There's been a lot of discussion back and forth about Sklill Points and how they matter (or don't matter) for character progression. Many unrealistic and unreasonable expectations have been bandied about and passed off as almost word-of-god styles facts, leading many newer players to become lost in a sea of contrary misinformation and despairing that their characters can ever hope to achieve a level of competence and mastery over their chosen roles. It's my hope and purpose here to reassure incoming players that you don't need to have 140 SP to play competitively. It's my intent to explain in as concise and honest a manner, that most of the higher-end content can be effectively played even as early as reaching 50-60 SP. This Guide is meant for the newcomer and novice who wants to understand how best to achieve their support class role on the minimum benchmark budget of Skill points possible as you are leveling up from the Under-Level 30 Tier 0 range to the early Tier I & II, and finally Tier III and higher. Some things that I will be assuming in terms of nomenclature that you should understand in this discussion: SP= (Skill Points) SP Tier ( 1 &2)= The lowest two rows of Skill Points in each Weapon Skill Tree. SP Tier 1 refers to the first achieved of the bottom row innates, in the fifth row of the weapon tree. These usually have the highest value of return on investment upon unlocking. The sixth row, SP Tier 2, unlocks anytime after unlocking the fifth row and is a recent addition to the game. These SP Tier 2 innates are generally useful for specialization in a given role, but do not offer as great a return on investment as the SP Tier 1 Innates. You should already know and understand that SP are gained by unlocking Feats in the course of leveling up and completing accomplishments as you continue to progress in the game after reaching Level 30. Each feat is worth either 10, 25, or 50 points, and is recorded in a progress bar in the Feats Tab of your character records. Every collected 100 points worth of feats grants an additional SP that you can spend in the Skills Tab. I will only be covering the Support Roles of Healer, Tank, and Controller. The variations of DPS builds I feel are too far beyond the scope of this guide, and given the preponderance of DPS players and shortages of effective and knowledgeable support role-players, I feel that what I cover here will be of more use to the community at large, particularly for new incoming players who are discovering the game at the launch of the PS4. Obviously there will be room for individual choices differing in progression, but since I am covering only the most vital areas of investment for the three roles, the range for deviation here is limited. The best results in terms of role performance will be in following the basic breakdowns in the priority order presented by my explanations *******************************************Controllers********************************************** I'm going to begin with the Controller Role. Let's take a look at what the possible gains are from the all the Weapon Trees' SP Innates at both SP Tier 1 and 2. Controller First Tier Cunning 3 (7) Cunning 3 (7) Cunning 3 (7) Vit 15 (7) Vit 15 (7) Vit 15 (7) Vit 15 (7) First Tier Crit Gain: 9% First Tier Vit Gain: 60 Vit First Tier Investiture: 49-1= 48 SP Controller Secondary Tier Vit 12 (7) Vit 12 (11) Vit 12 (10) Vit 12 (11) Vit 12 (7) Secondary Tier Vit Gain: 60 Vit Secondary Tier: 46 SP Total Crit Gain: 9% Total Vit Gain: 120 Vit Total Investiture: 95 SP Now let's take a look at the Vit Charts to see what that difference of first tier and second tier Vit investments actually accounts for: As you can see, once you've maxed your first tier Vit Innates, the difference in your Base Power-Out ranges from between 4-5 per tick. At 5 ticks per 25 seconds, we can see this is a relatively minor amount of power, corresponding to 20-25 power, not even 1/6th of the power required for even the most basic power usage. If we presume complete mastery over the entire Vit Innates at both SP tiers, we can see that the resulting Base Power Out is around 8 per tick, for a vast difference of 3-4 gained. Again doing the math, we can derive that the power out per use of POT is 40, not an incredibly high amount. What does make the difference is of course the crits. The +9% in conjunction with affinity and specialization bonuses can result in an overall increase of between 15-18% in critical power frequency, which IS a worthwhile investment. So when we look at the breakdown here of investiture versus returns, what we see is the first tier innates are the most important and provide the best return possible. A canny Controller will select the critical innates first, by taking all the possible Cunning innates selections in all available trees. Once the critical innates are maximized, the next logical selections are the Vit innates. To max out the Cunning (Critical Innates) only requires 21 SP. To max out the above plus the first tier Vit innates only requires 48 SP. The average fresh level 30 enters CR Tier 1 content at around 35-45 SP. On the highest-rate fast-track, they will through gear/styles alone, earn an additional 10 SP on average, giving us the commonly-complained about T5 'newb' character with between 45-55 SP, a number that has almost everything needed to achieve the most return out of available SP at the first skill tier. Even if you look at grinding out the second-tier innates, which tops out at 95 SP, we see that the number required is nowhere near the magic numbers commonly quoted by the SP-Mafia and elitists. And this supposed rounding out process only provides a measly gain of +3 to +4 power per tick gained. The truth of the matter is that a relatively casual controller with 55+ SP can do their role more than competently, and the practical gains of any SP higher than that are purely in the realm of wishful thinking. In conclusion, the aspiring controller would do best to focus her SP investments on maximizing the SP Tier 1 Innates first, then branching out to other areas of focus. My personal feeling is that SP Tier 2 innates can be shelved until a later stage of character growth is achieved, probably around after the realm of 75+ SP have been earned.
