PC No perk points in vain!

I feel the general concept that Perks can unlock recipes that are also loot-able and purchasable from traders is a bad design. It gives rise to all of the following possibilities, none of which result in a positive player experience...
1) The schematic never drops, so you are forced into Perks you didn't really want to be (e.g that damn Crucible forced me to Int 10)

2) The schematics drop after you bit the bullet and bought the Perk.

3) More often than not, both of the above!!! Grrrrrrrrrr.

4) Some of the schematics drop, but you end up missing a crucial one to complete the set (usually occurs with vehicles)

So in short, I think schematics should either be loot/buy only OR Perk only. Not both.
That was how alpha 17 was, and nobody liked it. Its a choice which is good. Shall I keep looking or bite the bullet and spend my perk points on this? We're adding more weight to the perks all the time.

 
Living off the land lets you harvest more, that is huge. We're adding a farm plot crafting discount to ranks 2 and 3 in an upcoming update. Grease Monkey reduces cost of parts needed to craft vehicles and will have more when we do a substantial vehicle update.
Great news! Thanks for sharing that, Madmole. :)

 
Grease Monkey 5 should give a discount for fuel consumption (a hefty one) for all vehicles. 50% discount on a bike is not a big deal. 50% discount on a helicopter? Huge. Maybe Grease monkey should make vehicles faster even.

 
So don't use it? Who cares what other people spend their money on?
I certainly won't use it but it defeats the whole "pick a build" theory. Int builds should be rewarded with the things that make Int build distinctive....Steel, high level science items, electric traps, the top tier vehicles, the best turrets etc etc. As it is, everyone will just spec to Int, build whatever they want then respec out again. Since none of the top tier stuff I'm talking about is ever destroyed or lost (other than traps but they can be spam-crafted prior to respec), it just cheeses the Int attribute. I prefer "choices matter" approach to RPGs (and let's face it we are firmly heading to RPG territory).

Living off the land lets you harvest more, that is huge. We're adding a farm plot crafting discount to ranks 2 and 3 in an upcoming update. Grease Monkey reduces cost of parts needed to craft vehicles and will have more when we do a substantial vehicle update.
There is no point whatsoever in putting more than 1 point in LoftL as far as I am concerned. You'd have to add a lot more than a discount to Plots to make it worthwhile. Food is trivial now with or without Farm Plots. Even if you want to go down the farming route (I was feeding 4 in one play-through), that 1 point giving double yield is more than enough - you will find the seeds you need or the recipes. Our larder is overflowing with excess Corn, Potatoes and Mushrooms with just the 1 point.

 
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For living off the land, the crops-per-harvest boost is really big.

Like, it improves your food stores significant.

On the other hand, who cares about mushrooms or super-corn, given that vegetable stew takes most of the same ingredients as meat stew, and is worse, and super-corn is... definitely the best raw food, but can't be cooked into anything.

If meat was the hard part about making meat stew (as it probably should be) then vegatable stew would be a useful substitute, but you run out of potatos first, then corn, then fat, THEN meat.

Meat is far too common for vegetable stew to be appealing, and mushrooms aren't really useful for anything else.

I've got like two stacks from my small farm plot, because I never use them.

As for grease monkey, lowered vehicle costs on every level would be nice, as would fuel-efficiency.

As is, it does feel kinda wasteful to put points in, if you already have... say, the 4x4 chassis schematic.

I haven't touched Yeah science, since the whole branch feels like of wasted.

Craft-speed with every level would speed up gunpowder production significantly, which is nice, but I still feel like bandages and first-aid kits should be under the physician tree, and the mines should be under the explosives tree that governs grenades, but that would leave Science even more barran.

... I guess if we take even more things away from it, we could remove it entirely and fold all of it's perks into other stuff.

Give battery crafting to advanced engineering, alongside engine-bank crafting.

I guess Chem Station recipe could go into physician or Engineering too.

Then Yeah Science could be done away with entirely.

