R5 is at E3 this week so I'll be posting his comlink today. Today's comlink is about the upcoming Expertise System.
The intent of the Expertise System is to allow players to differentiate themselves from others within their profession. Expertise can impact a wide variety of properties of a character. They can grant new commands, abilities or schematics, improve existing abilities and actions or increase overall performance in a given area.
In most cases, a specific expertise can be increased successively by spending multiple points in the same expertise "box", with each point spent granting an additional bonus to the properties that a particular expertise effects. Every "click" or "purchase" in the expertise interface will cost you one Expertise point. You will begin to accrue Expertise points to spend at level 10. At level 10 you will start out with 5 Expertise points to spend which will put you well on your way to customizing your character in the manner of your choosing. After level 10 you will receive 1 expertise point every other level.
The combat classes will initially have two seperate trees available to them - one “Path” and one “General” tree. This is slightly different from the original plan where we were going to have three trees per profession. At this point we feel it may be better to do the GCW trees closer to when the GCW content will come online. As a result, it looks like we might be able to publish as many as 4 professions worth of trees per publish, with the GCW trees coming online after the initial batches are complete. This is just a projection and is subject to change, of course.
The Path tree deals with very class specific differentiation, such as a Dark Path and a Light Path for Jedi while the “General Tree” will include abilities such as weapon specialization bonuses that are more generic in nature. As mentioned above, after all of the Combat classes have received their Expertise upgrades, a third tree dealing specifically with the Galactic Civil War and PvP conflict will be rolled out and made available to all classes.
Once the combat classes are complete, we will move on to the address the non-combat classes (Entertainer & Trader).
You will be able to respec your Expertise at any time by visiting a Profession Counselor and paying the requisite fee. Freebie Expertise respecs may be offered from time to time in situation where new trees are added or if a profession’s Expertise undergo any major changes.
Each individual tree offers choices in Expertise that are divided into tiers. A number of points must be spent in the previous tier before you are able to purchase Expertise in the next tier. The relative power of the Expertise in a given tier increase as you advance through the tree with the most potent of abilities in the final tier.
Awesome news about potentially doing 4 professions at once for the Expertise System. I have some questions, of course..
1. The new Smuggling system, is that part of the Expertise system you mentiom above, or a seperate system?
1a. If part of the ES, is it part of the Profession tree, or the GCW tree rolling out later?
2. Will we have a period of time when the system first rolls out for a profession to respec the Expertise Points for free while we get a feel for what things do what, and help you find balance issues (i.e. uber 733t FOTM FTW kinda stuff)? Nothing like a Live Server population to find the really weird and unexpected.
Message Edited by Darth_Spike on 05-12-200604:24 PM
The expertise system sounds pretty good. One question though. You say trader and entertainer is being done after combat classes. Is that because you guys have yet to decide if they'll become part of the combat classes' expertise trees?
Hope you give us a few chances to change our expertise tree's for free. It would be unfair to make us choose right then and there and not have a chance to see if it's going to be to each persons likeing. Even just one free change would be good IMO.
JohnnyBravoRPD wrote:
Hope you give us a few chances to change our expertise tree's for free. It would be unfair to make us choose right then and there and not have a chance to see if it's going to be to each persons likeing. Even just one free change would be good IMO.
Helios has stated this before, the expertise will be changable with an NPC trainer and a fee.
So basically like pre-nge, just without being able to "dip" into other professions.
Mandalore of KE [ M I M I C ] ).-=||=\===R===/=||=-.( [ A C H Y U T A ] Cloned Wookinator of KE _________________________________________________ -K A M I N O E N F O R C E R S-