally have fast reloads), but it's obviously a great pickup for someone who is specced into automatics for example. Situational, but useful, which seems about right to me.
Parkour is super fun, although it's mostly quality of life, so therefore a 'late game' perk.
Flurry of Blows would probably benefit from my idea to add a crit resist perk for melee. It's the type of perk that is just there for pure melee builds, but those need a bit more help ATM.
Light Armour suffers from not having many advantages over Heavy Armour and being way less protective*, but it's hard to say what should be done (if anything, obviously it's not like Light Armour is unusable, but it doesn't really feel competitive with Heavy Armour atm). The most obvious change would be to nerf the fittings mods(by 1% each probably, so from 2/3% to 1/2%). This would mean that while unmodded Heavy Armour would stay the same, modded/perked Heavy Armour would still have noticeable mobility penalties unlike currently (atm if you wear a set of Heavy Armour with Custom Fittings and Heavy Armour 4/4, you have 92% mobility, so barely any penalty), and it would make Light Armour look a lot better in comparison as modded/perked Light Armour would basically have no penalties to compensate for the lower protection. At the very least it would make Light vs Heavy more distinct gameplay wise as you would actually be slow in Heavy armour and fast in Light armour.
Another change that could be made would be to buff Light Armour crit protection to be the same as Heavy Armour, so that the difference was only in damage reduction.
To be fair however, half the issue is the urban combat magazine that makes armour not encumber you in combat. If that was removed, that might already help make Light Armour a lot more attractive.
*For reference, although it heavily varies with the specific stat roll, a full set of Light Armour with Banded Plating Mods gives you between about 60-65 armour, and a full set of Heavy Armour between about 75-80, which means you take about 60-75% more damage when wearing Light vs Heavy armour. So there is plenty of room to buff Light/nerf Heavy armour without making Heavy armour useless as it would still be WAY more protective.
Somewhat unrelated, and also something that is from back in A18, but currently the way armour perks and fittings stack, perked + modded Light Armour displays a mobility of above 100% on the character sheet (although this doesn't appear to actually increase your movement speed above 100% from my limited testing). Also when you wear the College Jacket, that doesn't show on the character sheet. Basically the display of your mobility/movement speed should probably be changed to be more accurate and take into account the jacket.
As for Stealth, well the core issue is it's obviously situational. I think the best solution would be to compress the ranks of the stealth perks down to 4, or even 3 each so that you don't need to invest as many points for the benefits. This would make stealth less of an investment, which would help fix the problem of it being situational.
Intelligence:
Well I already talked about this before, but the Int weapons really need help. Batons obviously just need higher/lower tier versions (ie A20). The sledge is a lot better post buffs, but the Junk Turret still suffers from the late game problem of constantly triggering Demos (but as I said before, just making it unable to trigger them would probably be OP), which makes Int pretty bad in the late game. Coupled with the lack of any early game Int weapons, this means there are a lot of gaps in effectiveness.
As for side speccing, well Int has always suffered from the issue of being unlock heavy, and schematics existing. Having said that, Barter is a top tier perk due to higher secret stash loot, and unlocking recipes early in the game is very useful. I always end up investing heavily in Int in the early game up to Int 6-7 just to unlock stuff faster, but that is mostly because I am impatient and like to progress very fast.
Daring Adventurer isn't a weak perk on it's own, but suffers from the problem that quests are usually a waste of time in the early game (at least if you want to be efficient; it's not that quests are 'bad' it's that you could be doing more directly useful things like looting or mining instead of running back and forth from traders). Not really a problem with the perk however.
Barter as I mentioned is already great. However on subject of trading/barter, I think the barter candy/barter elixir/cigar could probably stand to be nerfed in half. You can stack way too many of these buffs in the late game and it makes prices a little nuts, which sort of breaks the late game economy. It would make much more sense to nerf these buffs then the perk, since the perk actually requires investment, while these buffs are more or less just 'free' (I mean you get far more then 100 dukes 'back' from the candy for example, and the cigar is something you would be using just for the STR anyways).
