What would you use a skill calculator for? Which one would you prefer of the following?

1) You'd place any number for each skill, but this will mess up synergies if you put more than 20 for skills that synergize
2) You'd place up to 20 points in each skill, and then fill in a +Skills value to see levels above 20

Nice to see a skill calculator is being considered. Your skill tables are fine for most of what I consult them for, but the calculator will be nice for skills of any level. Would also save me the time of whipping out a calculator to deal with the synergies and such.

Will your calculator handle Masteries as well as synergies? By that, I mean will there be an option for non-sorcs to input a +%Dmg value? It might make things pretty complicated if you tried to make a single cell for each tree, but consider a cell for each element on that tree, i.e. pois and magic for the Bone Skills tree on the necro, while Poison and lightning on the Jav skills tree.

I voted for one skill at a time, since I generally just want to know what one skill is like at high levels.

Yes, I will surely make a cell for +skill damage%.

I've never used one, but if there was a good working one for HU i would probs just want to do 1 at a time. Except for a sorc that usualy sticks to 1 tree, most of my builds are spread over 2 or even all 3 trees.

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there is also the problem of gear that gives + to a specific skill...then again you'd probably be trying to just get into the ballpark of damage.

but yeah this would solve a lot of peoples questions of what skill should i max...this could give them a decisive tool to try it out for themselves.

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There are only 10 types of people in this world...People who understand binary and people who don't.

Given the 2 situations in Shantu post, I think what he's describing won't consider +Skills to a specific skill, but I'm not sure it needs to either.

Consider the situation where you're making a cold sorc, and you're going to max Blizz, FOrb, GSpike, IBolt, and CMastery. You've decided your gear and you will get +25 to cold skills, and +28 to Blizz.

Situation 1)
- Place 20 points into each of the 5 skills.
- Place 45 points into 1 skill to see it's synergized level 45 damage. Reset it to 20 if you want to check another skill.
- Placing 45 points into all 5 skills will give silly-high damage due to impossible syneries
- This style of calculator isn't nice if you're checking 5 skills at once like this
- This style of calculator would be nice if you wanted to test bugged synergy gear like HydraEdge's level 25 Hydra charges for a Chantress.
- If a sorc Mastery were ever made a synergy for a skill, this calculator would give you some problems for high leveled Mastery (although Shantu's going to have a %Mastery box that could be used to get around this (e.g. 20 into the mastery skill for synergy and then 200% into the Mastery box for +40 skills).

Situation 2)
- Place 20 points into each of the 5 skills.
- Place 25 points into the +Skills box and read out the level 45 damage of 4 of FOrb, GSpike, and IBlast
- Place 28 points into the +Skills box, and read out the level 48 damage of Blizz, but keep in mind that you just pumped CMastery unavoidably (this wouldn't be a problem for non-sorcs). As Bob908 pointed out, it's still fine to give you a ball-park idea of where the skill damage is at (those 3 levels into CMastery will offset the damage of Blizz by about 3%).
- This style of calculator is nice if you wanted to check a few skills at the same time, or if you don't understand the Synergy limitation of hard-points only (new players would be forced to obey that limitation).

I believe some kind of hybrid could be made:
- No cap on the input level, so you can check high level synergies too. Would be useful for the item charge synergy bug, like Marrowwalk. Some kind of warning could be shown when the input level is above 20, to avoid mistyping.
- +Skills could also be used for soft points, so that the calculator doesn't synergise the soft points.

This would enable both kind of calculators to work at the same time. You could do both situations with this.

A hybrid sounds ideal.

The warning probably doesn't have to overwhelming, since even a new player will figure out that something's up after the first couple uses. Maybe change the font colour of the number when it goes above level 20. The warning could just be something like, "Skills might be giving synergy bonuses beyond 20". Make the warning the same coloured font and I think people will figure out what that means.