Illarion.org

I was thinking, on creation the creation of a character, it would be nice if we could select which armor skills we get at the start and which weapon skills we get. The same could be true for other packages.

Currently:

Hunter receives: cooking/baking, medium armor, ranged weapons.
Farmer: farming, mining, woodcutting
Knight: heavy armor, parry, slashing weapons
Rogue: light armor, ranged weapons, stabbing weapons
Druid: Alchemy, herblore, tailoring
Crafter: carpentry, glassblowing, smithing

As you can see, some of these may be fairly useless for many characters. A waist of a precious gift. A farmer has all this food and no skills to cook it, but has skills to mine? A hunter may have no interest in baking, but could need or desire mining. Shouldn’t carpentry and woodcutting go hand-in-hand? Mining and smithing?

I would suggest to work up packages. Determine what types of packages each type gets. So there are crafting type skills, weapons packages and armor packages. I would like to see drop down boxes listing the different options available. Once one option is selected, it is no longer available in the next box and so forth.

Hunter for instance, would need a craft, armor, and weapon package options.
Farmer/Crafter would need the option for three different gathering or crafting skills.

I could or work up all the options, but I think we all know what they are.

Just a detail: There is no "farmer" package, I assume you mean the "worker" package. For the hunter, cooking is quite handy to process the pork/meat of animals. Nevertheless, I second some more freedom in character creation. This can be considered once the character creation moves to the client. The more concrete your suggestion, the more likely it will get implemented. With the current packages, we just can switch skills.

How about keeping certain "classes" such as "hunter" listed during character creation as presets, once it arrives to the client rather than in the webpage, though allowing the option to create a custom class? By this I mean you yourself could freely choose 3 different skills to start with (as it appears 3 is the set number of skills for the preset classes).

Please keep this open, I am working at refining the proposal.

What about an option for "make your own class" that, when selected, pops up a set of three drop down lists: one primary skill and two secondary skills.

Figuring out how to deal with items would be much more difficult. Perhaps a field of checkmark boxes with instructions to "pick 5" or something linked with the value of the items chosen? I really don't know. The skills are more important than the items anyway.

EnderDDT, thinking so far outside the box, we might as well not have a box! Loving it!

The thing we have to be careful of is making sure there is no way someone can double or triple up skill points, dumping all offered skill points into one thing. Assuming we can implement a user driven selection of some kind.

Have the dropdown menus come up one at a time, populating the second and third skill's menus with the options that wern't picked before. Certain skills would probably need to not be options (such as magic skills and priests and alchemists, etc.) and picking certain skills might black out more than just the one skill itself (depending on how abusive it seems it might be to combine certain sets of skills, though that might not be necessary with the only 5-10 points you get), but otherwise they can pick as they like.

That said, I think the presets do still have their place. They give new players a place to start, let them know what stuff goes together, and generally helps keep people from being overwhelmed with too much too quickly.