Greetings Vampires!
It’s our hope that the chill of the creeping winter has treated you well and that you’re enjoying the darker, longer nights alongside us. Here at Stunlock Studios, we have been taking advantage of the darker nights, working more comfortably so that we can focus on the intricate and arcane.
That’s right, here in our crypts, we’re hard at work with the darkest and most horrid magic of all… math! Though we’ll spare you the most painful details, as we are merciful, we’ll instead show you the fruits of our labors. Today, Vampires, we’re going to take a nice bloody bite of one of the most integral parts of the RPG aspects of V Rising. As always, everything we share during development is subject to change.
Let’s talk gear, stats, progression, and of course… blood!
Embracing Your Fantasy
From the earliest days of V Rising development, when players first got their hands on the game, one thing was clear: there was a strong desire to bring your own unique vision of a Vampire to life. What should a Vampire look like? How should they feel? We’ve steadily refined and expanded the game with each update to help you live out that fantasy.
To give you the tools for this, we introduced new ways to express yourself, like adding armor appearances that let you shape your Vampire’s look to match your ideal vision. You can recolor your gear, override the appearance of your current set, and bring your flair to life in a way that feels truly yours. Alongside these visuals, we added “classes” of armor at different tiers, enabling you to tailor your combat stats to fit specific playstyles, whether you prefer the agility of a rogue or the spellcasting prowess of a caster. In this way, your character’s look and gameplay reinforce one another, making your vision whole.
We’re pretty happy with the options we’ve delivered so far, and while wardrobe improvements (especially in the weapon department) may still be on the horizon in 1.1, today’s blog isn’t about appearances.
V Rising is ultimately about the experience of being a Vampire. That experience comes to life not just in how you look but in how you play. With that in mind, let’s talk about combat stats because they’re about to get a massive overhaul.
Compulsively Counting
He’s got a lot on his mind.
We know that some stats ended up being much more powerful than others. There are a few ways to approach controlling those so that they don’t get too out of hand. For instance, one thing we tend to do is keep the amount of potential sources of an ability limited so that you can’t stack too much of it. That approach has worked well in the past, but it’s become harder to manage as we’ve continued adding more abilities, gear sets, and unique pieces of gear.
These stats generally aren’t an issue in the early stages of the game, but as you progress and acquire more powerful gear, they can begin to cause problems. Some stats start to climb very high, pushing the boundaries of mechanics and coming dangerously close to breaking them. Move speed is a big offender here, which can make it all too easy to evade a lot of attacks, both against bosses and against players.
At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves what we feel is the most important question when it comes to designing our gameplay. Could this be more fun? How we achieve that might require a little bit more explanation, and it’s a lot to take in, so you might want to grab yourself a nice glass of blood wine to settle in.
Step 1. Cap All Ability Statistics
Introducing a cap on ability statistics ensures that no single stat, even the strongest or most desirable, completely dominates your attention. The stats you gain from items will be high enough to let you cap multiple attributes, but you won’t be able to sink all your focus into just one, like movement speed. This opens the door to investing in other secondary stats, such as spell power, physical attack power, or cooldown reduction, without sacrificing overall effectiveness.
For example, even if movement speed feels essential, once you hit its cap, you can prioritize other stats to round out your build. This approach helps build diversity by encouraging you to spread your investment across multiple attributes.
In the example UI below:
- Dark red bars show how close you are to reaching the cap.
- Bright red bars indicate how far you’ve exceeded the cap.
- Hovering over the stat provides more specific details.
The dark red bars in this example UI represent how close you are to reaching the cap, the bright red represents how far over the cap you’ve gone.
Mousing over the stat will get more specific!
Soft Caps vs. Hard Caps
We’re implementing caps in two ways: soft caps and hard caps. These determine how bonuses apply and whether further increases are limited.
- Soft caps are the first line of defense to keep stats from becoming problematic. You’ll encounter these through long-term sources like gear, potions, passive spell bonuses, and blood types.
