Allow us to reduce skill ranks

Xboxiscrunchy

Something that I think would be helpful for the new Solomon game and the old ones too would be the ability to disable a skill or reduce the amount of ranks you use. Sometimes during a run you are offered too many primary skills and too few mana or secondary skills and your primary becomes too expensive to be effective It would really help to be able to disable certain unwanted skills until they become usable.

For example I’ll be using a skill like lightning bolt and I’ve been offered tons of damage increases and stun and chaining but no battle mage or channel as it stands the mana cost would be incredibly high only useable for a couple seconds at a time. If I had the option I could reduce chaining or damage levels and be able to cast for longer and protect myself with stun or I could reduce stun and chaining and try to thin the enemies with high single damage. Later on I could reenable my skills if I improve my mana.

A good way to do this might be double tapping on a skill in the skill menu and bringing up a plus and a minus to adjust it. This would allow more control over a build and help prevent bad luck from making a character nearly impossible.

SomeRandomHEFan

I strongly disagree. I felt that one of the most interesting challenges of SB was having to maintain a balance between mana consumption and regeneration.

Whenever I had to choose between a spell upgrade and Channel Mana or Battle Mage at a time where my mana consumption was already a bit high, it was always a struggle to predict if I could survive on a mana shortage until the next levelup. The reward for success would be having a really powerful spell once my mana consumption is balanced again.

Conversely, when I was instead given this offer at a time where my spells were starting to become underpowered, I had to predict if I could survive in this state a while longer. I would then be able to significantly strengthen my spell after the next levelups without having to worry about mana.

I do feel that this shouldn't be quite as luck-based, though. When I wasn't offered Channel Mana or Battle Mage for a sufficient amount of levelups, I eventually only had the choice between refusing to upgrade my spell any further despite desperately needing it to be stronger, or rendering it unusable.

It should be noted that I never played the game with characters who have multiple spells, though. I could see things playing out differently when you can fall back on an alternative spell during times where one of them is too mana-heavy.

Xboxiscrunchy

That’s just the problem though it would be one thing if your character is not as strong because you were offered bad skills but sometimes you accually get WEAKER after a level up which just feels terrible.

In my opinion that should never happen you should always be getting stronger or more versatile even if only by a little. Being able to reduce ranks doesn’t make you stronger but it does at least offer more versatility.

SomeRandomHEFan

That's how the games discourage you from upgrading your spells without thinking. If you could temporarily downgrade them again, the whole risk vs. reward factor of upgrading your spells beyond what your mana can currently handle would simply disappear. You could make your spells as powerful as you wanted without having to think about the consequences.

Such a change would also encourage you to frequently interrupt the gameplay by reconfiguring your skill levels just for short intervals. For example, say you're using ice magic to shield yourself against a barrage of arrows. Then your shield breaks and you don't have the mana to regenerate it. You could just stop using your spell for a few seconds to recover enough mana, but that would require putting actual effort into dodging arrows in the meantime. So why not open the menu, set your spell power and Chill Wind back to 1, then close the menu and continue to protect yourself with this downgraded spell until your mana has recovered enough to restore your shield, then open the menu again and reconfigure everything to the way it was before? It's a clunky strategy that really hurts the flow of the game, but it would produce superior results.

Peppermaster

Instead of having this cumbersome skill level switch thing, I personally believe the better solution would be to increase the base max mana and mana increase from mana up drastically(like 500-ish for base mana and 200 for increase). The main issue with the mana is that the base max mana is so low that it is very difficult to wipe out a room without running out of mana unless your mana cost is less than your mana regen. By making the base max mana increased drastically, this allows players to not be so obsessed with early mana upgrade and be able to survive the early game while still punishes players if they use mana inefficiently. 

P.S. to test out this solution, i made a modification of solomon dark that implements this idea. It is a small mod that only touches mana up and battle mage but it will be enough to test out my idea.

link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qfqismpspf6kfkh/SolomonDark mana test.zip?dl=0