 
It was alpha 15 and earlier that had crafting as action skills. In alpha 16 they functioned like perks, you had to manually spend points in them. They were level-gated, however!
Action skills is the nr.1 thing i miss about this game. I know the will never be reimplemented as they were before, so from what im been thinking, how about this:

There is 7th tab im the perks menu, called action skills, all having a max of 100 levels.

You cannot put points manually in these skills.

These skills are separate from the perks, meaning no perks are tied to any specific level in the similar action skill.

There are skills for all weapons and some other skills, for example:

Pistols

Rifles

Shotguns

Archery

Bladed weapons

Blunt weapons

Fist weapons

Explosive weapons

Technological/misc weapons

(the spears could either have its own category, or maybe they could fit into Bladed weapons?)

All weapons would gain like, +0,3% increased damage per level.

Mining: (dealing damage to blocks with tools) +0,5% block damage

Athletics: (spending stamina) +0,3% stamima regen

Bartering: (buying and selling goods) +0,3% trading efficency

Scavenging: (looting) +1 to gamestage loot

Construction: (crafting and upgrading) +0,3% crafting speed and +0,5% upgrade speed

Leveling these skills would be rather slow, like 50% slower that the alpha 16 skills were to level. And yes, they should only give a small bonus, the perks should still be the major component of powers.

This is what i would wish for most of all... But i guess that will be left to the modders.
Already a mod (sort of) Deceptive had this in 17. Im assisting in keeping it updated now for 18.

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?99334-Return-of-Action-Skills-perks-that-level-as-you-use-them-(Test-Release)

updated link for 18 at the tail end

 
I certainly won't use it but it defeats the whole "pick a build" theory. Int builds should be rewarded with the things that make Int build distinctive....Steel, high level science items, electric traps, the top tier vehicles, the best turrets etc etc. As it is, everyone will just spec to Int, build whatever they want then respec out again. Since none of the top tier stuff I'm talking about is ever destroyed or lost (other than traps but they can be spam-crafted prior to respec), it just cheeses the Int attribute. I prefer "choices matter" approach to RPGs (and let's face it we are firmly heading to RPG territory).
Having an option to respec is basically mandatory for a game like this.

Not everybody perfectly optimises their build on the first try, and realising that you've messed up your skill-choices and having the only way to fix it be to delete your whole character and start over would be really punishing.

Personally, I don't buy respec potions (because they're prohibitively expensive) but i will use admin powers to spawn them for any player who wants to fix their build.

I think the risk of people trying to minmax by investing in int, building everything that they ever plan to build, and then swapping to something else is pretty unlikely.

Int is probably the most useful skill-tree in the game, just for trading, crafting and questing. Not to mention that it now has it's own scaling weapons (though they're not balanced especially well)

Not to mention that you need to continuously build more things as you keep playing.

"building everything you'll ever need all at once before respecing into something else"is a completely unrealistic idea.

The amount of materials you'd need to make the dozens of turrets, blade-traps, darts traps. The ten forges, workbenches and chem-stations The motorbike/car for each member of the group.

No, by the time you've gathered all of that stuff, you'll already be using it because you'll be in the endgame already, which means you'll need to be crafting evermore turrets and traps to fend off the increasing hordes every week.

 
For living off the land, the crops-per-harvest boost is really big.Like, it improves your food stores significant.

On the other hand, who cares about mushrooms or super-corn, given that vegetable stew takes most of the same ingredients as meat stew, and is worse, and super-corn is... definitely the best raw food, but can't be cooked into anything.

If meat was the hard part about making meat stew (as it probably should be) then vegatable stew would be a useful substitute, but you run out of potatos first, then corn, then fat, THEN meat.

Meat is far too common for vegetable stew to be appealing, and mushrooms aren't really useful for anything else.

I've got like two stacks from my small farm plot, because I never use them.

As for grease monkey, lowered vehicle costs on every level would be nice, as would fuel-efficiency.

As is, it does feel kinda wasteful to put points in, if you already have... say, the 4x4 chassis schematic.

I haven't touched Yeah science, since the whole branch feels like of wasted.

Craft-speed with every level would speed up gunpowder production significantly, which is nice, but I still feel like bandages and first-aid kits should be under the physician tree, and the mines should be under the explosives tree that governs grenades, but that would leave Science even more barran.