***********************************************Healers**************************************************** I am going to now cover the Healer Role. This role is perhaps the most 'expensive' in terms of SP investiture of the three roles, at least in terms of initial investment. Healer First Tier SP Innates Crit Heal Mag 12 (7 SP) Crit Heal Mag 12 (7 SP) Crit Heal Mag 12 (7 SP) Crit Heal Chance 3 (7 SP) Crit Heal Chance 3 (7 SP) Crit Heal Chance 3 (7 SP) Resto 45 (7 SP) Resto 45 (7 SP) Resto 45 (7 SP) Resto 45 (7 SP) First Tier Crit Mag +36% (21 SP) First Tier Crit Chance +9% (21 SP) First Tier Resto Bonuses +180 (28 SP) First Tier Total SP= 70-1= 69 Secondary Tier SP Innates Resto 42 (6 SP) Resto 42 (6 SP) Resto 42 (6 SP) Resto 42 (6 SP) Resto 42 (6 SP) Resto 42 (6 SP) Resto 42 (11 SP) Second Tier Resto Bonuses 294 (47 SP) As we can see, Healers have SP innates that focus on increasing both their role-specific criticals: Critical Healing Chance and their Critical Healing Magnitude. This is unique when compared with the Controller role which focuses on only Critical Chances. It also means that the Healer must begin their SP planning at an early stage with splitting their fields of focus in mind. For efficiency's sake, I've already broken down the math of straight resto bonuses versus crit bonuses at the SP Tier 1 level. This assumes socket affinities. For an investiture of 28 SP you can gain a +45% increase in base healing. This translates roughly to a gain of 1.6% per Sp spent. For an investiture of 42 SP you can gain a potential increase of +76% one out of every five healing attempts. This translates roughly to a potential gain of 1.8% per Sp spent, but only one out of every five attempts. It becomes pretty obvious that in the case of the healer, it's better to start with the straight resto innates first, then once those gains have been solidified, to slowly expand towards the critical innates. The nice thing here is that once you begin to max out the SP Tier 1 innates, they synergize well with each other. Once we take a look at the SP Tier 2 innates however, there is a sharp dropoff in the ratio of return versus investment. It's still a positive set of gains, but we're spending at an inferior exchange rate in terms of SP, at a loss of 9.3% efficiency. This leads me to advise that the SP Tier 2 innates should be taken spread out well after the course of other SP progression. With all the SP characteristics taken as a whole, we can observe that effective healer progression requires quite a bit more development time than the controller parallel, with SP Tier 1 maximization taken place only after the 70+ SP benchmark. Maximized SP Tier 2 expenditures will not be accomplished until sometime after 120 SP benchmark, realistically speaking. However given the enormous gains in resto from gear and progression, the entire SP Tier 2 tree is for the most part, entirely optional and unneeded.
