Originally posted by 76561198351907541:

Nice breakdown post
I'm giving my 10 cents on what usually make people unhappy about the skill system
-Bow
On my current playthrough I'm at ~30 skill level, I honestly never felt impeded by draw time/stamina usage. Fair to me

-Running and Jumping
Honestly these two should be merged as "athletic" skill... when running home to haul wood or metals I find myself using the first boss buff and jumping around to level it. Jumping is such an important mechanic in this game yet you have too few occasions to level it legitimately

-Mining and Woodcutting
That one I noticed that the higher tier tool you use the more materials you get. With Bronze axe I struggled to get acorns and birch seeds. Now with Iron Axes I get them half of the time. I have no opinion on this I just noticed that today

-Death skill penalty
I think it's not THAT bad. But I know a lot of people who play survival games are, more often than not, perfectionnists and completionnists. I think a great way to balance this would be that each time you die, you can cancel the penalty by doing something within a time limit (like reaching a level 15 comfort bonus within 5min after death, or drinking a hard-to-come-by potion)

Thanks for the feedback. I do agree running and jumping could be merged; I mean the Eikythr buff impacts both of them anyway and it feels a little silly to struggle in a mountain biome just because you didn't mash the space bar enough times the previous two weeks of playing the game.

In some ways tying this system to a flat number of actions is kind of limiting. Sure the Rested buff gives you 50% more bang for your buck. But they could give more incentives to play the game consistent with whatever the devs vision is. So like if you want to encourage players to explore, take some risks, experience the world of Valeim then the progression can afford to be a little more dynamic; getting bonus weapon skill xp on kills/boss kills means wading through trash mobs is less of a waste of time. Similarly bonus exp in areas that you recently explored encourages you to expand outside your comfort zone. Bonus modifiers in harder biomes would help as well. One of the reasons you get situations like "players maxing out bow skills by shooting a rock 5,000 times" is in part because there's no dynamic way to speed up the process, and it doesn't even scale with risk at all. This also makes the death penalty, while not that bad at low levels, aggrivating later on since it punishes you for being brave and proactive.