... I guess if we take even more things away from it, we could remove it entirely and fold all of it's perks into other stuff.

Give battery crafting to advanced engineering, alongside engine-bank crafting.

I guess Chem Station recipe could go into physician or Engineering too.

Then Yeah Science could be done away with entirely.
Hi there :p

This so much on the food thing. Potatoes are a huge limiting factor atm because every good food requires them. We need more recipes that use other stuff and don't need canned food.

Yeah science is a bit of a point of disagreement between us but i agree it needs some love. But thats thats somthing of an int issue in general as it includes a lot of perks that provide access to basic supplies/capabilities you can't function without, (as base building, ammo crafting, and first aid stuff is such an integral part of basic gameplay), that everyone needs, (much like food for that matter), in significant quantities.

Every tree has some perks that fall into this category actually, but for the others they all fall under the general section for that atribute rathjer than the non-weapon specific part of the attribute specific stuff.

I've said it before but there's quite a lot of perks, (nearly everything under the general tabs, though some exceptions exist that could/should be put under attribute specific headers, and vice versa with int), that are either vital to general gameplay or have significant cross build applicability in a way that make having them tied to a specific attribute a rather major problem as you can't easily focus multiple attributes, (which is a good thing generally, it forces you to make decisions),that really should be moved to a new non-attribute specific group and require merely X or more point n any one attribute.

Like i said choices should exists, but stuff required to do the most basic common gameplay stuff effectively, (i.e stuff used for gathering, crafting and constructing a base, (including defences), food supply, medicine, and ammunition supply), shouldn't be somthing your forced to choose, it should be somthing available to any build. In fact wasn't this the entire point of moving weapon and armour crafting to their governing perks. To try and stop people being forced into int just to do basic stuff? Forcing them into multiple different attributes by distributing stuff around doesn't actually fix that, (it's fixed weaponry wonderfully and i love that, but food, ammo supply, medicine, and late game base construction are still locked under specific attributes, it's just multiple diffrent ones instead of one single one).

 
Oooh we have similar tastes then. I played PSO for years back in the day. So many fond memories. Haven't played PSO2, but I am definitely signing up for it when the English server drops - as are all the people I play 7 Days with. In fact they were my original PSO crew. It's through that game we all met up and have been playing as a group ever since!! If PSO2 is as addicting as PSO was, I can see me staying with the game for a long time.
One question....I would never have described PSO as an MMO. I know many people can meet at the station hubs, but there was no open world, and all expeditions were instanced and max 4 people. Is PSO2 different?

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Drool. Yes please....
Well, In general its a lot like pso, however in some stages which are more like explore stages, you can run into other players, up to 8 or 12 per map, runing around doing stuff in the exploration to boss area's. Boss area's are instanced though to you and your party only unless its a raid style emergency quest, then you can have 16-24 people all beating on the same boss.

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Having an option to respec is basically mandatory for a game like this. Not everybody perfectly optimises their build on the first try, and realising that you've messed up your skill-choices and having the only way to fix it be to delete your whole character and start over would be really punishing.

Personally, I don't buy respec potions (because they're prohibitively expensive) but i will use admin powers to spawn them for any player who wants to fix their build.

I think the risk of people trying to minmax by investing in int, building everything that they ever plan to build, and then swapping to something else is pretty unlikely.

Int is probably the most useful skill-tree in the game, just for trading, crafting and questing. Not to mention that it now has it's own scaling weapons (though they're not balanced especially well)

Not to mention that you need to continuously build more things as you keep playing.

"building everything you'll ever need all at once before respecing into something else"is a completely unrealistic idea.

The amount of materials you'd need to make the dozens of turrets, blade-traps, darts traps. The ten forges, workbenches and chem-stations The motorbike/car for each member of the group.

