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Designing Abilities with Augmentation in Mind
McShave
Member
Hello everybody! Since we have some content drought after Alpha 1, I wanted to have a conversation around how you would design skills around the idea that they will be augmented in a variety of different styles. We know the basics, such as each archetype will have schools of augmentation that can be applied to spells, and that the full class's abilities will just be flavours of the primary archetype's, so let's expand on that.
I am slightly confused on how you are going to be able to alter every spell in at least 4 different ways per secondary archetype, (not to mention other sources of augmentation). While looking at many of the tank's abilities in Alpha 1, there is not much room for change. You can either:
-change the type of damage and add a debuff or buff of some kind (poison, bleed, elemental effect)
-add a form of CC or CC resistance(blind, slow, knockback, stun)
-add aoe or distance
For example, how would you add the mage's teleportation augment to an ability that just strikes a foe with your weapon, which many of the tank's abilities are? My guess would be to make it a ranged ability (which falls under my list above). Maybe each primary archetype ability isn't supposed to be altered by every augmentation, but i am not a fan of having less options. Or how about adding the cleric's death augment (we know this exists because summoner + cleric = necromancer) to the tank's stalwart defence? I imagine this probably just adds a resistance, does aoe damage, or applies a debuff to enemies (all 3 are on my list again).
I am also wondering what happens when you augment a very unique archetype like the bard and summoner, but since we don't know much at all about these archetpyes, let's avoid this topic and stick to just what we know so far.
I am not going to say that this would be a bad design since it still leaves character build creation to be quite varied since you can choose between each secondary archetype and then between each school of augmentation in each archetype. This would let you focus on specific debuffs and cc types that may work better against specific opponents/ classes or may synergize with your party members better. However, I am worried that these reskins of abilities that each secondary archetype offers that will blanket over all primary archetype abilities will not alter your class enough from other classes with the same secondary archetype to make it feel unique.
One way they could approach augmentation is to design unique alterations of each ability with each school of augmentation. Since the number of abilities and the number of augmentations is known, it would be possible to design each spell's augmentation to be unique for each augmentation school. This would make classes feel unique from every other class with the same secondary archetype, but this would require a lot of work and may bring challenges when trying to balance the combat.
Is there other ways you can alter a spell that i did not mention on my list? Let me know if you have ability ideas that could be altered in cool and interesting ways. How do you feel about augments just being reskins of the primary archetype abilities?
I am slightly confused on how you are going to be able to alter every spell in at least 4 different ways per secondary archetype, (not to mention other sources of augmentation). While looking at many of the tank's abilities in Alpha 1, there is not much room for change. You can either:
-change the type of damage and add a debuff or buff of some kind (poison, bleed, elemental effect)
-add a form of CC or CC resistance(blind, slow, knockback, stun)
-add aoe or distance
For example, how would you add the mage's teleportation augment to an ability that just strikes a foe with your weapon, which many of the tank's abilities are? My guess would be to make it a ranged ability (which falls under my list above). Maybe each primary archetype ability isn't supposed to be altered by every augmentation, but i am not a fan of having less options. Or how about adding the cleric's death augment (we know this exists because summoner + cleric = necromancer) to the tank's stalwart defence? I imagine this probably just adds a resistance, does aoe damage, or applies a debuff to enemies (all 3 are on my list again).
I am also wondering what happens when you augment a very unique archetype like the bard and summoner, but since we don't know much at all about these archetpyes, let's avoid this topic and stick to just what we know so far.
I am not going to say that this would be a bad design since it still leaves character build creation to be quite varied since you can choose between each secondary archetype and then between each school of augmentation in each archetype. This would let you focus on specific debuffs and cc types that may work better against specific opponents/ classes or may synergize with your party members better. However, I am worried that these reskins of abilities that each secondary archetype offers that will blanket over all primary archetype abilities will not alter your class enough from other classes with the same secondary archetype to make it feel unique.
One way they could approach augmentation is to design unique alterations of each ability with each school of augmentation. Since the number of abilities and the number of augmentations is known, it would be possible to design each spell's augmentation to be unique for each augmentation school. This would make classes feel unique from every other class with the same secondary archetype, but this would require a lot of work and may bring challenges when trying to balance the combat.
Is there other ways you can alter a spell that i did not mention on my list? Let me know if you have ability ideas that could be altered in cool and interesting ways. How do you feel about augments just being reskins of the primary archetype abilities?
1
Comments
Unfortunately, I think discussion about augments can't progress until the identity of the 8 archetypes is fully established. At the moment, we have a small collection of abilities for 3 of them.
I'd also appreciate if they implement a systematic distinction between class abilities and weapon skills, because at the moment it feels like class abilities are capable of doing everything the weapon skill tree will offer - which makes it hard to see how augments will fit in.