*******************************************Tanks**************************************************** As we get to tanks, I feel I must give a bit of a disclaimer now due to the very different ways that tanking powersets have been perceived to work, and what people feel is the best pay-off in terms of tank stat progression. This portion of the guide has been written with the beginning Ice Tank in mind, but can easily be adjusted for the other tanking powersets by substituting Health Innates for the Defense innates, and in the case of Fire Tanks, substituting Resto Innates for the Dom innates. I realize there is some debate as to the effectiveness of certain stats, but I'll explain that since this guide is written with the developing character in mind, lower-to-mid tier progression building blocks make for a more solid foundation of play experience in my reasoning, without sacrificing too much effectiveness at the current stage of 'endgame' content. For the Ice Tank, Defense is the hardest stat to consistently improve from starting game to the Tier III range. There are no gear mods that provide Defense, while by and large most people consider Defense to be a laughable stat in terms of damage mitigation. The massive bonuses of the Ice Tank in near-doubling the effectiveness of their Defense score however means that investments into Defense in the early skill progression is worthwhile and allows for a measure of learning curve that can be adjusted with advanced tactics and retraining later on. The other tanking powersets have less use for the Defense stat, and so it makes more sense from a SP investment point of view to focus on gaining extra health instead. However all of them will use their Dom scores for both crowd-control and for shielding powers. Since much of the emphasis in this guide is to establish as much double-duty expenditure as possible, pushing for greater efficiency in the SP progression leads to emphasizing Dom as SP progression matures. It's my feeling that at the latter stages of progression where the SP Tier 2 innates begin to come into play that in-combat the renewable resource of shielding becomes more cost-efficient than health, and as such I focus almost exclusively on recommending Dom increases over Health. In the case of Fire tanking, which relies more upon self-heals instead of damage mitigation, we have the exception that proves the rule, and since Resto is also used in the formula for healing and for shields, it's a more efficient approach for the fire tank's SP expenditures, as well as having the benefit of Resto scores being earned in larger lots than Dom scores, providing greater overall gains. Overall though, the basic approach to budgeting SP expenditures here for tanks is the same pattern throughout. So with the understanding that adjustments must be made for the quirks of the various powerset differences, I'll post the progression below. Tank First SP Tier Innates Defense 30 (7 SP) Defense 30 (7 SP) Defense 30 (7 SP) Defense 30 (7 SP) Defense 30 (7 SP) Dominance 21 (7 SP) Dominance 21 (3 SP) Dominance 21 (7 SP) Dominance 21 (3 SP) First Tier Def Total: 150 First Tier Dom Total: 84 First Tier SP Total: 54-1= 53 Tank Secondary Tier Innates Dominance 12 (6 SP) Dominance 12 (11 SP) Dominance 12 (11 SP) Dominance 12 (11 SP) Dominance 12 (11 SP) Secondary Tier Dom Total: 60 Secondary Tier SP Total: 50 As we examine the SP Tier 1 innates, an important factor to remember is that survivability is the key at lower levels of progression. Because of the tighter 'budgets' of available bluebar power, skillpoints, and gear stat boosts, most tanking will be less reliant on spamming active powers such as shielding and CC, and get the greatest gains from the passive increases such as health and defense. In the case of Ice Tanks, it's important to remember that every increase taken in Defense is multiplied by 190%, making these SP investments key at the leveling up stages. (After hitting the plateau of Tier V content, many tanks do find it useful to review their initial investments into defense/health and respec into dom/resto instead, but that presumes a level of familiarity and experience with the game mechanics that goes beyond the scope of this guide.) As such, I find that concentrating on defense/health for the first 35 SP to be the logical path of progression, with developing Dom after reaching level 30 and Tier I content to be the next logical step. Most Dom requirements don't start becoming a problem in regards to standard gear not meeting the minimum for instances until after surpassing Tier III and reaching Tier IV content. So there's generally plenty of opportunities for developing the Dom innates while gearing up and progressing through the Tiers. Once reaching the realm of SP TIer 2 innates, things remain relatively straightforward. Dom is the default double-duty stat, and tanks benefit the most from focusing on these innates before any others (with the exception of Fire Tanks). Overall tank SP progression requires just the initial 53 SP to reach a competent level of proficiency, with further refinements occurring at the SP Tier 2 range that basically scale with the character as content increases in difficulty, but nowhere near as quickly as gear increases will. This gives the tank some luxury of experimentation and dabbling in damage-dealing. But it's my experience however that at the Tier IV level of content and above, that Dom sharply rises in relevance and if left ignored for too long, the tank character will have to do some catching-up either through respecs or modding, to remain relevant and desired in content of his CR range. It's better overall to keep increasing those scores as they maintain their usefulness as content continues to be released with minimum Dom requirements. *********************************************In Conclusion************************************************ I really hope that this guide has been of some assistant to both new and veteran players. If you have any suggestions or as time progresses the game, wish to comment in this thread, please do feel free to add your thoughts and suggestions to the guide. I ask only that if you have a differing opinion, please do refrain from turning this into a debate thread, and write your own recommendations for the expansion of knowledge in Oracle's Forum.