No, by the time you've gathered all of that stuff, you'll already be using it because you'll be in the endgame already, which means you'll need to be crafting evermore turrets and traps to fend off the increasing hordes every week.
I dunno, All my builds are 0 int builds, only thing I miss really is better barter. I get adv engineering 1 for the forge speed craft increase, then when I get a pair of those +1 intel glasses I often get grease monkey 1 if I don't have a vehicle already by that time. Really annoys the hell out of me they upped mat costs to force you to get the int perks to get them back down to what they were in a17, that was a real ♥♥♥♥ move, they should have started out at the normal cost and got cheaper. which is 10 iron for forged iron insted of 12. With perks might drop it to 8 or 7.

 
We're adding a farm plot crafting discount to ranks 2 and 3 in an upcoming update. Grease Monkey reduces cost of parts needed to craft vehicles and will have more when we do a substantial vehicle update.
Glad to hear that you are working on this matter, keep it up!

 
I feel the general concept that Perks can unlock recipes that are also loot-able and purchasable from traders is a bad design. It gives rise to all of the following possibilities, none of which result in a positive player experience...
1) The schematic never drops, so you are forced into Perks you didn't really want to be (e.g that damn Crucible forced me to Int 10)

2) The schematics drop after you bit the bullet and bought the Perk.

3) More often than not, both of the above!!! Grrrrrrrrrr.

4) Some of the schematics drop, but you end up missing a crucial one to complete the set (usually occurs with vehicles)

So in short, I think schematics should either be loot/buy only OR Perk only. Not both.
Agree. It makes spending perks a risk instead of a joy.

 
Having an option to respec is basically mandatory for a game like this.
That's your opinion. A lot of people like "choices matter" in RPGs. This elixir basically means Perk choices do not matter.

Not everybody perfectly optimises their build on the first try, and realising that you've messed up your skill-choices and having the only way to fix it be to delete your whole character and start over would be really punishing.
Not really since they recommend that you start again with every new build on experimental. Either way, it is very typical for games that do provide a respec to make that reapec option cost a LOT. This one the cost is negligible. 30k dukes around the time you want to exploit it is basically nothing; you will have way more wealth than that. If one dose of the elixir gave you perhaps 1 or 2 points back, then it just might be balanced.

Personally, I don't buy respec potions (because they're prohibitively expensive)
Not sure if serious. 30k is prohibitive? You're doing it wrong then.

I think the risk of people trying to minmax by investing in int, building everything that they ever plan to build, and then swapping to something else is pretty unlikely.
Not only is it cheap (sorry we will have to disagree on that one), but the elixir is not even remotely rare. Traders sell it always it seems.

Int is probably the most useful skill-tree in the game, just for trading, crafting and questing.
You don't have to remove all your Int points. Even Int 5 gives a really good boost to the things you listed above.

Not to mention that you need to continuously build more things as you keep playing.
Eh? How many Gyrocopters do you need?

"building everything you'll ever need all at once before respecing into something else"is a completely unrealistic idea.
Well I can see why you might think that if you consider the 30k dukes to buy the elixir as expensive. I do not. Day 30 and I have more dukes than I could ever spend; they are now my Brass source, nothing more. It is extremely easy to do this, and by the time you'd want to do it, it is extremely CHEAP to do it as well. I'll wager right now that speccing out of Int after you got everything you wanted is the most common use for this elixir.

The amount of materials you'd need to make the dozens of turrets, blade-traps, darts traps. The ten forges, workbenches and chem-stations The motorbike/car for each member of the group.
Forges don't count. You can easily have 10 of them in the first few days with just 1 person putting 1 point in Engineering. After that you just need everyone mining Iron as Steel is the main bottle neck for everything you want to cheese out of the Int tree before you respec. You can easily mass produce smelted Iron while one player heads to Int 10. Easy peasy. Chem Stations don't count either since they need only 1 point to build.

 
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That's your opinion. A lot of people like "choices matter" in RPGs. This elixir basically means Perk choices do not matter.


Not really since they recommend that you start again with every new build on experimental. Either way, it is very typical for games that do provide a respec to make that reapec option cost a LOT. This one the cost is negligible. 30k dukes around the time you want to exploit it is basically nothing; you will have way more wealth than that. If one dose of the elixir gave you perhaps 1 or 2 points back, then it just might be balanced.