Physician/Grease Monkey could probably be better, but they are already much stronger in A19 then A18, and it's hard to think of meaningful improvements to them.
Something that might be a good addition to Int would be a perk to speed up block upgrading/repairs. Something like 3 ranks, 15/30/50% faster 'swing' when upgrading or repairing a block.
Anyways, perks seem to be the type of thing most people have different options on, but that is my 2 cents on the matter.
Perception:
Overall I think this tree is in a pretty good place, it's both useful as a 'sidespec' tree for Salvage Operations/Lucky Looter/Explosives/Penetrator (at least once Penetrator gets fixed to actually do something again), and it's at least okay as a main spec tree, since Rifles and Explosives are good (although ofc you probably want to use something like shotguns for POI looting, but frankly no tree stands well completely on it's own). The biggest issue with main speccing this tree is Spears still suck even with the magazines for them (like they seriously suck and aren't remotely on the same level as Clubs/Sledges/Fists atm).
One change I would suggest would be to make the spear perk buff power attack damage by an additional 10-50% (maybe even 15-75% or 20-100%? Sounds crazy but honestly that might be what it takes to put Spears on the proverbial map) beyond the flat buff to all spear attacks, to make thrown spears truly devastating at high ranks, although I think even this wouldn't be enough to put spears on a similar level as the better melee weapons.
Also, Treasure Hunter could probably be doubled to 20/40/60% (honestly I could see this being buffed to 40/80/120% as crazy as that sounds), as you don't get that many treasure maps on average and the digging bonus only gets weaker as you get better tools. You get far more dukes/value out of putting points into something like barter or mining then you would putting them in Treasure Hunter anyways, so a massive buff wouldn't be out of place.
Strength:
Strength is sort of a strange tree balance wise. It's weapons are all in a great spot (clubs/sledges are basically the thing all other melee weapons are compared to), but Strength is already nearly mandatory unless you almost never mine or play MP where someone else mines for you. As it stands, this tree will almost always get taken in SP just for mining, so I'm not really sure why Heavy Armour was moved here, there is already enough attraction for 'side speccing' just due to mining existing here. I don't think this is a huge issue however, as to become 'okay' at mining requires only a 1 point investment in the attribute itself (with a cigar, that gives you STR 3, unlocking 3/5 mining/motherload and 2 ranks of tyran).
Pack Mule could probably be compressed down to 3-4 points for the same effect to make it a little better, as it's already sort of optional due to mods/vehicles existing.
Master Chef is fairly weak, at best you MAYBE take 1 point early to make teas/coffee and then just get all the recipes with schematics. I would suggest something like: compress the perk down to 4 points, make the grandpa elixirs not have schematics for them, and then change the melee/exp grandpa elixirs to have a longer duration (basically change the melee one to be more like the new Recog, weaker but longer duration so it's actually usable). In addition, although idk how easy this would be to do, you could do something like for every rank in this perk you get 20% more buff effect from the related recipes. For example with 4 points, you would get 80% more buff from the elixirs, or an 80% bigger stamina buff from the foods. Maybe even add extra buffs to some of the foods like max HP buffs or crit resistance to make this a bit more relevant. Or maybe tie some of these extra buffs to having ranks in this perk (ie if you have for example rank 3, you get an extra +10 max HP buff from eating high end foods).
Having said all that, unless I am mistaken, doing stuff like this would require adding a bunch of different versions of each buff, which would probably be a ton of clutter/work. But it's just some ideas, I'm sure someone else can think of something better/easier to implement.
