Shattered World - Pt. V - Character Progression and Combat

PvP

After making the last post, I had some time to think, and some questions to answer. It seemed to me that I had missed a few important details in Character progression. First, though I want to go into a bit about PvP and how it's connected to what I posted last time.

First off, biomass. Biomass can be aquired through the killing of NPCs (level 300+ only) the killing of players or from farming. If you die, no matter how you die, you loose biomass and all equipped weapons that are not appearance upgrades. The lost biomass will come out of your floating pool first, then out of appearance upgrades starting at your highest level upgrade.

While I'll go into it more, the way pvp and character progression connect most directly is that you are only allowed to attack people +/- 5 levels. This is important because every ten levels your biomass doubles, this means you'll be fighting people within 75-150% of your current level. Enough to allow some ganking, but not enough to ever make it honestly easy. Now why would I limit you in such a way when the levels are theoretically infinite? Because it means that all players of all levels are needed by a good guild. So you've only made it to level 10? Great! You can walk right past an entire guild and start attacking the buildings that aren't inside the town proper. You can get low level gangs together to run around ganking or destroying unprotected buildings in the middle of nowhere, or you can run medium level, testing different builds until you find the one that works for you and then polishing it to a perfect shine.

There are a few important exceptions, though. The first is within the limits of a town belonging to your guild. Inside those limits you may attack any player, no matter their level, that is not a member of your guild or alliance. Second is declared guild wars, these will allow you to attack within fifteen levels, and finally Alliance wars, which raise the limit to 30.

But enough of that for now...

Character Progression Part II - Abilities

Now last time I said something I live by, abilities are fun! Clicking things and watching something happen is by far and away one of the funnest things in games. The problem with staying out on the macro as often as I do is that sometimes you loose sight of the little things. Like, the fun and what not. I really hope that this isn't the case with my system.

You'll begin with the standard row of action buttons, 1-10, this is your general action bar. The first three are the basis of all future combat, these are punch, block and kick, arguably the basis of all martial arts. While unarmed punching is your basic damaging attack, blocking will reduce the damage of the next incoming hit and kicking will do some damage and cause knockback. All players have those basic abilities, and if you open the skill window, will show up in the 'unarmed' skill cloud.

You see, each weapon type has it's own "ability cloud" they aren't trees, as such, rather groupings of abilities which can be preformed while carrying that type of weapon. Each one has a minimum statistical requirement unlocking for you to use as soon as you meet it's minimum requirements. Each picture will also have a set of small pictures you can zoom in on to it's left connected to it with lines pointing to it, and on it's right with lines pointing away from it. During battle, if you use the ability to it's left, then it, it's effectiveness will be increased, the effectiveness of an ability on it's right will be likewise increased if it's used first.

Combat

Combat itself isn't too terribly different from what you've played before. There will be an auto-attack, but very minor global cooldown and significantly more powerful active abilities so no real reason to use it as a crutch. I wish I could say combat would be new and innovative, but it's something I've seen done right enough times to not want to re-invent the wheel with it.

I do have a few minor additions though. The weight of a weapon or shield will counter your speed, increasing the cool down time of abilities using it. Also, a shield does not effect your damage mitigation what so ever. That is why you have a block ability, when you have a shield equipped, it will take the physical damage of the next attack straight to it's own HP when you block. Damage it too much and it breaks, permanently gone. Of course people with high enough channeling statistics, I haven't decided on the appearance for that one just yet, can channel biomass into a shield healing it. Actually, all weapons have HP,which is why they are destroyed when you die, this comes into play when you parry or block with a weapon instead of a shield.

It's comparatively boring. However, it's the secondary anchor, opposite character creation, so it needs to be stable and remain intuitive and relatively fun for years to come.