To put it mildly, several skills on the Arc Raiders raider skill tree seem better than others. To put it less mildly, as I said to design lead Virgil Watkins in a recent interview, player testing has found that several skills have an indiscernible impact on gameplay. Fortunately, Watkins says Embark is "not deaf" to the sorry state of these unlovable skills, and buffs are "100% on our radar." (Here are our picks for the best skills in Arc Raiders.)
"I think even internally, we know," he says. "There's certain skills I don't choose. So yeah, 100%. I'm not going to pretend there aren't some on there that need some work. That'll be something that changes again. I won't say when or in what nature, but we're not deaf to the state of it."
The irony here is that Embark can't make all of the skills, collectively, too good partly due to the way Expeditions work. Completing an Expedition and soft-wiping your character awards you with up to five extra skill points to use in future cycles – at least for now, until this point reward eventually caps out. This brings compounding benefits over time, and runs the risk of veteran Expedition runners developing a growing advantage over less experienced players.
By similar logic, Embark doesn't want level 75 players to absolutely decimate newcomers. This is, presumably, why we don't have skills for things like max health or gun damage – those should be untouched constants. (The closest thing to this is maybe extra stamina, which I think everyone should get.) Putting in the time and effort to get more skills should get you a reward and gameplay benefits, but Watkins suggests Embark wants to be careful about letting that reward and that advantage become too big.
"That is the danger there, and that's why skill points come right up to that line of, 'Do I have a clear advantage over another player?'" he says. "So we'd have to be quite deliberate. The current intent is skill points will not be the reward forever with Expeditions, it will cap out at some point to whatever kind of makes sense. The intent is, if you've done enough Expeditions to have, say, the full amount of extra skill points available to you, you've got maybe a couple of slight quality-of-life changes, like, I can have that little extra stamina and still do Security Breach and maybe move quieter, or whatever the constellation of those points you've allocated is. But it shouldn't be like you've maxed out two branches of the skill tree entirely and then not have it matter for the rest."
I asked Watkins about any specific skills that might be in Embark's sights for potential buffs, or skills he avoids himself. My mind went to two places: movement skills which seem to have extremely negligible impacts on your speed or stamina, and melee skills which do literally nothing when you aren't actively hitting something with a hammer, which is going to be most of the game when most enemies either fly or can instantly deep fry you if you get within hammer range. His mind goes to the latter category.
"Speaking for myself, maybe someone out there will disagree, but the ones that are centered around melee hits on certain things, like taking [Arc] out in one shot and stuff like that. If I recall, back when we were starting to build a skill tree, the way the melee system was then and the way certain things would play out, that was a little more practical. But then once you see how people are actually engaging with the game, and the distances at which they prefer to take on stuff, those kind of fell by the wayside a little bit.
"There's other ones, of course, we can just look at adjusting. Like some of the ones that, even if you invest the full five skill points in them, still don't have a very clear impact on how you actually play moment to moment. Yeah, we can see about what we do with those."
