New Skill Point assignments - What to Master first

Wanted to post this here as a placeholder. I'll probably put a guide up if things go well and they get finalized for live.

DLC10 and GU36 bring some major changes to skill points in addition to Weapon Mastery. Some abilities have been changed, some abilities have been shifted, some have been combined, and some have been dropped all together.

Here are the major changes:

• There are no longer any +20 Might, +10 Precision, or +15 Restoration bonuses in the first tier of innates. (Shield still has Restoration but this should be fixed.) These have been shifted around for a roughly equal distribution of Critical Attack/Heal Chance/Damage innates.
• Cunning/Critical Power Heal has been removed. Instead you can gain +1 to your critical power heal by spending 3 points in 3 different first tier innates: +5 Vitalization, +7 Dominance, and a new innate which gives +12 power.

Now that Weapon Mastery has been introduced, it's going to take an ungodly amount of Skill Points to max out everything you want for your role - upwards of 230. So instead, we're going to see specialized builds again.
There are four new innates that you can put 3 skill points into once you spend 21 points in a tree (the normal 20 + Weapon Mastery. Those innates are:

• +30 Restoration
• +8 Vitalization and +25 Power
• +50 Health and +7 Dominance
• +25 Might and +25 Precision

So you'll need 24 Skill Points to unlock Weapon Mastery and max out one of these new four innates. The only roles that may want to max out two of these new innates would be fire and ice tanks which may want to take both the Restoration and Health/Dom innates, in which case you'd need 27 SP.
The trick is going to be finding a balance between trying to master a tree to get down to these new innates, or spend the SP around the other trees. With DPS it's pretty clear cut now that they've removed the +20 might innates, but it's a little more blurred for the other roles.
I'm listing each role here and what order to max out Weapon Mastery to get the most out of your role. These will give you the biggest stat increases for the least SP. I'll also put how much of a boost in that stat you get when mastered.

Healer
All weapon trees now have either a Critical Healing Magnitude or a Critical Healing Chance boost (Shield is bugged to still show the old +15 Restoration bonuses) so you may decide to sacrifice some of these innates to increase your restoration, especially if you run with a group shield.

Weapons with Restoration in the Second Tier (+132 restoration)

• Bow
• Brawling
• Hand Blasters
• One Handed
• Rifle
• Staff
• Two Handed

Weapons with no Restoration in the Second Tier (+90 restoration)

• Dual Pistols
• Dual Wield
• Martial Arts
• Shield

Tanking
This maxes out both Health and Dominance. This definitely applies to fire tanks but could also apply to rage and earth as well, although there's more wiggle room for damage as a rage tank.

Weapons with Dominance and Health in the First Tier (+192 health, +42 dominance, +42 restoration - these also have restoration in the second tier)

• Brawling
• Hand Blaster

Weapons with Dominance in the First Tier and Health in the Second (+192 health, +42 dominance)

• Staff (also includes +42 restoration in second tier)
• Dual Wield

Weapons with Health in the First Tier and Dominance in the Second (+195 health, +33 dominance)

• One Handed
• Rifle
• Shield
• Two Handed

Weapons with Health in the Second Tier (+192 Health)

• Bow
• Dual Pistols
• Martial Arts

Ice Tanking
This deserves its own section because Restoration was dropped from the first tier of innates and the second tier of dominance does not contribute as much to your shield strength as the second tier of restoration. When you get to your third tier of innates, you will want to get the +30 Restoration innates instead of the +7 Dominance/+50 Health ones - unless you don't have enough SP to master another tree. In that case get those innates as well. This is why the following does not list the bonuses from the third tier of innates.

Weapons with Dominance and Health in the First Tier and Restoration in the Second (+21 dominance, +45 health, +42 restoration)

• Brawling
• Hand Blasters

Weapons with Dominance in the First Tier and Restoration in the Second (+21 dominance, +42 restoration)

• Staff

*The following three categories are interchangeable as they will either give you 42 restoration or 42 dominance in tank role before the last tier of innates. I would personally max out the first category over the others as the added health will increase your survivability

Weapons with Health in the First Tier and Restoration in the Second (+45 health, +42 restoration)

• One Handed
• Rifle
• Two Handed

Weapons with Dominance in the First Tier (+21 dominance)

• Dual Wield

Weapons with Restoration in the Second Tier (+42 restoration)

• Bow

Useless weapons

• Martial Arts

Troller
Every tree now has a +1 power critical heal bonus as mentioned earlier. You may decide to give some of these up depending on how much vitalization you want to go for. The following maxes out vitalization.

Weapons with Vitalization in the First Tier and Dominance in the Second (+39 vitalization, +12 dominance, +75 power)

• Two Handed
• Rifle
• One Handed
• Dual Pistols

Weapons with Vitalization in the Second Tier (+36 vitalization, +75 power)

• Brawling
• Dual Wield
• Hand Blaster
• Martial Arts
• Shield

Weapons with no vitalization or dominance in either tier (+24 vitalization, +75 power)

• Bow
• Staff

DPS
There are no longer +Might and +Precision in the initial tier of innates, so there's no "max this out first" unless you're trying to stack precision or might with a specific critical modifier.

