A new skill point? No! Dont make me decide!!
There are plenty of phobias out there so I doubt anyone will mind if I add one; fear of new skill points. How do I know of this you ask, well it’s because I am the very first acknowledged victim. A new skill point is revealed and I am completely paralyzed, unable to continue playing, unable to decide what skill to spend said point on.
This affliction is particularly acute when I am confronted with a skill choice that excludes other skills. What if I like the other skill better, or my character is permanently damaged because I misspent this one skill point. Ah, the agony of indecision.
My solution has become complete and utter avoidance. This is often reinforced by the fact that my ability to play the game and succeed doesn’t seem to be diminished in the least by my not spending the points. I was playing just fine before that skill point showed up. Why not just continue playing and hope that sometime in the future a burst of inspiration will help me spend those skill points wisely.
The first time I remember this dilemma rearing its ugly head was in Diablo 2. Oooh those skill trees gave me headaches. Avoidance became the way, the fallout from which was the accumulation of a very nice stash of saved up skill points. This in turn allowed me to skip wasting points in the lower tier of the skill trees and spend all my points on the higher level skills that I really wanted anyway. Instant level ten Blizzard!
Suddenly my problem had credence – all of my avoiding I could now call strategy. The next step became testing how far I could level a character without spending any points. Quite far it turns out.
My most recent bout has shown up in World of Warcraft – the dreaded picking of talents. The developers seem to really have it out for me on this one, because every time I manage to pick a talent set, they reset all of the talents. Meaning they give me all my talent points back and I have to start all over. It does take me forever to decide, but seeing as how it has happened a few times now I claim is more than paranoia. Half of my characters are still talentless due to this trauma.
So to all developers out there, take pity on my talent less characters and paralyzing indecision. Why make me decide? Would it really be so bad if I could obtain all of the talents or skills?
Tags: rants, roleplaying, skills, strategy
