As it was alerady pointed out in different thread the Weaponskill progression level were as follows:
Unskilled, Basic, Skilled, Experienced, Refined, Ace, Adept, Expert, Specialist, Master, Grandmaster
Now I don’t believe we had any limitation in getting Grandmaster in all weapons, which I kinda found odd. I don’t think you should be allowed to go Grandmaster in more than 1 and rest let’s say up Ace? Once you are grandmaster with one, and start to use extensively another weapon type and level it beyond Ace, you lose level in your top one as you are natturaly not practicing that weapon but focusing on another.
How you fight with rapire and 2 handed battle axe are two completely different things.
Same similar might be applied for Mages. Specialists in Water should not be able to fully master Fire, eart vs water. So a mage could successfully pick Water and Air spells and wreck havok with them. However his fire and earth magic while still would cause some serious damage, would not be subject of any bonus increases/benefits or perhaps being unbale to learn certain high level spells as they require “Master” skill. (not completely sure this would be practical though, especialy with very small player base)
Well…the only class something like that would really hurt is Fighter. The rest of the classes don’t really rely that heavily on skill. Its bad enough you could lose weaponskill from deaths (which I hope is not included in this remake because losing Grandmaster off a death is pretty much what made me suicide my char in the first place cuz that is ALOT of work down the toilet) but losing skill from nonuse is just an antifun game mechanic. And besides its not like you forget how to do something if you master it, its going to be ingrained in your muscle memory, like the classic phrase “its like riding a bike”
Also I am pretty sure the other classes skill stops at Master, only Fighters can get Grandmaster.
I think just in general, any mechanic that is severely antifun should not make it into the game. Especially if we want to try to recruit some new players.
Although I’m 100% sure getting the basics working is going to happen before skills refinement, I’d like to see unarmed skill levels. Monks could be the only ones to advance beyond a certain level maybe? And it should take longer than the normal weapons to upgrade. (fond memories of Final Fantasy 1’s black belt/monk and how much cooler it was to be unarmed).
Of course, there could also be other hand-weapons like brass knuckles and different varieties of claws.
Actually I had an idea for skills this morning that could make them more relevant for all classes.
Fighters could wield weapons a tier higher than other classes as just a baseline fighter mechanic. What if you leave that, but also add in additional weapon tiers that allow you to wield a weapon higher than your tier. I don’t know if you would want to start it low, maybe at Experienced and do it every 3 tiers, so you could do at Experienced, Adept, and Master. So potentially a nonfighter class who had high weaponskill could eventually wield a weapon 3 tiers higher, and fighters could wield them 4, 3 from weaponskill and 1 baseline.
That would give the other classes a lil more incentive to work on weaponskill.
For unarmed for monk, each of those weaponskill levels could provide a sufficient damage bonus to compensate for not using weapons.
I know Arcadia was talking about not liking the huge damage numbers from the old system of critical strikes, where the damage was about 10x’s your base damage. (Honestly I loved seeing the huge numbers) I think I would be pretty cool taking the damage down to say 4x’s your base damage. That way you can leave in Double Damage, and critical strikes would still do considerably more than a double damage. Then at that point you can also up the percentage that criticals occur. You would still probably want to leave lethal blows for fighters on a low chance to occur, you probably never want lethal chance above 1%.