In Gatewalkers, the player has a vast arsenal of skills at his/her disposal, which makes it possible to survive even in the most hostile environments. The basic types of skills are:
- skills from items (x8)
- quick slot items, like grenades (x8)
- passive skills (x9)
- chargeable skills (x1)
- combo skills (x1)
- and co-op combo skills (x1)
In this post, we’re going to cover two types of skills:
- passive skills and
- chargeable skills.
Passive skills
In addition to skills obtained through wearable items and skills available through quick slot items, you can also unlock passive skills. The goal of passive skills is to constantly (without any additional player activity) buff selected character attributes. For example, some passive skills increase critical damage, while others increase defense or make the character restore stamina faster.
Proper selection of passive skills opens new options for developing your character. You can create characters that are:
- balanced, for example, a warrior that deals a lot of damage and at the same time has reasonable survivability in combat,
- specialized, for example, an assassin that deals formidable critical damage but at the cost of very low defense.
The passive skills window
To assign passive skills, you have to click on the highlighted region on the main bar (1).
This opens the passive skills window.
In the left panel, you can browse unlocked passive skills. These are divided into five categories:
- domination (1)
- charisma (2)
- discipline (3)
- determination (4)
- smart (5)
To make searching for skills easier, the top of the panel contains switches that allow the player to filter passive skills based on their type.
The right panel features the wheel of passive skills (6), which contains the skills that are activated. Only those passive skills that are on the wheel are active and grant their effects during gameplay. All the effects granted by currently activated passive skills are presented below the wheel (7). Moreover, the center of the wheel contains the chargeable skill slot (8). The chargeable skill depends on the currently activated passive skills (more on that below).
Unlocking passive skills and passive skill slots
Passive skills are unlocked in the player’s skill tree, much like item recipes (we’ll describe the new skill tree in our next post). A list of available passive skills is presented in the preview popup that appears when you click a node on the skill tree.
To unlock a passive skill you have to unlock all the recipes for a given item in the skill tree. For example, to unlock the “Clear Mind” skill, first you’ll have to unlock all the recipes for the Force Staff, that is, the basic recipe, all the elemental recipes, as well as the epic and legendary recipes.
It is worth noting that the number of available passive skill slots grows with the number of unlocked recipes in the skill tree. The thresholds are as follows:
- 3 passive skill slots after the player unlocks Tier 3 recipes
- 5 passive skill slots after the player unlocks Tier 5 recipes
- 7 passive skill slots after the player unlocks Tier 6 recipes
- 9 passive skill slots after the player unlocks Tier 7 recipes
Passive skill levels
Some passive skills appear in the skill tree more than once. For example, the “Brutal” skill, which increases the chances of critical hits, appears four times. This means that you can acquire the same passive skill multiple times. Each time you unlock the same skill you increase its level. However, different skills have different maximum levels (from 1 to 3). That is why acquiring a skill that is maxed out doesn’t make much sense (unless you want to unlock an item recipe).
Having the same passive skills appear more than once on the skill tree gives the player more flexibility when planning his/her build, deciding which branches should be invested in and which should remain unexplored. Thanks to this property, players can achieve similar character effects by unlocking different regions of the skill tree.
Chargeable skills
After choosing which passive skills are active, the player gains access to a chargeable skill. There are five chargeable skills available, each corresponding to one of the five types of passive skills. The number of activated passive skills of each type determines the chargeable skill. If the majority of activated passive skills are “domination” skills, the player can use the “Tyrant” skill. If most of the activated skills are from the “smart” category, the player has the “Ranger” skill at his disposal. Below, we list all the chargeable skills available in the game and the corresponding passive skill types:
- LEADER skill (majority of passive skills from the charisma category) - all allies within 4 meters become immune to attacks for 4 seconds. Removes all Crowd Control effects from the caster
- TYRANT skill (majority of passive skills from the domination category) - 20% more power on skills for 10 seconds
- SCHOLAR skill (majority of passive skills from the discipline category) - the caster gets 200% shorter cooldown time for 10 seconds
- DEFENDER skill (majority of passive skills from the determination category) - Restores 35% of max armor; this value is additionally modified by the characters Susceptibility to Healing
- RANGER skill (majority of passive skills from the smart category) - Restores 50% of max stamina
After selecting passive skills and activating the chargeable skill (1), you have to charge the skill to 100% before you can use it (2). To get to 100% you have to pick up charges (3) dropped by hit enemies.
To sum up, we gave you a sneak peek of the passive and chargeable skills system. We hope you’ll like them. Let us know what you think and remember to try them out during the upcoming BETA tests, which start February 3, 2021!
Best,
Gatewalkers Dev Team
P.S. Remember that the things we’re writing about can be still considered “work-in-progress”, so it’s still possible that the mechanics presented here will change. We’re counting on your feedback!
