We spent last week deep-diving into many of the upcoming changes to Pantheon’s combat system. But there is an equally important category of upcoming changes that we’ll be focused on this week: character progression. Currently in Pantheon, most of our character progression is in the form of vertical power growth through levels or equipment upgrades. This week, we will focus on the ways we are broadening how players can develop their characters, starting with player skills.
Changes to Character Skills
As of today, character skills in Pantheon feel weightless and underutilized. While your skills have an impact, they reach their cap very quickly each level (especially combat skills), and the impact of your skills is vastly overshadowed by your level and/or your equipment. As such, there is little incentive to pay attention to your skills when seeking to progress your character.
Our goal in the upcoming Combat and Progression Update is to make your skill progression more of a mainline part of your character’s journey. Skill points should feel weightier, there should be more decision points related to skill progression and more time should be required to invest in the skills you really want to master.
Here are some of the ways we will be accomplishing this:
- All skills will cap at 5 points per level instead of 3.
- The rate of skill gain will be slower. Getting a skill to its cap will require you to intentionally focus on using that skill in many cases.
- To give weapon skills more impact, having a high skill a specific weapon type will not only improve your chances to hit opponents at all levels, it will also grant bonus damage to your attacks when using that weapon.
- The Techniques you can learn will be based on skills with specific weapons (e.g. swords, axes, daggers, etc.) rather than a damage type (e.g. slashing, crushing, etc.).
- Additional skills will be added (or adjusted) to represent other areas where your character might learn and improve over time. For example, the Shield skill will be updated to directly improve your chance to block attacks with an equipped shield as the Shield skill increases (this is in addition to the shield’s stats).
- Skills will play a major role in the Mastery system. A Wizard will need certain amounts of Conjuration skill to unlock parts of their Mastery progression, while a Rogue will need to continue improving their Tricks of the Trade skill to unlock more of their own.
The goal of these changes is twofold:
First, offloading some character power away from gear over to skills helps us balance itemization and create more interesting itemization overall.
Second, by recalibrating the power that comes from leveling up to include more power contribution from skills, it allows for a degree of horizontal progression to our player characters. When the item just won’t drop, or you can’t put the group together to finish out the level, skill progression will now be an additional avenue for growth. Not to mention when Mastery comes into play (more info in our next Dev Diary), the skills players choose to master will give them ways to distinguish themselves from others playing the same class.
Evolving Techniques
Our Technique system is intended to instill the feeling that as you become more skilled with a weapon, you should be able to wield it more effectively in combat. Anyone can swing a mace, but a skilled mace user should be able to use it to deflect blows, stagger opponents, and potentially turn the tide of a battle.
As many of you know, Techniques have undergone many rounds of tweaks and iteration. In their original form, their effects were critical from fight to fight, needing to be coordinated and stacked to get a target into a state where the group could handle it in a reasonable amount of time. The repetitious nature of Technique usage and the need for near voice-com levels of communication in applying Techniques in the right sequence led to players burning out. As a result, we swung the pendulum to make Techniques more optional and, as a result, largely overshadowed by class abilities providing the same effect. While the reprieve from Techniquegate has been appreciated by many, it has left a feeling in our players that Techniques are no longer living up to their potential.
We agree. Let’s break down the updates coming to Techniques in the Spring:
- Beyond the basic, damaging Technique players start with, they will have the opportunity to learn more varieties and stronger Techniques as they advance their skill in specific weapon types.
- Techniques will no longer be granted automatically when reaching the required skill. Instead, you will be prompted when you have reached the skill to learn something new. At this point, you will have to seek out trainers in the world and prove to them you are ready to learn the Techniques they teach.
- Techniques are going to be grouped into 3 different categories: damage, reactive and utility. Additionally, we are reducing the Technique slots for all characters to 3. Each slot will correspond to a specific category of Technique, meaning at any one time you can have 1 damage Technique, 1 reactive Technique and 1 utility Technique slotted.
- The reactive Techniques are important, as they represent the final form of how Techniques will be used as a tactical component of combat. Let’s break it down:
- In the first iteration of Techniques, they were used primarily to counter the inflated stats of chevron (elite) NPCs. In order to reduce the enemy’s armor, resistances, outgoing damage, etc., Techniques had to be stacked and coordinated in such a way to reduce all of these stats to a point where the group could survive and take down the target in a reasonable time.
- Coming with this Spring update, we will be heavily updating the NPC Trait system and altering the way many NPC traits will function. Instead of the Armored trait being a permanent, passive trait the NPC spawns with, the Armored trait will now give that NPC a chance to “armor up” during combat, drastically increasing their Armor Class for a period of time. Without an answer to this, your group will need to slog through the extra defense and eat the increased time to kill. But, if you or someone in your group has learned one of the Techniques designed to counter and break through the effects of the Armored trait, you have an answer indeed. We plan to extrapolate out this approach to how various Techniques will now be used to counter specific NPC traits, giving your choice of weapon and the Techniques you have learned the tactical and preparatory layer to combat we have wanted from the beginning.
- At the highest levels of weapon skill, you will be able to unlock a master technique for that specific type of weapon. Mastering a weapon type and learning this capstone technique will not be quick or easy. But if you do, you will have access to a special ability that signifies your status as a master of that weapon type.
These updates to skills and Techniques, and the introduction of the Mastery system, are expected to add robust progression paths and uniqueness to different players who choose the same class. It will be exciting to see one Dire Lord focused on mastering the Greatsword while another Dire Lord is dedicated to dual wielding Axes.
In our next developer diary, coming Wednesday, we will be talking about the Adventuring Mastery system and how it will dramatically change the character progression experience within Pantheon.
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More from the Combat & Progression Update Details Series
Part One: Overview
Part Two: Unified NPC Templates
Part Three: Combat Formula Adjustments
Part Four: Kill Credit & NPC Spawning
Part Five: Leveling & Experience Progression Adjustments