(Why use weapon skills at all if my augmented class spells are way more powerful?)
All of this is to say: might still be too early to meaningfully discuss this because we don't have enough foundational info.
STILL
I think you can implement more interesting mechanics than those three, but like you said - it becomes more costly on development.
It's even more than that if we consider the racial augments and the plethora of augments from social organizations that could be in the game.
Because what do you do? make an augment for a single ability per class? or do you make a tree of augments that affect multiple abilities almost like another pool of talent options to choose from?
Some examples.
Heal/Regen/life stealing are tied to Cleric as a secondary archetype (SAT).
Bleeds/poison DOTs are tied to Rogue as a SAT.
Damage mitigation is tied to Tank as a SAT.
Melee abilities are tied to Fighter as a SAT
The majority of (area?) CC's are tied to Bard as a SAT.
Elemental abilities and associated (weak?) CC's are tied to Mage as a SAT.
What I wouldn't want to see is archetype definition being weakened by giving away their associated augment types to classes without an appropriate secondary archetype.
I think we should be expecting this. You would choose your SAT based on what kind of effects you want your abilities to have, like you mentioned. We were told that each SAT will have 4 schools of augmentation tho, so each SAT will actually have 4 different themes that can be applied to abilities. This is a lot of different unique themes and it will be interesting to see if Intrepid can come up with such a variety.
Also, just a personal opinion but I think bleed should probably go to fighter instead of rogue if i had to choose, but im ok with both having it.
This is very true. I'm wondering if there are any examples people can think of that's not this case, but I doubt it.
I'd really like it if they were implemented as new systems - not just flat stats.
e.g.
I find it hard to think of interesting Tank augments though...
Still balanced together to be the strength of one character, but with twice as much to do.
It's about the only way I would play a pet class.
Maplestory's Evan class basically has this - but it plays out more like a totem shaman where the summon fires a laser for like 3 seconds while you do other stuff.
Would be interesting to see what it's like if it's closer to what you describe - managing 2 GCD's.
But yeah, twice the damage is pretty broken - unless other augments also give you twice the advantage.
Then the battlefield will truly be chaos.
From what I understood there is no class tied to pet.
Like 2 weeks ago they posted something about the stable from Animal Husbandry profesion. (Post has been removed tough)
I asked if a player like me (Cleric/Cleric) could have a battle pet to fight with me. And with this profession it would be possible.
So it got me thinking How the summoner would be working then if any class can get a battle pet to fight with you if u work on it
Summoner/fighter, summoner/ranger should be the ones with non magical animal summons.
Fighter/summoner, ranger/summoner might as well be deleted.
Well Maybe Summoner will be the only class who can have 2 pets at once. 1 or both that can be buffed by the summoner unlike other class. Where the pet from profession only provide a tiny bit of additionnal Dps.
Expect that combat pet to be near worthless, functionally.
Especially in appearance.
A summoner/ranger and a ranger/summoner can have two very different playstyle identities, even with sharing the same school animals to pick from.
I think combat pets will probably have a similar role to that of the companions in SWTOR. Kind of there to help support solo play, not really there for group play or dungeon runs.
Well Combat pets are tamed. So they can only be found in Verra. Unlike Summons who re probably magic types for most.
Undead for Necro, maybe Elemantal from Mage, Weapons for Fighter, Magical shield for tank maybe.
These are fews of my speculations.
Why implement something so lame that the only purpose it ends up serving is to dilute the identity of the summoner?
I dont know. Im not the one who came up with the idea of beeing able to tame battle pet. And having a Summoner class. I just know Battle pet tamable will be allowed for all archetype. I didnt create the game im just sharing what i've been told.
Im also trying to figure out what will be the difference between a Summoner pet and a battle pet
This is something I have talked about before. We have no idea what augments are capable of or how much they can change an ability.
Look at mage/tank.
Mage has an ability called Prismatic beam.
Will the tank augment be a tacked on bonus like extra damage mitigation while channeling the beam.
Or can an augment completely rework the spell? It's now Prismatic barrier and you reflect all damage from the next X seconds instead of it being a beam at all.
We simply don't know the scale at which augments can or will change primary abilities. So this conversation is just guesswork based of kind of vague at times quotes.
Part 1 this statement is exactly why I dont like the 8x8 system so far. They could do away with the 64 combos, combos in which some are very similar to other, just weaker versions. It could be a waste of development, when they could focus on 25 unique classes with unique animations and 2-3 available weapon options per real class.
That would cover all fantasy playstyles.
Part 2 help with solo? This is mmorpg. Never played swtor but ESO recently introduced companions and it's so lame that people are exited to play with npcs instead of grouping with ppl.
