Designing Abilities with Augmentation in Mind

McShave

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?

maouw

Hey, there have been a few threads of people suggesting options for augments, like this one: (https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/47908/augment-brainstorming)

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.

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STILL

I think you can implement more interesting mechanics than those three, but like you said - it becomes more costly on development.