New Skill & Equipment System

So far, Chatventure had a class system that’s pretty common across RPGs - You pick your class and get a set of skills to choose from. In order to make things more flexible, people could change their class at any time, with each class having their own level and skills.

Well, not any longer.

Class and skill selection have been removed from the game, instead, players now build their own “class” by just equipping a weapon and an armor. You no longer level your class, instead you’ll work on your weapon proficiency for a certain weapon category. Every category has multiple weapons to choose from, which can change the play style within a category quite drastically. And just as before with classes, you won’t be bound to a certain weapon category and can change it at any time by just equipping another one.

Skills

Each weapon comes with up to 4 of them. Usually, every weapon within a category will share one or two skills, while the other vary depending on their supposed use cases. As an example, there will be magic wands with skills specializing in damage (fire), healing (holy) and buffing/tanking (ice). Further, you’ll get up to one skill from your Armor, which in most cases will offer some form of utility.

Passive Effects

The main focus for Armor (besides their stat bonuses) will be their passive effects.

Some of the simpler ones include reduced incoming damage, increased mana regeneration or just plain damage boosts, but there will also be some with more complicated effects in the near future, like reflecting some of the incoming damage back to the attacker.

Rest Actions

Finally, Weapons and Armors can feature unique actions which can be used in between encounters, in addition to using a consumable or just waiting for the next encounter.

No Armor Proficiency levels

I’ve been thinking about having separate Armor and Weapon proficiency levels for some time now, but that would make things just unnecessarily complicated. Determining and balancing a player’s relative strength would have been a bit awkward - say we have someone with a very high weapon and a very low weapon proficiency. That would mean they would oneshot everyone, but also be oneshotted by everything in return. That’s lame and hard to avoid, so instead you can now wear whichever armor fits your current weapon level.



Anyway, I hope there will be enough options to make players experiment with different combinations in a small “build your own class”-style and break things with unexpected combinations. Show me those mage tank skills once the bot is back online, guys!