This is very helpful. Thanks especially for my troll and healer. Its all confirmation that I was doing this alright. Huge help once again
Controllers F2P and most Premiums will not have access to the Shield weapon or Home Turf. Cunning is worth speccing into when you can get the full 9% from Shield and especially when you have access to the Escalating Replenishing Procs home turf neck mod which stacks critical power chance every time you use instant power dump. Without Shield and Home Turf, six skill points is probably better invested in Tier 1 Vitalization first for a player with a bargain bucket of skill points. These days controllers are just there to power the team with crowd control best being left to the tank, therefore head straight for Tier 2 Vitalization before spending skill points on anything else you feel might be useful. Shield Weapon If you have access to the Shield weapon then once you get to level 10 it is well worth respeccing and putting 7 skill points into Shield for Tier 1 Precision. +30 precision is a pretty huge bonus to have at level 10 and will help a lot when levelling up. Tanks Your Dominance is doubled in tank role so a +7 bonus per skill point turns into a +14 bonus when tanking. It improves Shield Health and Self Healing. Ice and Earth then get a Defense bonus from Dominance and Fire gets a Health bonus. Statistically it always works out better to take Dominance before Defense/Health and this is why Dominance is the #1 Priority for all tanks. Invest in Tier 1 Dominance before anything else. For Ice and Earth you should then take Tier 1 Defense and for Fire take Tier 1 Health innates before heading toward Tier 2 Dominance. Healers It can be dismaying to get DPS drops when you are trying to gear up and this is going to seriously hurt your Restoration, in turn compromising your role. You can spam heals to compensate but this will really stretch the controllers out. You should spec into Tier 1 Restoration and Tier 2 Restoration before you do anything else. Guaranteed healing is more important than praying for a critical heal to fix your Restoration stat when you really need it. PVP You cannot PVP effectively without critical hit chance and critical damage magnitude innates. Especially in these days of debuffs trying to PVP without the ability to deal damage will be a whole fistful of fail. Respec before you PVP - Armouries will make this possible for folks in the very near future. Hope this advice helps.
I'm really glad you found the guide helpful! I want to make things easier for the players coming into the game, and dispel a lot of the myths and misinformation that can confuse and mislead the playerbase. While this is an excellent "Pro-Tip", I'd like to point out that at level 10, most characters will have only 7-9 SP total, so this will likely detract from the intended "role-focused budget SP" path I outlined. It is still excellent advice however, as once you've started to max out your SP Tier1 innates, that precision boost will still be of great use in Solo and Duo content at Tier I and II. This is an excellent point about Dominance being doubled that I neglected to mention. However Lucaefor is giving a slightly skewed impression on how it works: Ice and Earth Tanks add Dom to their total shield damage mitigation when using an active shielding power. Fire Tanks add Dom to their Health bonuses when using their active powers. As I pointed out above, at the early stages of progression passive innate bonuses will be of greater use to you because you won't always have the bluebar power to constantly activate these powers. Remember that the tank power bonuses only last for about 6 seconds at a time and all of them have cooldown timers. It's very true that Dom has tremendous advantages and is a 'must-buy' stat, but it's my experience that these come into maturation more in the mid-game to end-game Tiers of content. I stand by my guide's assertion that Defense/Health should be purchased earlier, and then once a character has gained more SP and progressed into Tier III content, a respec would be appropriate. I'm just going to have to agree to disagree here, but I'll caveat my assertion by saying it greatly depends on your Healing Powerset and preferred loadout. Critical chances are of much more use and efficiency when you tend to consistently use Heal-Over-Time powers. One power-cost and activation can potentially yield a great deal more healing with consistent high-magnitude crits on the repetitive healing ticks of a HOT power. If you prefer one-shot spike and wave heals, then you may find earlier investment into SP Tier 2 Resto innates more to your liking. Again I'll emphasize that my guide is trying to lay the path for the highest amount of return on the least amount of SP invested. There are more effective paths, but they will cost you more SP before you see efficient returns on them. This is an excellent point of PVP advice as well, but just like I tried to avoid discussion of DPS SP investment, I'm going to refrain from recommending any PVP SP investments as they will detract from the main point of this guide; which is to steer upcoming and unsure players on budget methods of growing their SP into support-role specializations. Thanks for the great input so far!
Thing about tanking is that it's not really needed for Raids until T3 and arguably for Alerts until T5. It's a bit of a shame and possibly the reason why there is an absence of good tanks around when you need one. Most potential tanks should really play as a damager for the lower tier content and respec to tank once they have got their gear and skill points going; skill speccing a fire tank isn't for the faint of heart. I like the intention behind the thread a lot because currently on EUPC villains all you hear on LFG all day is people asking for controllers. Any kind of stimulation to get players interested in playing a role earlier on will benefit the community even if there is a disparity on advice here and there. Imho culling the DPS population is necessary at this point but for sake of completeness we should probably give some tips on how to skill spec a damager properly. Good thread anyway.
