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What if we could focus on more than 1 skill at a time?Max skill level is 9 atm. What if we could focus on 2 skills, but 1 skill could be only lvl 5, and the other lvl 4? Or focus on 3 skills, but their sum level is also 9?

This aproach would have it's benefits. For example, we have a (more or less) useful skill "Poison Reistance", but nobody uses it, because you can only focus on 1 skill, and it would be a "waste". But what if you can have raging lvl 7, and poison resistance lvl2?

The game could have few "passive" skills, for example Magic Defense skill, Critical Damage defense skill, etc. Currently having these skills wouldn't make sense, because who would use a "defensive" skill and give up attacking bonus of Astral Soul or Raging skills? But if players could balance their skills, it could improve gameplay.

What do you think?

Great idea, I think the numbers would need redoing however.

I was thinking on this matter a while ago too, but my idea seemed to me overcomplicated (or requiring too much work to implement it) so I abandoned tinkering with it. But I'll share some on my conclusions, since the topic is on.

First, leveling focusable skills (raging, speed, mallards etc.) would work like now (job exp and stuff).

Second, we need more levels of focusing skill itself. Getting new levels can be done as a simple quest/ additional option in Luca's dialogues, available after requirements are satisfied: ^{* value is trumped up, it has to be big and quite challenging}

Levels 1 and 2 allow you to select only 1 focusable skill (like now),
levels 3 - 5 allow 2 focusable skills to be selected,
levels 6 - 9 — 3 focusable skills and
level 10 — 4 skills.

For the current set of focusable skills, its just like in Trav's idea.
Level of focusing skill determines, how strong can you be focused on focusable skills in sum. It can be straightforward N-th level -> N points to distribute, no more on particular focusable skill than this skill's level.
In example if you have focusing skill at level 8, raging skill lvl 7 and speed skill lvl 4, you can put 7 points on raging and 1 point on speed (and speed skill will work like on current lvl1 only).

Dementia potion would reset distribution of "focusing points".

Not bad, but it would only make sense if the skill power rose linearly with the skill level. If it stays quadratically as it is now, putting all 9 points into a single skill would remain the best option.

Great idea, this would highly increase the variety of different builds. It also would keep the possibility to use the builds as it is common now.
I also dont think skill power should rise linear as Sykinia proposed, but quadratically seems too much too. I played around a little and think functions like x^1,25 to x^1,5 give reasonable values. You will pay off for using more than one skill (as it should be), but not that much so it makes no sense.

Hope this can be realized, feels like putting some more complexity to the char creation but I think it wont be too complicated for noob as its supposed to begin with only 1 skill until lvl50 or so (The table from Barbarabatiri is not bad I think, also the prices seem reasonable).