Increasing Skill Levels From default

[Terwin]

Originally Posted by Pseudonym

One new thought though: because the direction of defaulting can be changed at will according to the RAW, it seems to me that it wouldn't be wrong to say you can calculate the best value through the entire network of defaults relative to skill A and record that.
Then if you go back to the second diagram, if you don't rebalance the points, you could find the best value for skill B and record that. And this would be fine because a player is allowed to change the direction of defaults at will anytime... and would probably not be too confusing to me as long as I disallow the ability to be allowed to shuffle the points around. That's really the part that bothers me the most.

Remember: when you rearrange a skill default tree, no skill can ever go down. So if you change the tree such that a skill would have a lower value that it did previously, you *MUST* spend points to bring it back up to it's prior level.

As such I suspect that you cannot do your trick of rearranging the default tree to maximize each skill in turn, as you would then need to buy up any non-maximized skill back to its maximized value.