Giving all Hand Wearables Active Abilities & Fixing the Thaave Hammer

Ideas
1

Hello again frens! Hopefully everyone has managed to have a good read of Gotchiverse Bible Chapter 4 (GB4) by now and has a bit more spare time due to the playdrop winding down :slight_smile:

I was particularly interested in the wearable section and think Pixelcraft have done an awesome job of coming up with a system that gives great wearable diversity but is still simple enough for new players to figure out.

However, I would like to propose two ideas for discussion:

  • Extending active abilities to all hand wearables by implementation of new abilities Self Buff, AoE Buff and AoE Debuff,
  • Changing Thaave Hammer to a Ranged Weapon to match its +BRN synergy

Proposal 1: Extending Active Abilities to All Hand Wearables

In GB4, 28 of the 68 hand wearables were identified as weapons which we can assume have the core function of actively dealing damage. That works out to be 10,465 weapons in total for ~20,000 aavegotchis currently in circulation. Interestingly, there were no wearables identified that could actively perform other essential MMORPG tasks such as healing/buffing or debuffing.

I propose that all hand wearables be given some form of actionable ability. Some of the categorisations given in GB4 such as “Healthy Edible” would even suggest that some wearables could be eaten, consumed or activated (perhaps at a later date in development). Whether or not this is intentional, it would make great UX sense that, as an example, a gotchi could slurp on a milkshake in their hand for a temporary speed boost.

I would like to propose that every hand wearable can initially be given one of the following 5 actionable ability categories:

  • Melee Weapon
  • Self Buff
  • Ranged Weapon
  • AoE Buff
  • AoE Debuff

Assumptions of this categorization:

  • Self Buff strength is dictated by Melee Power,
  • AoE Buff/Debuff strength is dictated by Ranged Power
  • The AoE spell implementation is as simple as possible. i.e. You cast AoE spell and all units within a fixed radius of your gotchi are affected at the time you cast the spell. No special targeting system.

The below diagram also helps show this breakdown and examples of the 3 new categories.

image
image2422Ă—1258 366 KB

Advantages

  • Better play style diversification, engagement and team building as players can now build towards healer and support style roles in addition to damage dealers,
  • Theoretically, only ~50% of gotchis can hold one of the currently available weapons. Rather than dilute wearables by minting more weapons, we can make use of existing hand wearable to fulfil other important MMORPG roles in the Gotchiverse, (there are currently 24,910 hand wearables in existence)
  • Better UX. It’s extremely simple to tell a newcomer “If your wearable is held in the gotchis hand, it has some kind of actionable ability”,
  • Melee Powered Self Buff wearables make sense as they compliment a melee play style. E.g. an all Melee player might equip an axe and a hand wearable that temporarily boosts attack speed for explosive melee plays.

Disadvantages

  • More dev time to incorporate. (As this is an extension though we would have to accept that it is something that gets rolled out incrementally at a later date by Pixelcraft),
  • Benefit 1/2 system could become unbalanced as we are now changing 40 wearables to actionable type equipment (however, this could potentially be balanced by retaining the benefits for those wearables and giving the existing melee/ranged weapons benefits 1/2 as well),

Proposal 2: Change Thaave Hammer to Ranged Weapon to Match its +BRN Synergy
The Thaave hammer is currently a melee weapon but adds +1 BRN to a gotchi. Propose to make it a ranged weapon (imagine smashing the ground and sending out a lightning bolt wave!) to bring it in line with its trait synergy.

Note this would then mean we would have to introduce 2 new melee weapons to even out the melee vs. ranged weapon numbers again. I would propose the clutch (@coderdan :wink: ) and the skateboard as it would be entertaining to see a gotchi wailing on lickquidators with these two items. Completely open to suggestions on the skateboard but clutch is non-negotiable.

I’ve made the below spreadsheet as a first pass of what categories each hand wearable falls into. Feel free to make comments in the sheet or reply to this thread.

4 Likes
2

Couple of quick thoughts for now…

  1. balancing ranged vs melee is a moot point, the gotchis come with a ranged weapon.
  2. Thaave could be melee, with alt attack as you describe, doing damage in a radius.
  3. We can do most of this in a slightly simpler way, using just the tools given already. I’ll come back to that later, but the system they gave us can be tweaked easily by making bonus 1 be a stronger effect than bonus 2 and adding a third row for the 5 types of effects you just described that says what the sphere of influence is.
3

Great work @SlickBB. I strongly support his as it would balance the power between hand wearables and give much more varied gameplay for pvp/pve. My suggestion in terms of implementation would be all non-weapon hand wearables work the same as godlike auras but only limited time e.g. gotchi with milkshake triggers the action and a AoE HP replenshiment is activated for 5 seconds with a 10second cooldown. Hopefully this would lower the dev time as permanent auras are already being implemented for godlikes.

4

Excellent write up as always :smiley:

I shared this in the WTF and thought maybe it’d be good here as well for more discussion:
"
I would really love to play with healing items.

However, it’s a bit difficult at the moment to see how everything is coming together though. We don’t really understand how significant the inherent HP regen is for gotchis.

Nevertheless I do believe healing to be a critical element for fun gameplay. If healing is mostly dominated by HP regen, then it’s going to be more solo play than group efforts.

Some ideas to play with for healing:

I see there to be three types of healing/support- direct instant heal, heal over time (regen), and damage absorption.

Regen:
Flags or other healing items might also be able to spawn a healing circle in which players could run inside to regen faster.
Bandages - a bit off topic, but bandages made with alchemica would be a great thing to have in-game.

Instant:
Fire healing hearts at players to instant heal them.

Shield:
Fire a shield at frenly player which absorbs X amount of hits or dmg
Spawn a circle on the ground which is a damage absorbing bubble- it could absorb 100% of damage for X hits or reduce damage by X % for a timer or until X damage is absorbed.

