I was just wondering what your thoughts are on the issue of skill trees being set up in such a way that users of it are "Strongly urged" to take a particular skill tree along with it. In the process of balancing out Swiftstriker, specifically the final skill, Jump, I was disappointed with its damage output, mostly because of its tendency to partially miss, resulting in laughably low damage, which was anticlimactic considering its (at the time) 100-turn cooldown. I was about to buff it, when I saw that Essence had given it rave reviews, and called the damage "massive". He mentioned killing blow, which I wasn't aware of at the time, since I hadn't explored the expanded previously-short skill trees in that recent update, and sure enough, I discovered that a 100% critical chance essentially doubled the potential damage, and guaranteed that it would reach that potential damage. So I was left with a dilemma: Buff it to make it decent WITHOUT berserker rage, at the cost of making it ludicrously overpowered WITH berserker rage, or keep it the same, essentially obliging its users to choose berserker rage along with it, which generally means no dual-wielding, in order to get the most out of BR in its own right. I chose the latter, because it's always better to have something be potentially underpowered in certain circumstances than to have it be potentially OVERPOWERED in certain circumstances, at least in the context of a roguelike such as this. However, I honestly wish I hadn't needed to choose at all. Berserker rage is awesome and fun, but it tends to go with tank builds, and swiftstriker has far more applications than that. Plus, I love dual wielding, and I've found myself using it far less lately, since I've been using mods. I'm fairly sure I'm not the only modder who has made a skill tree with this kind of predicament, and I was wondering if anybody else would like to share their thoughts on this.
It's part of the fun, I guess. Sometimes you just want to have it a little easier, so you try to optimize the build and go for the most efficient way to become a dungeon mass murderer. But sometimes you just want to fool around, so you take a few skills and simply ignore those that are unwieldy. Though I do agree that it's better to have something that is underpowered most of the time, but shines in certain situations, because that way you have to either plan, or be skilful. And if you got something that would be overpowered most of the time but failed when it really counted, then you would simply become overly reliant on that and die miserably.
Buffing its damage could make it too stronk with KB, sure. I think the simplest compromise is: make Jump have extraordinarily high crit on its own (even 50-70 crit will make it crit most of the time for most people). That way people who take Berserker Rage can still use the KB on another attack, and Jump has strong damage for everyone but can't be multiplied further by KB.
