Perfect World and Echtra Games are continuing efforts on Torchlight Frontiers’ alpha, announcing this week that the next big patch is coming to testers a week from today on May 21st. At the heart of the update are multiple changes to skills and leveling in the game.
“The impetus comes straight out of player feedback: skill progression was unclear and the pacing felt off,” Echtra explains. “We took a step back and asked ourselves what principles we’d use to guide us during a revamp.” Those principles are pacing, planning, and scalability. Under the new system,
“Players now earn one Skill Point for every Frontier Level they gain up to a maximum of 100. These points are invested on two unique skill paths for each class: Brawl/Barrage for Forged, Dark/Light for Dusk Mage, and Lineage/Conductor for Railmaster. Skills on each path are divided among tiers. You’ll need to invest points in previous skills and tiers, as indicated by the tool tip, before you gain access to later tiers. You can invest a maximum of 12 points in each skill; in some cases, the point investment also synergistically boosts other aspects of your class’s strengths.”
PWE and Echtra also explain that a character’s skill progression will be directly linked to level, and to make all that flow properly, the studios have doubled experience gain for chests and bosses, plus rebalanced all of the level ranges in the game’s current zones. “Once the system is in players’ hands, we’ll roll their evaluations and assessments into the next wave of iteration and improvement,” they write.
Update 6: Adept's Path, which includes a new skill progression system and leveling changes, arrives May 21!https://t.co/v8gvYbGWLC
— Play Torchlight (@PlayTorchlight) May 14, 2019
