Talents are bad

[Second Duke Revier]

I'm sure I've riled up some people with my title, but I stand by it. They are essentially grinding masquerading as flavorful traits. Their tangible benefit, in any version of the game, is quite significant, but the only way to get them is by repeatedly crafting or utilizing those skills, often fruitlessly. Or rolling the dice at game start, but that's not reliable at all. And while a learnt talent granting 100 SP and BP might seem generous, it doesn't take away from the sheer burdensome feeling of doing busywork to make your character effective.

IMO talents should a. be 100% fixed for every character, b. not be unlockable at all, or be unlocked via a less grindy yet tough manner and c. do something other than raise success rate. bkdubs suggested having talents unlock specific items in item creation, and that does sound like a worthwhile and interesting application of them.

[valium]

Treat them as such, make it so earning a new talent is a happy coincidence rather than something you are grinding for.

[bkdubs123]

I do have thoughts on how Talents should also influence things like Pickpocketing, for example:

"This principle could (and in my opinion should) carry over to other specialties and their support items. For example, Pickpocketing requires the Thief's Glove to even use and both the Nimble Fingers talent and the Magician's Hand simply increase your chances of getting the item. I would change it so that you could use the Pickpocket skill without the Thief's Glove, but you get one try, you don't get to see what can be stolen, you try to steal a random item from the list of three, and you have a 35% increased chance to decrease friendship. The Thief's Glove gives you one retry, still random, still unseen,. Nimble Fingers gives you a 35% lower chance to decrease friendship, and the Magician's Hand shows you what the NPC has available to steal, shows you your odds, and allows you to choose (no third try, though)."

So I certainly agree. The Talents should not influence degree of succees at all, but should, instead, offer new, (better?) ways of using the same skills, but at the exact same success rate.

[Sky Render]

I'll take their implementation here over the PS1/PSP release! Back in Ye Olde Days, talents were absolutely essential for any skill that used them, because not having the talent would result in about a 10% success rate. Unlocking talents was much more tedious since you could only do 1 Item Creation attempt at a time, and you didn't get the ability to boost your unlock rate until much later in the game than you do now. Now at least you get access to Orchestra once you get to Hilton and can bypass most of the tedium with unlocking talents pretty early in the game.

[bkdubs123]

Originally posted by Sky Render:

I'll take their implementation here over the PS1/PSP release! Back in Ye Olde Days, talents were absolutely essential for any skill that used them, because not having the talent would result in about a 10% success rate. Unlocking talents was much more tedious since you could only do 1 Item Creation attempt at a time, and you didn't get the ability to boost your unlock rate until much later in the game than you do now. Now at least you get access to Orchestra once you get to Hilton and can bypass most of the tedium with unlocking talents pretty early in the game.

Agreed, certainly these are all good perks that make it "better," but in my opinion they do not address the core issues.

Instead, if you rework other, small things, with the creation engine, you could alter success rates and Talent factors from the ground up, and create a better experience from Lv 1 to Lv 10, for all crafting skills, if you really wanted to (and I do want to, if anyone has modding tools, please, hit me up).

[Second Duke Revier]

Originally posted by Sky Render:

I'll take their implementation here over the PS1/PSP release! Back in Ye Olde Days, talents were absolutely essential for any skill that used them, because not having the talent would result in about a 10% success rate. Unlocking talents was much more tedious since you could only do 1 Item Creation attempt at a time, and you didn't get the ability to boost your unlock rate until much later in the game than you do now. Now at least you get access to Orchestra once you get to Hilton and can bypass most of the tedium with unlocking talents pretty early in the game.

I definitely agree that Gemdrops did a lot to make the various item crafting and noncombat skills usable without being overtly grindy. But it's as bkdubs said - the core flaws and drawbacks of the original's systems are still very much present, and do visibly hamper the experience. Though I am sympathetic to them, as I know that they were remaking what is considered a "cult classic" and so couldn't really go too far with their changes. I just wished they went a little farther. Now modding though, that seems like an optimistic avenue.

[Xengre]

Talents are intended to make you try and have different characters focus on different item creation. It helps reinforce not accidentally spreading oneself too thin on a single character making no meaningful progress but also helps mix up play in each playthrough as you will have different characters focus on different things. Some characters can produce different rewards which helps mix things up slightly, and it also takes away some extreme perfectionist control at play where you can B-line straight towards your objectives with excessive ease.

Overall, its a decent idea with no real major downsides. Talents take little effort to grind using the music you can easily learn every talent a character has in under 2 minutes later in the game. The only exception is the talent related to the enemy attract/avoidance skill. However, if you want to earn them earlier it is slightly harder but extremely doable. Most importantly, they make it extremely worth while because of the huge point bonus, especially if you target learning multiple. Even early it usually isn't that grindy, either.