Idea: Hybrid Skills

Note: Also this is my big write up in a long time so I don't really know all the formatting and such. Sorry it's just a huge text block.


This is a bit underbaked and still cooking but I've been fixated on the idea of hybrid gems for multiple weapon types. For example, we have both Lightning Spear and Lightning Arrow. Both of these skills feel unique, are unique and should remain unique. However they also have a lot of overlap to the point where a lot of benefits to one would benefit the other as well. But they are for different weapons and thus have to be two different gems. This means in the future if you want to make a unique that adds more chains/damage to Lightning Arrow for example, it will only benefit Lightning Arrow, benefit everything that chains, require 2 lines for different skills on the same item or require 2 variations of the same unique item. This limitation was sort of the seed for my idea.

So A hybrid gem example would be Lightning Spear/Lightning Arrow. The gem would have the hybrid tag and transform based on whether you have a spear or a bow equipped. This would allow a few interesting design spaces. One example is the unique idea above, in the same way that a gem could transform based on equipped weapon, affixes could too. So a unique helmet that gives bonus chains and lightning damage to Lightning Spear/Arrow could scale differently for both but giving a different affix based on equipped weapon. It would also open up a lot of build design space with weapon sets.

Right now the weapon sets and weapon mastery passives are interesting but honestly I've never used them. So many skills and tied to a single weapon, so I would need to make both my sets use the same weapon. At which point it just feels useless. I get that you can min-max one weapon for single target and one for multi-target but that doesn't feel realistic or good. I'd much rather do something big like swap between a spear and a bow for example. With the weapon mastery points I could swap from bow nodes to spear nodes and with hybrid gems I could choose a handful of hybrid gems to share between the two.

By default using hybrid gems shouldn't give a huge advantage because I imagine a lot of people don't wanna deal with weapon swapping so it shouldn't inherently be better than not because if it is than people that don't want to swap will optimize the fun out of their game and use this mechanic anyway. Instead a lot of the power should be gated behind passives and support gems. So far the game does a good job of letting you play how you want to. If you want to be on your toes you can play evasion and dodge every slam. If you don't, you can focus on your build and take the passive that lets you evade anything at the cost of a bunch of evasion. Same with some people not wanting to deal with timing, but for people that want to you can use Perfect Strike and the associated support gem to make it super timing oriented. For hybrid gems I imagine there would be support gems like "if you have used this skill's alternate version recently than gain +x% damage" or "gain 1 charge every kill up to X, when you swap weapon sets gain Y buffs for Z time based on the amount of charges you've gathered." Ways to make hybrid skills give power but at the expense of passive points or support gems so that people that don't want to engage with hybrid skills can still potentially be of equivalent power.

In general I feel like hybrid gems would add a lot of design space and increase flexibility as right now, it doesn't feel like I can do anything as a class other than the things that class is "supposed" to do. Huntress must you spears, if you swap you lose all your skills, crossbow for merc, bow for ranger, etc. Hybrid skills (and the hopefully inevitable removal of some skill's weapon restrictions) I think would help allow the players to have a lot more freedom to build their character as they wish and would create a whole new archetype of playstyle for those that WANT to explore it.


UI: Hybrid gems/items would have some cycle symbol, like 2 arrows in a circle. When you hold for additional info you would than be able to click said circle to swap and look at the inactive stats. This would make it clear what things are hybrid and let you see what they are hybrid with.

Nah... Just give them RF, so they can walk without pushing any button and nuke screens. ROFL I am kidding. You get it, right?