I think talents should just be done away with. People focus way too much on them and they're really not the point of this game.

That being said, if I unlock a talent, I'll likely go mad with power. FEAR me, for I am the unstoppable water breather!

Well Talents won't be in at launch (I hope) and thus we will never know when they get added. Most talents are not going to be life altering anyway so I would not even worry about them. The game has a long way to go, with many changes ahead.

The difficult part of seeing the value of talents is attempting to see them from a developer's standpoint rather than a player's standpoint.

If your primary worry is min/maxing a talent then yes you are in for a very stressful and a not-as-rewarding playthrough compared to keeping your head down and focusing on your skills.

However, what this removes is the concept of career magic-users. Extraordinary things should be rare, and that's an opinion with far reaching implications. That means that some people cannot be precisely who they want to be when they grow up. If you see unplanned events in your character's life as obstacles, then you are not playing a role, merely executing a pre-designed role.

From the standpoint of a developer, having a very effective pyromancer whose powers can be utilized at their maximum potential is detrimental to the play experience as a whole. If, say, that pyromancer doesn't discover his talent until mid-life he probably will never drop a meteor on a village and that's okay. If he had the opportunity to prepare his whole life around throwing the biggest meteors the second time his talented soul sparks a body, there's no doubt that every discovered talent is going to cause everyone a lot of strife in an imbalanced way. If talents are discovered at a random time and only available for one life it makes it so that not only are extraordinary things rare, but the effective and tactical use of talents is going to be prolific, and based on random chance or story-enriching developer guidance.

This also means that we all have a way more likely chance of ever seeing a talent, which I think is cool. Plus if one day you can throw a fireball, you might think about quitting that blacksmithing apprenticeship, just for one life. That makes talents more realistic(ish).

I see both sides, especially count Fjorlund. However, there's an easy way to prevent that issue of overpowered-ness. Making someone have to reignite the talent on each incarnation. Yea it's the same talent but if you have to "spark" it another way than the previous soul before use then it will 'fix' the issue IMO. Not only would they have to figure out/find the way to spark it each time, depending on WHEN that happened in their life cycle they may not have enough time to really dig into it.

Example is pyromancy and creating a city killing meteor. Say the first soul discovers the talent 2 months in, gets the talent to the point of casting the city killing meteor but then dies before its use. The next soul goes about and unlocks the talent 8 months in. They may only have 1 month left before their death and that wouldn't be enough time to gt to the meteor stage again.

People focus way too much on them and they're really not the point of this game.

This is very true. Talents are not the main focus of the game, and thats really the big flaw with your idea.

The smaller talents (waterbreathing, fire resist ect) really just make characters rare/interesting/different. They exist to make those characters just seem weird, and allows them to do interesting things that noone else likely can. They arnt and wont be feared like the stronger talents, so these people will become either celebrities with a minor hate bounty on their head (people will always be jealous). This really changes how that player plays in a minor way, but doesnt really effect what they'll do in their day to day business. Giving one of these to everyone suddenly makes them boring. If we all get a random 'power', then noone is special for having one.

Bigger talents (vampires, lich, ect) are things that will obviously majorly change the style of play. Practicing these arts will be extremely dangerous. These players will be feared and often killed if they are discovered. They can be a very large danger to society if unchecked or get too powerful. In saying that, these powers create a large story. Either, a village has to suddenly deal with a player driven vampire infestation in their town, or a strong lich has suddenly taken up a home near town and got powerful over time, and eventually will likely try and cause chaos. These powers will create a large portion of story in how they make the players deal with them, and will likely be seen once in a lifetime (just seeing one, even just hearing of it occuring).

These things arnt something that can or will be just handed out to everyone. The focus is to go on with your daily lives. Do what you will, be a blacksmith.. or a guard or whatever. These traits make things different and interesting, or can completely shake the game up when things start to become stale.

Yet another post about talents. Those pop up every day as if the game is already on and half of the players got them and griefing the other half with their almighty presence.