Great thread CC This is remarkable, thank you for taking the time to explain this and explain well. +++1000000
So f So for a new troller like myself. You suggest putting my skill points in the vitality slots on all the weapon trees? Am I following this right?
Actually, I recommended Cunning first, especially if you have the Last Laugh & Home Turf DLCs or are a Legendary member. But yes, immediately after maxing out Cunning, you want all the Vitality innates that you can afford. These two priorities come before anything else if you're trying to focus on your controller role and are budgeting your Skill Points.
I am Legendary, but how is that possible? I'm currently lvl 27 and have only about 23-25 sp. How can I put points in several weapon trees if I need a lot to get down to the inate abilities? I'm a dual wield hard light troller if that helps.
For Fire tanks I would avoid the Defense innates completely. Almost every other innate (except for Stealth, maybe) offers something with more benefit for the time and effort it takes to get those Skill Points. At level 30 it takes 71 points in Defense to equal 1% of mitigation. So a Fire tank that has spent the SP to unlock all of the Defense innates, they are getting just 2% mitigation (that's about 10pts off of 500pts of damage). It's much better for the up and coming Fire tank to focus on the +Health, + Healing crits and +Resto innates in T1. Once there are enough SP to get all of the Dom, Health and Healing innates in T2, I would probably go for Cunning or Vit before going for Defense because of the greater returns they offer. As time goes forward I run into fewer and fewer Fire tanks that spec for Resto or the +% Health innates. Not doing so severely hampers how effective they can be as Fire tanks mitigate damage in 3 ways and Healing is 2 of them (bonus to all healing and self-healing, the 3rd mitigator being more health). I believe (but am not certain) that Ice tanks hit the mitigation cap well before T5, so Defense innates for them may not be very worthwhile either (but I'm not completely certain on that).
Magnificent, thanks for the helpful comments, but you might have missed the part where I mentioned that: The part about investing in healing criticals though is new to me... Does that actually help with the Fire Tank's Self-Healing? I'm glad to see that even after this fell off the front page, other people have still discovered this guide and found it helpful! And everyone reading, please do continue to add your thoughts and suggestions!
Hmm. As a troller I was advised (won't say by who) to take crit attack chance and crit damage because these would buff my power out. Is this not the case?
Good summary. The most valuable innates for any role are definitely the crits, as those will help you greatly at any level. The role-specific stat innates (vit, resto, dom, etc.) are much more helpful at lower levels/tiers. As you increase your gear tier, the relative stat boost from those innates becomes less and less. Of course, if you're doing things right, you should probably have a good number of SP by the time you reach a higher tier, anyway. I always shoot for mid 80s, as that will usually get you your movement mode innates, weapon combos, and role-specific tier 1 weapon innates. That's all I really have bothered to farm for my alts. My main has more because I've played him from the start.
I am afraid to say no, whoever advised you to do so was either pulling your leg or just mistaken. Crit attack and Crit damage have nothing to with a troller's power out at all.
I can confirm this after running a simple respec experiment. Adding +48% critical attack damage did nothing for the size of my critical POT tick. At least I can now respec accordingly, so thanks for the guide CCBatson.
150 defense from skill points and 50 defense from the iconic is nearly 3% mitigation. That might not sound like a great deal but, it adds to the higher defense you get from tank gear and from blocking so in the end it actually does make quite a lot of difference, especially when a T5 boss is smashing you.
I'm a Fire tank and initially I thought it would make a difference through logical reasoning but in practice, it doesn't. If I had 170+ skill points and full dominance/restoration specced plus all the crit healing innates and was allowed to spam self heals instead of block all the time, maybe... ... but since this is the frugal guide to skill point spending you are right to advise fire tanks to skip it, the self healing aspect to fire tanking is just a bump for the healer.
I didn't waste my tier 2 skill points by dumping them all into vit, What I did Is I distribute tire 2 skill points into Prec Vit Might and Dom only to push me to the next number. I.E. I had 606 Precision, I put two points into prec bumping me to 601 giving me an additional damage per second. Same things for vit and dom. I only put points into a stat when it will boost me up in stat x to where a change in output actually changes.
