Tabula Rasa abilities and character planners

In Tabula Rasa there is a hierarchial archetype/class where a character all start out from the same class and one set of abilities. At levels 5, 15 and 30 a choice is made choosing a more specialized class choice, a choice of two each time.

Which means in the end there are 8 different classes in the game. Each and every class choice have a set of skills and abilities which a player can put points into to improve that particular skill/ability. There is not enough points to maximize everything, so some choices have to be made.

Right now any choice that is made is final for that particular character, which makes the decisions rather important. The cloning system could help a bit here, but since it is currently a limited amount of times one can clone a character it is not a substitute for a respec mechanism . It seems Destination Games/NCSoft is considering some respec capability, but that will probably be some time in the future, after release.

I really hope they will include a respec mechanism – actually I would say they will have to if they want to avoid a number of frustrated players. There is a a fair amount of flexibility in the system, but people need to be allowed to make some mistakes especially since it will not be obvious how various skills and abilities plays out until one tries them.

With this system (with our without respec) a need some planning help for a character may be relevant and some people have started creating character planners to help with that. I have seen three character planner efforts and neither of them is “ready” or “finished”, which is not that surprising sicne the game is not released yet.

Two of them are browser-based, the third is a Windows program. I applaud the efforts here and hope they all continue work on their tools.
Tabula Rasa Character Planner (Windows program, download link)

Phaleux’s Tabula Rasa Character Builder

Zeus’ Tabula Rasa Character Builder