Why would people pour so much energy to be concerned with something that only 5% of the playerbase has the POTENTIAL to have, while not having a clue as to WHO will have it, HOW they get it, and how GAMECHANGING it is going to be?

I mean for real, as mentioned above- it is not the main point of this game, and really exists for the extra spice it adds up to the PLAYER DRIVEN story. If someone gets a talent, and actually unlocks it- HIS choices will create content and shape the game in certain fields no matter WHAT he does with his talent. He's a pyromancer who is threatening the villages? -you have a raidboss. He's a plainswalker? -you seek for him as a king to have him by your side or eliminate him if he's on the enemies' side, or get a chance at acquiring some rare materials for a new item through him. He's a shapeshifter? maybe he is the only one with potential to explore the depths of a lake, or the heights of a mountain and find an artifact for you (or him- and then he's a raidboss as well).

Again- the IFs are so many and so complicated, as well for the facts that they are random per player life AND not even set in stone as to how to obtain theose powers, that I do not think you should be concerned about it, nor focus just on it. You're ruining your own game experience before it's even out imho.

Why would people pour so much energy to be concerned with something that only 5% of the playerbase has the POTENTIAL to have

Because talents are a very exiting part of this game. They make an imbalance in the game, so people definitely have reason to be concerned if they havent seen the full picture, and at the same time, being one of these talented characters will be just as exiting. For a game thats based on an ordinary medieval setting, this is what will shake things up.

At the same time, a lot of people are not looking at past topics or watching daily like a lot of us are, and post before looking instead of continuing a conversation thats already somewhere in the forums.

People probably shouldnt care so much, and it honestly shouldnt have been told out to people, as it would have been much more exiting to deal with otherwise, but its out. People talk about it. Its exiting.

Posted By Darknesse at 9:47 AM - Tue Aug 02 2016

Why would people pour so much energy to be concerned with something that only 5% of the playerbase has the POTENTIAL to have

Because talents are a very exiting part of this game. They make an imbalance in the game, so people definitely have reason to be concerned if they havent seen the full picture, and at the same time, being one of these talented characters will be just as exiting. For a game thats based on an ordinary medieval setting, this is what will shake things up.

At the same time, a lot of people are not looking at past topics or watching daily like a lot of us are, and post before looking instead of continuing a conversation thats already somewhere in the forums.

People probably shouldnt care so much, and it honestly shouldnt have been told out to people, as it would have been much more exiting to deal with otherwise, but its out. People talk about it. Its exiting.

Excitement is one thing. But when I read a title named "Serious concern regarding body bound talents" - I see it as an over-reaction. Imagine a new player coming to the forums and that's the first thing he reads, especially with so much mis-information about a topic that was not even fully revealed. It'd most likely make me alert that the game is imbalanced by the amount of topics with so many so called "concerns" about that one mechanic which will be hard to be affiliated with in the first place.

I see it as an over-reaction

You're definitely correct. But most, if not all new people coming to forums with half the information because they dont keep up with dev blogs overreact to things they've 'heard of' but dont know the whole story. Giving talents to a random 5% of the population sounds like a horrible strategy for keeping a playerbase happy if thats the only information you give out. You need the whole story to conclude that its actually a great idea for this game.

We cant expect every single person coming in here to know the full story, because people immediately go to a forum, or even reddit and ask without even spending 5 minutes to google the situation. The first reaction these days is to ask and hope someone else just tells you, because people cant be bothered looking for it themselves. This leads to extremely bad mis-information cases, but the best we can do is to be calm and tell them whats right, or why they are wrong or even educate them about how easy it is for them to find such things.

Just forget that talents will be a feature of this game and then you can be shocked or pleasantly surprised when they do pop up. If they pop up around you. Or perhaps you'll hear gossip from NPCs.

At the end of the day it could be just as fun chasing the talented as it could be being the ones with talents.

