This encourages players to diversify their skills and engage in some long-term planning. You can only do them at further level intervals. You can't simply get to the point where you can use Blast Cannon and pump every following skill point into it. Second, increasing power in each of these skills is also level-based.
Thus having an ice, fire, and lightning set of spells is an entirely viable build – even encouraged. Instead, you can learn it when you hit level 21. You don't have to, say, learn two different fire spells before you can learn the Flame Pillar spell. Although it's technically true that Diablo 2 was more customizable in terms of stats particularly, I find that Torchlight 2 does four things with its character progression that make its system superior to Diablo 2's, which suffered from a dependence on rigid, "cookie cutter" best character builds. Without commitment and risk in character building, it's hard to say there's much reward.īack when I wrote about the growing preponderance of skills over attributes after I initially played Diablo 3, I noticed a few commenters suggesting that the game's skill system was a step back from the customization of Diablo 2. The ability to redefine my character almost instantly by switching her core attributes rendered her, well, something other than mine. I admire the conceptual elegance of Diablo 3's mix-and-match skills, and I certainly had fun experimenting with different systems, but in the end, I didn't feel committed. And with that tension comes the idea that I could do it right. It's exciting because I can get those combinations gloriously, messily, foolishly wrong. This isn't just exciting because there are different combinations. On the other hand, the Embermage – with its different elemental trees – seems like it has dozens of viable combinations. The Engineer is the simplest: Each of its skill trees correspond to distinct weapons. And, with that knowledge, I could take a look at every class and see the potential for different characters in each one. I could understand how the skills and stats and items interacted.
I'd put enough time and energy into this character that giving up on her should have seemed like a waste. As much as I had enjoyed her aesthetically, I had, quite simply, built her wrong. While they all seemed to work decently well on their own, by the time I got to the third act, my character was a mess, trying to work with every stat and far too many useless skills. With that character, I danced across the skill tree, picking and choosing several different appetizers. This was a far cry from my first main character, an Outlander. I was slow, ranged, difficult to kill, and had a range of helpers – so I didn't just look like a Big Daddy, I played like one too. The passive abilities also built defense. Blast Cannon, a simple, powerful attack, became my primary skill, backed up by a range of different supplemental robots. In this case, it was simple: Everything on the Construction tree interacted well with everything else, and all of them made the character I wanted to become. I was able to test and discard skills to some extent, but I had to choose what I wanted and stick with that choice. I looked at all the different skill trees, and picked the one that seemed to fit how I wanted to play. %Gallery-166151% What made me enjoy my 'Construction' Engineer was that I, well, constructed him. While that's a necessary component of what made me enjoy my 'Construction' Engineer, it's not the most important aspect. I actually found the original Torchlight's aesthetics off-putting, but tweaks in setting, tone, and graphics did just enough that my distaste turned to enjoyment. It's not just the excellent paper doll effects, it's also the way the Engineer carries the cannon and the recoil when firing. And playing my Big Daddy was some of the most fun I'd ever had in an action RPG.Īesthetically, it's good to look at. Then I bought him a helmet that looked like a mask, and I realized: I'd just made a Big Daddy from BioShock. He was also intended to be used primarily in multiplayer, built upon the Engineer's more supportive skill tree (Construction) for which hand cannons are the ideal weapon. In this case, I created him because my previous main character, around level 40, was running into extreme, frustrating difficulty in the third act. He's actually my second engineer, and probably the sixth or seventh character I made – although most of the others had only been played for a few minutes. Here's the moment I realized I loved Torchlight 2: It's the screenshot right above this.
0 kommentar(er)
