The overly condensed skill tree still remains one of my biggest disappointments to come out of this F2P business. It's supposed to be more user friendly but it's too condensed, unbalanced, unimaginative and out right boring. You guys can streamline the skill tree to make it easy to understand without having such a harsh limit on customization.

It would be so much better to expand the customization options and drastically reduce the cost to invest in a skill for each tier. Some people actually enjoy toying with skill point allocations to get as much out of their desired play style as they can.

For example, allow us to choose just how much of a boost we want for each specific subsystem efficiency and performance sort as it has been on live. In one tier I could go through and max out power efficiency for Shields and Auxiliary systems while ignoring Weapons and Engines.

To make it more user friendly you could go a step further and offer a basic or advanced skill tree.

The basic skill tree would lump certain things together at a higher investment cost. Take the power performance from the previous example and lump all four subsystems together. Each level of skill invested in this general performance category would require more skill points (really just the same amount as in the advanced option but lumped together) and apply a flat increase across all four subsystems. This would remove the micro management for more casual players who are content to go with a potentially less specialized build.

Most importantly, there needs to be a better balance. Healing, Damage, and Science abilities are spread out in a rather confusing manner. Their positions on the tree seem to be more about visual symmetry rather than actual balance.

I'm still not entirely clear on the handling of respecs either. The current version of the skill tree supposedly offers players the opportunity to swap a ship at will. That may be true but swapping ships effectively can still only be done within ship class (i.e. and Advanced Escort for a Fleet Escort). It does not allow for us to swap ships of different classes because the different classes often require different styles and by extension different skill point allocations.

One potential way to work around this issue would be to offer 3 profiles: one cruiser set, one science set, and one escort set. Then each character could have 3 different specs to fit 3 different styles of ships and game play.

do you know they are adding the ground revamp later so it is half done on purpose

Aye. The ground issue is another issue entirely.

that is quite a good idea.

I like the idea of basic and advanced skill trees, but I'd like to see the revamped ground skills before making any call myself.