- Hard caps are the absolute upper limit of what you can reach and are just another safeguard. Examples of things that bypass the soft cap are temporary buffs like the ones you get from spells. This ensures that abilities and buffs still feel impactful without breaking the game. After all, it wouldn’t be fun to see abilities stop working just because your stats are too good!
Step 2. Make It Make Sense
We’ve broken down stat bonuses at the max level to cap out in very even and expected ways so that it’s easy to break down where you’re getting your bonuses from and, thus, easy to plan out how to get the stats you want. We’ve reworked gear, blood, potions, and passive spell tree bonuses to make it so you can accurately and easily plan out how to cap the stats you want and maybe even be able to do it without making a spreadsheet.
You can make a spreadsheet if you want, though. I know some of you really like making spreadsheets.
Step 3. Give You The Tools
One of the most important parts of this plan is that we’ve enabled you to understand the changes and allow you to mold your build to your liking. A lot of V Rising can make you feel stuck in using a certain legendary weapon, spell, or gear set because you have to adapt to the tools you have. The stats are set this way, so you have to match your play style to fit them. We hope that we can flip that around with this overhaul.
Between the Fusion Forge we mentioned in our last blog that will let you modify your jewels and weapons stats and the changes we’ll be making to armor, blood types, potions, and passive spell bonuses, we’ll be giving you all the puzzle pieces you need to get exactly the build you imagine, which should be a large step in letting you play your ideal Vampire in both PvE and PvP.
A little update on how the Fusion Forge is coming along.
It can be hard to imagine exactly what we mean by that, though, so here’s a little further glimpse into the changes coming.
Blood On The Dance Floor
So. Blood gives stats now.
You’re a Vampire. You should have seen this coming. A 100% efficiency Blood Type should be a major part of maxing out the associated stat, leaving you room to invest in other avenues of reaching your ideal spread.
We’ve also done an all-around overhaul to the blood types! We wanted the blood types (except for Worker Blood, of course) to have applications in battle and give you more options to use in combat. Some of the convenient secondary abilities from the more utility blood types, like Creature Blood and Mutant Blood, have been moved to passive spell options instead. Those have also been reworked, and we’ll get into that a bit later.
As you progress into the later stages of the game, you’ll often have your preferred blood type on hand, and we’ve taken that into account. We’ve revisited the availability of certain blood types, when they appear in your journey, and how you acquire them overall. Now that we know you’ll likely want specific blood types more often and more reliably, we’ve made adjustments to strike a better balance. Rare blood types should now be a bit easier to obtain, and you’ll even be able to capture mutant Spitters in Gloomrot to keep a steady supply of Mutant blood on tap. They’ll also make for some particularly nasty servants, something to look forward to!
Who’s a good spitter? You are!
You might find yourself in an awkward position with this rework and the whole stat overhaul. You may want the stats from one blood type but the special ability from another. Thankfully, some of Vardoran’s invaders happen to be skilled alchemists. After drinking their blood, you’ll gain the ability to craft a new station, the Blood Mixer. With this new workbench, you’ll be able to perform brilliant blood alchemy, mixing in bonus effects from other bloods to better tailor your blood type to your build!
To give you an idea of what to expect, these are the general themes of the Blood Types in 1.1:
Worker Blood: Increase resource yield, faster resource mining, higher mount speed, and a chance to instantly destroy a resource node when you strike it.
Creature Blood: Increased health, health regeneration, movement speed, healing received, resistances, and a heal and temporary attack speed boost on Vampire bite.
Warrior: All about weapons and weapon skills, largely focused on giving benefits around weapons and skill cooldowns from your weapons.
Rogue: Much like before, it is focused on improving movement speed, physical critical strike chance, and physical critical strike damage.
Brute: This blood type is still focused on healing and some light physical power like before, but it’s now acquired warrior’s ability to parry, making it the tankier up-close-and-personal blood type.
