Original Post — Direct link
MASSIVE

Lastly, we want to address some balancing concerns from the community with insight from the development team:

Skill builds are underwhelming and require too much of an investment into Skill Power:
A: Skills innately scale with level and world tier to always be relevant. Boosts to skills from skill power come in the form of mods, where the player can pick their own improvements to the skills. We recently revamped the skill mods so that high end and purple mods have reasonable requirements for mid-level to all-in skill power builds.

What we will provide in the next patch is ways to craft blue skill mods to provide options for low Skill Power level builds. Further, the recent re-balance was somewhat conservative in terms of power level of the mods, and we recognize that currently, they dont represent enough impact for the sacrifice made in other stats. We will be enhancing the effects of mods across the board in this next update. Our hope is that these further adjustments will make both full on and hybrid skill power builds more viable.


I got this from the latest release on future changes/fixes

STILL no improvement for skill builds except to release BLUE mods are you kidding me guys ?

The problem is not the mods its that skill builds overall are useless and weak......blue mods just won't do anything to improve that.......

We need builds to be powerful and a useful addition to a team,right now you barely take a tick of armour of NPC's with skills
about 5 years ago - Ubi-RealDude - Direct link
Originally Posted by Can_able
No one seams to be talking about the 60% skill power nurf. They lowered the skill power cap on all itams. Pre patch had 9.3k sp. After patch same gear at 3.3 k skill power. But i had no armour or dps. It was nice knowing only pure skill builds could use really cool mods. Its took me a week to get back to 3.3 sp on chem launcher but now as alot less radios. I wanted to do a dps skill build but cant see the point anymore.
This was more of an across the board readjustment of the floor and ceiling/curve. The strongest mods at the time also had their requirements significantly lowered in tandem with the skill power. The best analogy for illustrating this I've seen has been taking the old Skill Power system, which was a parabolic power curve, and making it a more linear increase for Skill Mod strength vs. Skill Power stat.

As for the overall thread, one thing I've always been curious about is the following: When you say you want Skill Builds to be 'viable,' what do you mean? I understand that the literal definition would be equally as impactful on the game/in a mission as a gun-based DPS build... But could you please illustrate and describe for me how you imagine your ideal skill build functioning in regular gameplay?