Fortitude:
I know this is going to sound like heresy, but I honestly think the Fort tree is the overall worst perk tree period (worst doesn't mean useless or 'unviable' ofc). I never put a single point into any of the perks, even in the late game. The weapons are okay: Fists are legitimately good now with the magazine to make beer last longer/not make you dizzy, and you can actually fight groups of radiated with fists + beer now if you take all the melee perks. Would even say Fists might be slightly better or at least on par with Clubs now if you can source beer. Automatics are obviously strong, but guzzle resources like crazy (so they are pretty bad on horde every night for example unless you want to mine all day every day), with their only real advantage being raw DPS (which isn't very useful in this game, and even if that is what you want the SMG comes pretty close and is much cheaper to make ammo for, and is also more accurate). So Fort is probably fairly well balanced in terms of it's weapons with the changes to fists, but it's sidespec potential is IMHO awful. I'll go into more detail:
Huntsman was already unneeded even before the animal buffs, now it's just completely overkill, even if animals were somewhat toned down again (maybe compress it to 3 4 points?). Would make it better for MP at least.
Living off the Land to me is pretty much pointless (and I mine a LOT, so it's not a question of not needing food/buffs), but I know people do like it and use it, so it probably is fine as it is.
Healing Factor has become MILDLY useful with increased healing from crits, but frankly the regen was always a joke. Before you get it to rank 5 (which takes Fort 10 and is a MASSIVE investment, even if you were using Fort Weapons), the regen is basically just out of combat regen to deal with minor injuries. The problem is healing items and healing foods (boiled meat is very good for early game healing) are absurdly common, even just from loot. Even without crafting a single healing item and never taking any fort perk I have stacks and stacks of healing items just sitting around in the late game. And even if you get rank 5 Healing Factor, the regen is still too slow to be that meaningful in combat: if you are actually in trouble you would still need to pop a medkit or bandage to stay alive. However I know some people swear by this perk, so I'm not really sure what else to say about it, I just feel it's a waste of points (even if you already had the prereq Fort for other reasons).
Iron Gut is just... yeah. Idk why this one still has 5 ranks (should be like 3). Alternatively, the buff duration bonus could probably be increased to +100% (or maybe just +75%) and then it would actually be pretty good for Recog/Candy buffs/Beer if you went Fists.
To make Fort a little more attractive, and make pure melee builds more viable, there could be some kind of crit resistance perk added to fort that is tied to using melee weapons (for example a stacking crit resist buff that gains a stack every time you hit with a melee weapon, and loses a stack if you use a ranged weapon). Would mean that if you invested in all 3 melee perks (Tyran, Flurry and this one), a pure melee build might actually work pretty well and be really fun, esp with the buffed fists. Or it could just give a flat crit resist buff when you have a melee weapon equipped.
Agility:
Handguns were already very strong in A18, and in A19 are even better with the buffs to the Magnum, and the Desert Vulture being an even better Magnum that basically fixes all of it's problems. In A18 this was just the Pistol/SMG tree but now the Desert Vulture is probably even stronger (seriously this gun is crazy and might be the best gun in the whole game; high DPS, resource efficient ammo, penetrates targets, accurate on hip fire and almost instant reloads). However Knives/Bows were pretty weak in A18. With the change to make them deal way more stealth damage, they might be a bit better, but both are still quite bad at straight up combat (but you do get explosive arrows/bolts at least, if you don't want to side spec Perception). So weapon wise, this tree is a mixed bag, with arguably the best gun skill but a very weak melee option and bows basically being a stealth/explosives only weapon.
In terms of side spec potential, this tree is a bit weak but not terrible, more detail below:
Run and Gun is sort of a weird perk in Agi, since the only Agi weapons that actually meaningfully benefit from this perk are Crossbows and the Magnum (the other weapons generally have fast reloads), but it's obviously a great pickup for someone who is specced into automatics for example. Situational, but useful, which seems about right to me.
Parkour is super fun, although it's mostly quality of life, so therefore a 'late game' perk.
Flurry of Blows would probably benefit from my idea to add a crit resist perk for melee. It's the type of perk that is just there for pure melee builds, but those need a bit more help ATM.