I guess the collectable madness has replaced all forms of gaming.
And once again, this takes away from the summoner identity and the potential flavours that summoner/X could be added to the toolkit. Why dilute summoner for a weak, lame pet system? You like pets? Make a summoner. You like a specific pet? Pick the correct class combo.
I would like it. It give me a nice Zelda vibe in Smash Bros Brawl. That little shield who return attack
As a teenager, and with wolves being my fav animal, I liked the concept.
A few years later I was sick and tired of looking at our constant group, 9 beautiful classes, all using direwolves to increase the dps of the party. Such an ugly sight.
So yeah... introduce pets and watch everybody and their mother running around with pets for the extra benefits.
Yes... people need to learn to take no for an answer and respect other peoples character uniquenesses, in this case, summoner being the master of puppets.
But I guess it's 2021 and the age of entitlement has just began, no matter how ridiculous the products are for the ridiculous demands of the wallet holders.
I guess we can just agree to disagree here because I love the idea of the 64 combo system and blending classes in different directions.
A beast Master is a summoner who uses the bow, can you call a wolf pack or a bear to come and help him in a fight. A very summoner play style, with flavorings of a ranger.
Where is a falconer could summon a falcon that has various tricks for him to use. Such as marking targets for bonus damage or to maintain tracking on them even if they run behind obstacles (I'm pretty sure there was a bow or crossbow that had an ability like that in APOC) I'm picturing something like Mordecai's bloodwing from borderlands. So this plays like a ranger that also happens to have a pet.
I thought the companion thing was really nice in Star wars. I'm in the military, I have duty days, I have rotating shift work, I'm not able to play games on a set schedule with people in a guild. So I have to do a lot of leveling or grinding by myself and I just play with friends when I can.
Leveling some character class combinations by yourself can be difficult. Amongst all the ashes possibilities I see a bard struggling out in the wild by himself. That's where your combat pet comes in. I'm pretty sure you can do this with your chocobo in FFXIV. In Star wars you had a half a dozen you could choose from to go with you while you were questing, and you could choose their role and tank, healer, or damage to complement whatever you were playing. So I could level my sith pure blood Juggernaut as a tank and then my companion would be a damage dealer because I wouldn't do enough damage to down certain things.
I don't see a Bard having a pet bear that doubles as part of his circus act and as his tank while traveling damaging the identity of a necromancer summoning a zombie horde.
We have some pretty good examples of what augments are capable of and how much they can change an ability.
The examples are out there. You can ignore them if you wish, I suppose.
An augment can be tacked on to an Active Skill and can also radically and fundamentally change an Active skill. Depends on the specific augment and the specific Active Skill.
Two examples of augments in action given by devs.
Two data points is not enough for anything...
Correction, three... Although it should be mentioned they are all using mage as the example and two of them are pretty much identical examples.
While a summoner/fighter is summoner first and foremost, a fighter/summoner is a fighter.
The "summons" that a fighter/summoner has access to will be augments to fighter abilities, as opposed to summoners having actual summon abilities that they can then augment.
A fighter ability that is augmented via the summoner secondary class is not likely to be a permanently summoned pet, but is more likely to be a temporary summoned sword or shield - rather than the fighter using their sword or shield for that same ability.
Obviously this is all speculation, but the basic point that a summoner/fighter is a summoner and a fighter/summoner is a fighter is not speculation.
A tank summoner will summon a shield
A rogue summoner will summon a dagger
A ranger summoner an arrow
A cleric summoner will summon a book
A mage summoner will summon a staff
A bard summoner will summon backup vocalists
I rly cant see them being picked for mains. Summoner as secondary will either steal away from summoner/x or be weak and weird.
But I can see the summoner/x options being flavourable (if people stop asking for animal husbandry combat pets).
By the way, since IS has said many times that in AoC you will need to get involved with the comnunity, any discussions bringing up "I work so I cant find groups" lose any credibility.
Steven has said there will be things that you can do solo, but if you count on pets giving you help, then count on every player and every group to have pets for the benefits.
Being able to summon a shield to block attacks from an enemy (say, a ranger) seems really interesting to me.
Summoning a magical dagger to the behind of my target that mirrors my attacks for a few seconds seems pretty decent as well - guarantees I can get a backstab, even from right in front of my target.
As for rangers, Yondu seems to do fine with what is essentially a summoned arrow.
Honestly, there are so many possibilities for summoner as a secondary, I don't see why there is an issue with it.
Edit; almost anything with an over time effect could be considered a summon. Summon a patch of oil to cause others to slip over, summon spikes to impale others, summon vines to ensnare others. While these could be argued to not need to be */summoner abilities, they all could fall under that secondary class just fine.