The only problem or less of a problem and more of a convenience, I see with armed/unarmed is that they don't really have as much of a great need to apply for hiddens, compared to mages that focus purely on the spell flinging aspect, to be pretty effective in most cases when it comes to fighting.
I am pretty certain that most trees alone solely compared to just the unarmed and armed trees have a noticeable amount of trash skills, things just sitting in there which aren't worth using outside of collecting them to hit the 60 RPP mark to get to the good things. Or you have trees that require you to apply for its hidden spells to actually obtain the true oppressive power that it wasn't capable of within its tome spells. Armed only has one and that's a hundred cuts, but it's an intermediate you can ignore!
Nature for example. Without the hidden vine summons, you can apply for, Nature on its own really isn't much of a threat since the normal vines can be killed and sure Deadly Bloom is annoying when they have multiple down but! Unless you pair Nature with other trees, it doesn't do much except exist to be an annoyance.
Let's take a tree that has great specialisation trees but the base of it lacks quite a bit. Fire is the greatest example of this. It's cost-heavy for its intermediates and its specialisations are so good, you can easily consider completely ignoring base fire outside of overheat and fireball which are really great.
What about other spell trees which just seem generally bad at a first glance? Wind, another big example! Grab flurry and shockwave and that's about it, you can ignore everything else in most cases unless you want the aura which is decent. Lightning? Shock still has a cast animation locking you in place for a moment, it basically feels like an inferior sweeping cleave as you don't maintain as much mobility, so that's a horrid 25 RPP investment that goes down the drain.
There's more to list, but I haven't used those trees yet or seen them in action and that's probably for a very good reason; some trees just aren't really worth using at the moment compared to the other offerings on the table and need to be brought up to be viable and not a waste of time, energy and investment.
I think a healthy but very unpopular change would be to treat specialisations as intermediates on entry, requiring you to put in 60 RPP into the base tree to go into them outside of applying for them due to special circumstances, e.g Druids getting entry into Nature without buying into Earth. Then you could allow those specialisations to keep their power without fear of people 'dipping', then strengthen the base trees up so they're actually worth the investment.
I am pretty certain that most trees alone solely compared to just the unarmed and armed trees have a noticeable amount of trash skills, things just sitting in there which aren't worth using outside of collecting them to hit the 60 RPP mark to get to the good things. Or you have trees that require you to apply for its hidden spells to actually obtain the true oppressive power that it wasn't capable of within its tome spells. Armed only has one and that's a hundred cuts, but it's an intermediate you can ignore!
Nature for example. Without the hidden vine summons, you can apply for, Nature on its own really isn't much of a threat since the normal vines can be killed and sure Deadly Bloom is annoying when they have multiple down but! Unless you pair Nature with other trees, it doesn't do much except exist to be an annoyance.
Let's take a tree that has great specialisation trees but the base of it lacks quite a bit. Fire is the greatest example of this. It's cost-heavy for its intermediates and its specialisations are so good, you can easily consider completely ignoring base fire outside of overheat and fireball which are really great.
What about other spell trees which just seem generally bad at a first glance? Wind, another big example! Grab flurry and shockwave and that's about it, you can ignore everything else in most cases unless you want the aura which is decent. Lightning? Shock still has a cast animation locking you in place for a moment, it basically feels like an inferior sweeping cleave as you don't maintain as much mobility, so that's a horrid 25 RPP investment that goes down the drain.
There's more to list, but I haven't used those trees yet or seen them in action and that's probably for a very good reason; some trees just aren't really worth using at the moment compared to the other offerings on the table and need to be brought up to be viable and not a waste of time, energy and investment.
I think a healthy but very unpopular change would be to treat specialisations as intermediates on entry, requiring you to put in 60 RPP into the base tree to go into them outside of applying for them due to special circumstances, e.g Druids getting entry into Nature without buying into Earth. Then you could allow those specialisations to keep their power without fear of people 'dipping', then strengthen the base trees up so they're actually worth the investment.