Light Armour suffers from not having many advantages over Heavy Armour and being way less protective*, but it's hard to say what should be done (if anything, obviously it's not like Light Armour is unusable, but it doesn't really feel competitive with Heavy Armour atm). The most obvious change would be to nerf the fittings mods(by 1% each probably, so from 2/3% to 1/2%). This would mean that while unmodded Heavy Armour would stay the same, modded/perked Heavy Armour would still have noticeable mobility penalties unlike currently (atm if you wear a set of Heavy Armour with Custom Fittings and Heavy Armour 4/4, you have 92% mobility, so barely any penalty), and it would make Light Armour look a lot better in comparison as modded/perked Light Armour would basically have no penalties to compensate for the lower protection. At the very least it would make Light vs Heavy more distinct gameplay wise as you would actually be slow in Heavy armour and fast in Light armour.
Another change that could be made would be to buff Light Armour crit protection to be the same as Heavy Armour, so that the difference was only in damage reduction.
To be fair however, half the issue is the urban combat magazine that makes armour not encumber you in combat. If that was removed, that might already help make Light Armour a lot more attractive.
*For reference, although it heavily varies with the specific stat roll, a full set of Light Armour with Banded Plating Mods gives you between about 60-65 armour, and a full set of Heavy Armour between about 75-80, which means you take about 60-75% more damage when wearing Light vs Heavy armour. So there is plenty of room to buff Light/nerf Heavy armour without making Heavy armour useless as it would still be WAY more protective.
Somewhat unrelated, and also something that is from back in A18, but currently the way armour perks and fittings stack, perked + modded Light Armour displays a mobility of above 100% on the character sheet (although this doesn't appear to actually increase your movement speed above 100% from my limited testing). Also when you wear the College Jacket, that doesn't show on the character sheet. Basically the display of your mobility/movement speed should probably be changed to be more accurate and take into account the jacket.
As for Stealth, well the core issue is it's obviously situational. I think the best solution would be to compress the ranks of the stealth perks down to 4, or even 3 each so that you don't need to invest as many points for the benefits. This would make stealth less of an investment, which would help fix the problem of it being situational.
Intelligence:
Well I already talked about this before, but the Int weapons really need help. Batons obviously just need higher/lower tier versions (ie A20). The sledge is a lot better post buffs, but the Junk Turret still suffers from the late game problem of constantly triggering Demos (but as I said before, just making it unable to trigger them would probably be OP), which makes Int pretty bad in the late game. Coupled with the lack of any early game Int weapons, this means there are a lot of gaps in effectiveness.
As for side speccing, well Int has always suffered from the issue of being unlock heavy, and schematics existing. Having said that, Barter is a top tier perk due to higher secret stash loot, and unlocking recipes early in the game is very useful. I always end up investing heavily in Int in the early game up to Int 6-7 just to unlock stuff faster, but that is mostly because I am impatient and like to progress very fast.
Daring Adventurer isn't a weak perk on it's own, but suffers from the problem that quests are usually a waste of time in the early game (at least if you want to be efficient; it's not that quests are 'bad' it's that you could be doing more directly useful things like looting or mining instead of running back and forth from traders). Not really a problem with the perk however.
Barter as I mentioned is already great. However on subject of trading/barter, I think the barter candy/barter elixir/cigar could probably stand to be nerfed in half. You can stack way too many of these buffs in the late game and it makes prices a little nuts, which sort of breaks the late game economy. It would make much more sense to nerf these buffs then the perk, since the perk actually requires investment, while these buffs are more or less just 'free' (I mean you get far more then 100 dukes 'back' from the candy for example, and the cigar is something you would be using just for the STR anyways).
Physician/Grease Monkey could probably be better, but they are already much stronger in A19 then A18, and it's hard to think of meaningful improvements to them.
Something that might be a good addition to Int would be a perk to speed up block upgrading/repairs. Something like 3 ranks, 15/30/50% faster 'swing' when upgrading or repairing a block.
Anyways, perks seem to be the type of thing most people have different options on, but that is my 2 cents on the matter.
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. That being said Gatling guns used a variety of ammos over time so they were not particularly ammo limited.
