Talent Design has been something you have left for the latest stages of development. How is that coming along? Do you have any overall design principles for the design of Talents in PE?
We don't currently have many Talents because they are highly dependent on player feedback. Talents can either extend or modify standard class abilities or they can grant access to outliers that may or may not fall within any single class. Broad Talents like Weapon Focus simply grant accuracy with categories of weapons. Any class could make use of that Talent. A Talent like Grimoire Slam depends heavily on the character using a grimoire, i.e. being a wizard. Thankfully it's pretty fast and easy to implement a lot of Talents, so we should be able to have a quick turnaround following our Backer Beta.​
Sensuki: Josh also provided some extra details about some of the Talents that will be available for the Backer Beta on the Obsidian forums:
Talents are things that are not core to classes but can be used to flesh them out in different ways. Some Talents are class-specific and some are more-or-less class-neutral. An example of a class-neutral Talent would be Weapon Focus, which increases Accuracy with a group of weapons, or Hold the Line, which increases the character's Engagement Limit by 1. Examples of class-specific Talents include Powerful Sprint, which increases the speed of a barbarian's Wild Sprint, Critical Focus, which grants allies affected by a paladin's Zealous Focus a 5% Hit to Crit conversion rate, and Penetrating Blast, which grants DT penetration to a wizard's Blast ability.
The Backer Beta will feature about two class-specific Talents per class (~20+) and a small handful of class-neutral Talents.​
