LotRO’s skills were consistently underwhelming. I level from 5 to 6, I want a new shiny thing to do; something that changes the way I play — not some sort of passive that adds 1% to some chance I probably should care about but don’t. I know in the back of my mind that it scales, and forty levels from now will serve to distinguish me from other classes, but like I said, I just don’t care. It’s 1%. In my head, 1% is small, no matter how large it is at the logical conclusion of the multiplication problem.

Warhammer gives me the same feeling. I look through the skill list at my trainer, and I see my level 40 skill, and I see that it does maybe 120% of the damage of my level 1 skill. Again, I understand that it’s because it’s showing me how the level 40 skill would work if I had it now, but it just makes it seem weak. It doesn’t feel like it’ll be any more fun to kick monsters’ asses with that spell.

Plus, if you’re not worried about deprecating old skills, you can add a lot more flavor and variety to the skills you hand out. Who cares if it’s just a reskinned fireball, it’s GREEN! That RULES!

These are all based on my impressions as a casual player rather than hardcore math, which I understand is not the approach that everybody takes. Even from a “does this make optimal gameplay more or less interesting” perspective, though, I feel like getting a boost to one of your attack skills every few levels means that a given ability isn’t ALWAYS the right thing to do against a given type of monster. You have to reevaluate for mana efficiency vs. damage, or whatever, in a way that constantly scaling abilities would never prompt you to do. Sure, maybe there’s only one right answer at any given level, but at least the answer is different from level to level.

I kind of think of a game in terms of its “effective levels”. ie after a level-up I stop and say – do I have a new shiny to play with? Does my character feel any different? If not, sorry bub, that wasn’t a real level, your game just earned grind factor +1.

Speaking solely from a developer point of view (I put on my very dusty wizard robe and hat…), not having to come up with a new name for Fireball 2.0 – see Everquest 1 for an almost entertaining plethora of bizarre names – really makes life a lot easier.

I’d love to see this taken to its logical conclusion and have MMOs stop inserting needless levels.

Each level should give one ability, possibly also give a spec point. Once you’ve learned all of your abilities, you know how to play your class right? WTF is up with going through numerous levels with no main abilities to train?!?