Week 4 – Tamarrion – Spells and balance!

Physics – archenemy of Tamarrion

This week has been all about working on the boss fight and the player spells.

What we’re trying to do, is to give the player a wide range of customization, both in itemization and spell variety.

After we introduced the God Power system, we started looking at combinations of spellsitemsgod powers, in an effort to create as many interesting “builds” as possible. The main thing we are looking at doing is removing the need for a cookie-cutter rotation build.

Spells – how do they work

Spells are split into five types (as mentioned in the post below):

Holy, Melee, Magic, Support and Defense.

For the GGC build, we’re going with 3x spells across the 5x types, totaling in at 15 spells.

There are also two different categories of spells, Actives and Passives. The player equips 4 active spells, with a Passive ability. A player may equip any combination of spells before entering a fight. As mentioned below, the spells are supposed to give the player an interesting choice in creating Combos, as well as creating the most effective builds after figuring out  the boss mechanics being faced.

Let’s talk a bit about passives for a second here:

The passives provides a specialization; a way for the player to give the player a specific play style. Example being the Melee Passive called Berserk. Let’s look at how it works and what kind of play it favours:

Each melee HIT; the player gains 1x Berserk. Each hit within 2 seconds of the first attack adds +1 berserk. If the player does not hit again within 2 seconds, the stack is lost. Maximum stacks are 5. Each stack gives the player 5% attack speed.

This obviously favors a melee heavy build. But the fact that Berserk has to be maintained, it’s worth investing in defense heavy and damage mitigating spells, as to give the player a way of actually stacking the Berserk Buff. Otherwise, the buff quickly becomes super fluent, as the player would never be able to reach the full stack.

There’s currently a interface in the menu that allows for full customization of spells. Although we have had some issues in streamlining the experience, the spell-menu as well as the inventory menu is looking to become extremely well-thought out and user-friendly. We’re still working a lot with the way we present information to the end user, and the amount of “clicks” (the amount of hassle it is to navigate through the menus) it takes to perform an action.

Now, let’s get back to the nitty-gritty of the spell balancing:

Each of the types of spells (holy etc) follows a general theme:

Holy is all about healing/damage – typical paladin traits.

Magic is all about heavy magic damage – typical Mage traits.

Melee is pretty obvious, slow and heavy or quick and mobile – typical Warrior traits

Support is all about mobility: movement speed and teleportation

Defense is all about damage mitigation, allowing the player to survive longer

Balancing

The spells have to be balanced as well. “Why should I choose this spell”. This is hard enough as it is. But, we’re trying to build each spells to fit a specific purpose: a specific play style.

We’re working on coming up with a damage calculation that allows for scaling, as right now we’re only working with a static base damage model, which can only be scaled up by modifiers such as critical hits.

I believe we’ve got to add a weapon slot in the items as well, to give the player more customization (this is fast becoming a buzzword) when it comes to building your own plays style.

The table showing all spells and how we’re balancing the spells. A lot of this is Work in Progress, so don’t mind the arbitrary numbers.

That’s about it for now. I’m off to create an Alpha build. Thank you for reading! I’ll leave you with Lord Valac.

Alpha Fever