I’m trying to think of things that aren’t too far of a stretch from the current fidelity.
"

I also agree with Mark in that permanent auras be reserved for GL. But we can also play with cooldown related auras which cost AP to use.

Flags could be active auras. That is, you have to click to use them and it consumes significant AP. The aura could be on a timer of a few seconds or minutes and might be really cool if the radius of the aura diminished with the timer. ie, it starts at a 10 tile radius and gradually shrinks to zero.

5

Could all of this just be simplified with temporary/actionable auras?
Flag = HP regen aura
Shield = Defense buff aura
Alcohol = Atk buff aura
Sign = Atk debuff aura
etc
I’m just aware that the more complication we add, the less likely we are to see it implemented any time soon. If we go all in on the auras which are getting implemented for godlikes anyway then we might see this stuff implemented with the rest of weapons.

6

TBH I was trying to differentiate them from the Aura’s for Godlikes (and potentially mythicals if I remember to bring my post on it up at next DAO meeting) as it takes away from those special wearables.

Personally I’m not too worried about seeing something implemented soon and could see us just using the weapons as per GB4 for a few months before anything else gets implemented. I would actually prefer if we got to play with weapons first before we try to lock anything in so we understand the targeting systems etc. better.

Heal/buff/debuff spells do seem like a pretty big MMORPG component we’re missing right now though. I know we have a ton of players that only like playing support and don’t want to have them left out :slight_smile:

7

Hmm I kind of disagree fren. I think we’re all in agreement we want healing, buffs and debuffs. I don’t think we should allow this to become canon when we all agree this is the direction combat should go.

The sooner we get this in the game the sooner we can start balancing it, it’ll be a snowball effect which will get us to where we want to go far quicker. Alternatively, if we release combat without these features and then start balancing it we’ll end up months down the line and face a much harder job of adding these features into an already semi-balanced combat system.

Actionable auras as I described are essentially just AoE “spells” for healing, buffs and debuffs. If we can agree we want AoE spells then adding them to the non-weapon hand wearables seems the most direct and least frictional way to achieve this. We can add other types of spells later, such as targeted spells, with a lot more ease if spells already exist in the combat system.

4 Likes
8

Is it time to resurrect the actual design stuff? The system they have showed us is VERY simple, but leaves a lot open for details to be filled in, and there are numerous ways to make this thing do all the stuff you want it to.

I have a really nice system worked out for it, that does what you want, AND uses what they gave us so far, but it means adding a SMOL bit of complexity, and I’m not down to dive that deep again if there’s just four of us wanting a more full featured combat system,

My basic idea to enable everything, is to make bonus 1 stronger than bonus 2, and add bonus 3. Additionally, melee and ranged just become bonuses, and you can put any bonus in any slot. The rarity of the item is a multiplier, so that solves the “these do same thing” problem. The way it plays out is, your thaave hammer could be a Melee/Melee/AOE or a Melee/Randed/melee

Just do it like this…

Bonus 1 = 100% of whatever “1” boost is
Bonus 2 = 66%
Bonus 3 = 33%

So, a M/M/AOE, would do 166% melee damage * the rarity multiplier, and have a 33% sized AOE
M/R/M, would be 133% melee damage and 66% for ranged.

You could make the signs have melee damage on bonus 3, and they can hit for a 33% bonus, and still have other effects as their main.

9

My initial thinking was that the devs hadn’t introduced heal/buff/debuff spells to us yet due to time constraints and the added level of complexity (we now have to introduce timed “status” variables to gotchis whereas when its just a weapons system all we’re doing is reducing HP which is much easier to code).

If we can get them to roll out heal/buff/debuff AoE spells at same time as weapons though I’m all for it! We should put it to PC at this weeks DAO meeting :slight_smile:

As you say too, targeting would be something that’s easier to tweak down the line. For example, we can lock in now that a coconut heals and make it a simple self-consumable. But maybe in the future its something that can be tossed to an ally. Tons of cool targeting systems that can be rolled out once we know the “gist” of what each hand wearable should do.

Just a side note. I don’t think we should refer to these new hand wearable spells as actionable “auras” an aura implies something that has some kind of permanent buff/debuff to surrounding units within range. If we refer to these as “AoE Spells” we can still include instant heal spells etc. in this definition.

1 Like
10

The spatial modifiers for weapons, can be broken down into…

Range (0-?), Radius(anything over 0 is AOE), Speed

And then you have the damage type/effect, and whether it affects enemies only, friends only, or both, and probably one for ethereality as well.

11

I agree fren. I know there are dev limitations on what can be pushed out in the beginning, but I think it’s important to have a framework in mind for where we are going. As you say, to retrofit a battle system with completely new mechanics (healing) is going to be incredibly difficult. Not to mention, it will greatly disrupt the status quo and meta.

We could get a head start on this and hopefully shape things before the deadline (as with harvesters right now). From what I see, we have a long ways to go yet before we have actual pvp and use for the weapons.

I think understanding the current limitations of the game helps to shape this a bit. Things like no targeting system. We can still build something complex without it.

One thing I haven’t quite yet understood is the differentiation between friend and foe. Does this mean on some level we’ll have groups? I get that guilds ideally would always be on the same team, but what about random people we might want to play with?

2 Likes
12

I think we should just rip off the standard RPG tropes for interpersonal functionality. These have been developed over time and exist for a reason…

[GUILD] tags, ad hoc groups that share treasure while grouped… anything group and communication that’s survived the last 30 years of gaming and is still in all the big MMORPGs, is a feature we should have.

Renters would use the groups for sure, and start working out area denial tactics, and guild tags are part of a whole set of things we need to keep track of what is what and who is whom.

3 Likes