Not sure if serious. 30k is prohibitive? You're doing it wrong then.

Not only is it cheap (sorry we will have to disagree on that one), but the elixir is not even remotely rare. Traders sell it always it seems.

You don't have to remove all your Int points. Even Int 5 gives a really good boost to the things you listed above.

Eh? How many Gyrocopters do you need?

Well I can see why you might think that if you consider the 30k dukes to buy the elixir as expensive. I do not. Day 30 and I have more dukes than I could ever spend; they are now my Brass source, nothing more. It is extremely easy to do this, and by the time you'd want to do it, it is extremely CHEAP to do it as well. I'll wager right now that speccing out of Int after you got everything you wanted is the most common use for this elixir.

Forges don't count. You can easily have 10 of them in the first few days with just 1 person putting 1 point in Engineering. After that you just need everyone mining Iron as Steel is the main bottle neck for everything you want to cheese out of the Int tree before you respec. You can easily mass produce smelted Iron while one player heads to Int 10. Easy peasy. Chem Stations don't count either since they need only 1 point to build.
And your talking out of your arse about 30k dukes. I play with iamnuff so i know what our income looks like and 10k dukes in a single day is a big deal. We can get 30k sure, but it's not some trivial to acquire amount. We have to actively work at it to get that much. And given all the time and effort we have to spend into rebuilding our supplies and repairing and beefing up our defences between each horde night we just can't afford to spend all day everyday doing quests, there isn't enough time in the day for that. Which means 30k is a once a horde night thing at best.

Sure if you've found some exploit i'm sure you can make oodles of dukes. Just as exploiting zombie pathing can reduce the defences needed by leaps and bounds. But an argument based on exploits is automatically invalid because the devs are actively patching exploits out as fast as they can find and figure out a solution. Your not going to be able to sue those exploitive methods to do somthing forever.

 
And your talking out of your arse about 30k dukes. I play with iamnuff so i know what our income looks like and 10k dukes in a single day is a big deal. We can get 30k sure, but it's not some trivial to acquire amount. We have to actively work at it to get that much. And given all the time and effort we have to spend into rebuilding our supplies and repairing and beefing up our defences between each horde night we just can't afford to spend all day everyday doing quests, there isn't enough time in the day for that. Which means 30k is a once a horde night thing at best.
Sure if you've found some exploit i'm sure you can make oodles of dukes. Just as exploiting zombie pathing can reduce the defences needed by leaps and bounds. But an argument based on exploits is automatically invalid because the devs are actively patching exploits out as fast as they can find and figure out a solution. Your not going to be able to sue those exploitive methods to do somthing forever.
I've got about 300,000 Dukes now. Admittedly, it's Day 125 on my game, so it's been going for a while, but I don't think it didn't anything particularly exploitative - biggest sellers are the armor and weapon pieces I'm finding now, of which I'm finding a lot, at good quality levels, and selling it all, unless I specifically want to use it.

30,000 Dukes ain't nothing to be sure, but I also don't think it's a massive hurdle either.

That said, I think the elixir should remain in the base game, and those that don't want it, can mod it out.

 
I've got about 300,000 Dukes now. Admittedly, it's Day 125 on my game, so it's been going for a while, but I don't think it didn't anything particularly exploitative - biggest sellers are the armor and weapon pieces I'm finding now, of which I'm finding a lot, at good quality levels, and selling it all, unless I specifically want to use it.
30,000 Dukes ain't nothing to be sure, but I also don't think it's a massive hurdle either.

That said, I think the elixir should remain in the base game, and those that don't want it, can mod it out.
Day 125 if your not playing on below 100% XP modifier is late enough i'd expect the average loot quality has gone way up, it's also late enough you've had a long time to build that up. Where getting to the point now in our game where T5 loot is becoming semi common but that majority is still 3 or T4 and T6 is fairly rare whilst where still getting a modest amount of lower tier items. In addition our base setup has consumed a fair amount of scrapped items, (as has our own gear), upto this point. We probably will see a general uptick as things go forward in dukes income, (and thats no bad thing, we need the brass), but where also starting to push into what i would consider the endgame or even post endgame part of play where where maxing out our gear at last and looking to really get the defences steadily enhanced to truly silly levels.