Posted By Darknesse at 10:03 AM - Tue Aug 02 2016

I see it as an over-reaction

You're definitely correct. But most, if not all new people coming to forums with half the information because they dont keep up with dev blogs overreact to things they've 'heard of' but dont know the whole story. Giving talents to a random 5% of the population sounds like a horrible strategy for keeping a playerbase happy if thats the only information you give out. You need the whole story to conclude that its actually a great idea for this game.

We cant expect every single person coming in here to know the full story, because people immediately go to a forum, or even reddit and ask without even spending 5 minutes to google the situation. The first reaction these days is to ask and hope someone else just tells you, because people cant be bothered looking for it themselves. This leads to extremely bad mis-information cases, but the best we can do is to be calm and tell them whats right, or why they are wrong or even educate them about how easy it is for them to find such things.

Well I will not disagree with you on this part since you're correct :P Call it an over-reaction of my own haha

Yeah, its all good. I hate this new breed of lazy uneducated people that dont know how to look for the information they need (no offence Aqeuous, you're not what i mean. Keep with the ideas, you'll come up with something good). But we cant just get angry at them, because we'll sit here angry all day every day till release day in over a year.

Just gotta spread the knowledge, and be exited together.

There are a lot of differing ideas of how talents are actually going to be in the game and how it will actually turn out could change often since the game is still 1-2 years before release.

That number 5% seems really small to most people. If you were playing a game of Russian Roulette and had a 5% chance of surviving you wouldn't take those odds. But in a game with, hopefully, 100k people on a server 5% becomes 5000 people with hidden powers waiting to be unlocked by some event. We don't know how difficult it really will be to unlock the talents since it could be anything from finding an artifact, dying a certain way, or killing a special beast.

Let's say, for hypothetical reasons, that around 10% of those 5000 people unlock them. It could turn out more than 10% are able to, but if only 10% are able to that's still 500 people in the world with powers. That's not a small number. Around 1 out of every 20 people(5% of population) will have a hidden talent and if only 10% unlock them that's 1 out of every 200 people could potentially have a special power.

In every major city with 200+ people it would be safe to assume that someone there is a talent user. That could change if a city becomes a hot spot where many talent users migrate to. Then there is the possibility that more than 10% of people with hidden talents unlock them. It would be very possible for all the talent users of the world to unite and become an order of wizards or something. This could lead to amazing stories.

Sorry that seemed so off topic about body bound talents. But as you can see there will be enough people with magic as rare as it seems. If those people were to have those powers for multiple lives the world would likely get overran with magic or no one else would get to experience magic except those same people over and over. Body bound talents is the best option I see as it won't be as rare as you all think so over a decade of playing the game it's very possible for you to at least be born with a hidden talent to unlock.

You make some good points @Aqueous

However, I think the fact talents are body-bound is meant to encourage you to explore them. Make the most of them in the time you have them. If people know they have that talent (in some form) for the next ten years, they won't be nearly as proactive with it as someone who knows their time is limited.

I feel like - by having the talents bound the way they are - it encourages us to play our character to the fullest potential, rather than plotting what we can do with our next incarnation.

I think the issue here is you are looking at Talents as character progression. This is not what they are intended to be and as such do not met the goals you are looking for.

Talents are about progressing the story of the world, not the individual. Imagine being able to recover the one relic that can save Mann-kind because you are the only person able to access the flooded temple it is housed in because you can breathe underwater. Now imagine, taking that relic and using it for other purposes instead! It is about the story of the world and the fact you get to be such a fundamental part of that (for good or for ill) is what makes talents so worth pursuing.

The benefit of having them on a character rather than on a soul really works towards the goal of them being story drivers.

• Gives more people the chance of having talents without decreasing the rarity of them.

• Means that if you find out you have a talent you are more encouraged to use it as otherwise you will lose your chance. With a soul bound system you can always choose not to bother this life and focus on other things.

• Increases the amount of different stories. Otherwise you are always having the same people driving the story and that doesn’t allow for as much variety.

I think as long as you view talents for what they are, story elements, the proposed system of character talents makes the most sense.