Weapons with +30 Might and increased Critical Attack Chance (+105 might, +75 precision)

• Two Handed

Weapons with +30 Might and increased Critical Attack Damage (+105 might, +75 precision)

• Brawling
• Dual Wield
• Martial Arts
• One Handed
• Shield

Weapons with +18 Precision and increased Critical Attack Chance (+75 might, +93 precision)

• Staff
• Bow
• Hand Blaster
• Rifle

Weapons with +18 Precision and increased Critical Attack Damage (+75 might, +93 precision)

• Dual Pistols

I hope this helps you all start to plan out your SP!

A brilliant, clear and concise write up as always Kris!

Thanks

Dude thx for the write up! So difficult to get all the new information all in one place like this to sort of take it all in at once, i really appreciate you guide writers who take the time to do this for everyone else.

I just saw so much misinformation on the forums and on the test server about it, so I wanted to gather all the info here. People are actually going to have to think about what they spec into again

Return of the OP 1hander, t6 is looking more and more like t4 every update.

This is awesome, so you can max out 7 with only 168 skill points. I see my might increasing by 705 and precision increasing by 543. The might vs precision is still unbalanced in terms of a might based damage power set vs HL/CL/Rage (hope devs listen to the new thread in the testing).

I currently have 182 skill points so there is 14 left over to spend and 4 new points once all of DLC10 is completed.

Will have to go over the restoration. Hoping Rest at least breaks 5800s or something.

This thread is.....

I feel the exact same way! I was so pumped when I saw how it looked. It was like learning the game all over again. ^.^

Thanks for compiling this information, Kris! I have bookmarked this for use when WM hits live.

One of our leaders pointed me in the direction of this thread. It's funny, ever since we saw the changes to the weapon trees, we started wondering if it would pay off to somewhat ignore the original innates we have right now on live and, a couple of tests later, the answer was ABSOLUTELY.

I came up with a couple of guides, one for each role, except (so far) for tanking because, as you said, there are fine tunings that should be done to different tanks and I still didn't have the time to look into it. The first one was DPS and it kinda made the guides for other roles unnecessary. Hope you don't mind me sharing it here...

Step 1: Unlock whatever movement innates you want!

Step 1.1: Get all 4 basic weapon combos that bear stats and the 3 DPS innates from the first row (picture 1). This must be done in all weapons.



Step 2: Unlock your favourite combos on your favourite weapon. Whatever you want and/or use frequently. You can save SP or unlock all combos, up to personal choice.

Step 3: Find the weapons that have the most relevant stat for your Power set, Might or Precision (Precision is key for Light, Celestial and Rage, everything else sucks up Might). The trick here is to use as little points as you can to activate WM (20+1 for the actual mastery) and get to the last row of innates. So after getting the Might+Precision innates, aim for Power innates and/or defensive innates. (pictures 2 and 3).



Remember, the first row always holds more for your SP; if you can get Power innates from the first row, go for that (picture 3).



Step 4: Unlock the 3 DPS innates from the last row (picture 4).




Step 5: Repeat until you run out of SP. Notice I did not waste any points in WM combos. The aim here is to save as many SP possible, but, again, up to personal choice.

Final note: If you do not want to use Weapon Mastery on your weapon of choice (I’m thinking of using Hand Blasters, but I might not want WM with it) skip that weapon on step 3 and 4.

Basically, for the other roles, the changes are obvious, instead of getting the DPS innates in the first row, get the ones that actually matter for what you are doing. BUT, on step 3, I'd say any role could/should pick up the DPS innates in the first row to reach the 20 needed for WM. The last row will still give the best stats for your SP and support roles may end up doing more damage and help in the burn...

Any comments are appreciated, this was done at 3am...

lol shouldn't this be posted in Oracle’s Database (Guides)? but thx none the less. will help me tech all the noobs.

AWWWWWWWWWWSSSSSSSSSSSOOOOMMMMMMMMMEEE! You saved me time! Your post is....

One of the reasons I wanted to lay out the different weapons that I didn't include in the OP was to make it easy for people to see what weapons benefit your role the most so you can decide what weapon mastery combos to use, if any. You have to have both the weapon that you use and the weapon that has the combo both mastered in order to use it.

For example, if you like using Brawling as an ice tank, you have a choice to either use weapon mastery with Martial Arts or Two Handed. From the list, you can see that Two Handed is one of the strongest weapons for an ice tank while Martial Arts is the worst.

I personally use Staff as a fire tank, which combos with both 1H and Rifle, so I have the Cleave combo enabled.

thank you kristyana

I'll write a more indepth one covering combos. This is just a placeholder

The reason being is there's a huge discussion right now going over what the bonuses will be for support roles when using a WM combo. Right now for Tanks and Trollers there's a percentage-based dominance buff. Spytle says this is going to be changed over to a power cost reduction but the latest build on test after this announcement doesn't include this change.

I don't want to sit down and do all that work to figure out each precise buff per role for all 44 WM combos before we get confirmation as what's actually happening with the bonuses.

Maybe for a day. People will figure it out and post it and the masses will just copy it.

With T6 gear and Resto 5 Exp mods, my resto was 6050+ with 172 SP.

Now that what I like to hear. I like being a damage healer though with Rest/Precision, so I cant wait to try it out with WM.

Thanks for the post.