How you build your base will play a huge role for that matter. The more you abuse zombie pathing the less of everything you use., and the more time you have to make dukes even if your using non-exploitive methods. It's hard to say exactly how much forged iron, steel, electrical parts, and mechanical parts we've gone through, (not to mention brass, lead, ad gunpowder), but where probably pushing 5 figures on the forged iron and absolutely 4 figures on the rest of the non-ammo items. Gunpowder i know we've eaten through several tens of k of the stuff, with an appropriate amount of lead and brass. That kind of expenditure cuts sharply into your time spent looting salables or doing quests which hits you in the income big time.

If your curious our current primary defence layer is composed of: 48 each of dart traps, electric fence posts, and tripwire posts. This is fed by 4 generators each using 4 engines with one timed and one standard electrical relay plus a switch. In addition we have 4 shotgun turrets in close to the walls, 4 SMG turrets covering the skies and 8 spotlights lighting the area between the main defensive layer and the walls proper. That might sound like a lot but it's split across 8 sub zones ringing the base in a square pattern so at any given point in a horde night a good chunk of it is sitting idle, (hence the tripwires for efficiency's sake).with probably around 1/4 of it fully active and another quarter getting odd stranglers at any given point in time. And that means the actual defensive density is pretty middling, (where on day 55 atm in case your wondering, both in low 60's levels).

 
And your talking out of your arse about 30k dukes. I play with iamnuff so i know what our income looks like and 10k dukes in a single day is a big deal.
Single day? Where did you get that from???? If you can't earn 30k dukes in the time it takes one player to get to Int 10 and take all the science, vehicle and engineering perks (which is level 34 at best), you are absolutely doing it wrong. That player can also take Better Barter to 5 while he's at it and do all the selling as well. Piece of cake.

 
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How you build your base will play a huge role for that matter.
Indeed. And to compare ours to yours. We use 28 Blade Traps and 3 generators and that's it. No abuse of zombie pathing whatsoever. No infinte ramps, no mazes. Just genius. Base murders gamestage 500 horde and we rarely have to fire a shot. Total repair bill each horde: a couple of Blade traps. You're right, it's all about clever base design.

I'm starting to see why you guys have no money.

Tiny Hint for you: Mods are really cheap to produce and don't sell for diddly squat, but placing mods into items you sell makes them considerably more valuable. I guess you're going to call that an exploit huh?

 
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Indeed. And to compare ours to yours. We use 28 Blade Traps and 3 generators and that's it. No abuse of zombie pathing whatsoever. No infinte ramps, no mazes. Just genius. Base murders gamestage 500 horde and we rarely have to fire a shot. Total repair bill each horde: a couple of Blade traps. You're right, it's all about clever base design.
I'm starting to see why you guys have no money.

Tiny Hint for you: Mods are really cheap to produce and don't sell for diddly squat, but placing mods into items you sell makes them considerably more valuable. I guess you're going to call that an exploit huh?

Care to show me an image of said base, i was planning on grabbing some screenshots of ours if you asked.

 
Indeed. And to compare ours to yours. We use 28 Blade Traps and 3 generators and that's it. No abuse of zombie pathing whatsoever. No infinte ramps, no mazes. Just genius. Base murders gamestage 500 horde and we rarely have to fire a shot. Total repair bill each horde: a couple of Blade traps. You're right, it's all about clever base design.
I'm starting to see why you guys have no money.

Tiny Hint for you: Mods are really cheap to produce and don't sell for diddly squat, but placing mods into items you sell makes them considerably more valuable. I guess you're going to call that an exploit huh?
I would call that a balancing bug, if a weapon with mods installed is considerably more valuable than the sum of its components. A small increase is acceptable (from a realism perspective) as you are getting paid for providing a complete service in a world where buying a weapon and enough fitting mods can't be guaranteed.

By the way, I like your idea of making the forgettin elixier only remove a few points. Since a UI to specify which points would cost too much developer time though, it would have to be random points you forget.

 
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