Scholar: Now one of a handful of spell-focused blood types, Scholar maintains its ability to free-cast spells occasionally but is focused on defensive spell power. In addition, it also resets your spell cooldowns when you use your ultimate ability.
Draculin: Another spell-focused blood type, this one more set on the offensive aspects of spellcasting. It has a small chance of awarding free casts, but it focuses more on spell critical hits and leech.
Mutant: The summoner’s blood! This now increases spell power, summoned minion damage, and the recovery rate of your ultimate ability. It also spawns mutant rats when you cast your ultimate. For all the vampires who dreamed of the ability to control mutant rats, this one is for you.
A potential layout for a mixed Warrior / Rogue Blood. We’re still working on the values, so these are not final.
Equip Yourself With Power
While the general concept of the gear sets will remain pretty similar in terms of getting a bulk of your stats from them, other sources of craftable items will become much more fluid and give you more control over your sources of enhancement. Primarily, this comes in three forms.
The first step is a change to all gear sets, focusing on balancing their stats and equalizing set bonuses. Armor now provides cleaner, simpler, and more even bonuses, making it much easier to see when you’re approaching a stat cap without dealing with messy or uneven totals. As long as you make adjustments in other areas like blood, potions, or individual set pieces, you’ll be able to avoid wasting any of your power by exceeding the new caps.
Each individual change is small, but it adds up.
The second change to itemization will introduce a much wider array of stat buff potions. It will no longer be just the Potion of Rage and Witch Potion for physical and spell power, but we’re also introducing different “Elixirs.” This is a new variety of potions, and you’ll only be able to activate one at a time, but each one is associated with a different secondary stat to fill out your build further.
One potential new Elixir. These numbers may change significantly before 1.1.
The third is mostly applicable during the later stages of the game. Still, as we’ve mentioned with our introduction of the Fusion Forge, we will be giving you the ability to mix and match the stats and benefits of your legendary weapons. This is also going to be true of the Unique Artifacts! While they will keep their specific, unique abilities, the statistics on them are now randomized and can be edited through the Fusion Forge. This should give you a lot more flexibility with your gear. You will no longer have to adapt to the weapon's stats, but now you can make sure your Unique Artifact feels properly legendary and mold it to be your ideal weapon of war.
Two different versions of the Unique Artifact, Apocalypse. We’re still working out the values, but this should give you an idea.
There’s also a third, less statistic-related addition that will mix up the gameplay even more, but we’re saving that surprise for a little later.
It might have something to do with this guy.
Magic In The Air
Your spell passives will be a new and major contributing factor to your character stats. These ancient powers you tap into with the Altar of Stygian Awakening provide many useful bonuses that you can unlock at your leisure for Stygian shards, adding to your overall power.
Now, you can choose which passives to have active at any given time, turning them into a more engaging and dynamic part of your build instead of something you simply unlock and forget. As you gain more spell points, you’ll unlock additional slots for passive abilities, each providing a significant boost to help round out your build!
A placeholder UI element showing the selected passives towards the bottom, between the Blood School Spells and the equipped spells.
A mockup of the new Passives page in your spellbook. The specific ability numbers and effects are still a work in progress.
Here are a few more examples of potential passives. As with the other images, the specifics are still in development.
Schemes Unfolding
All together, we hope these changes culminate in an experience that lends itself to an all-around more immersive, more fun, and more interesting Vampire journey. Through customization, you better get to feel your fantasy come to life! These are, of course, far from the only changes that are coming to Vardoran in the coming update, but we thought you, our most dedicated and interested Vampire, might enjoy a more thorough look into what we’re crafting.
That’s all for now! We hope you found this a fitting meal to get you through this leg of the cold winter season. However, this isn’t the last time you’ll hear from us before winter is out! Keep an eye on our socials for more news in the future, and we’ll see you in the new year.
Happy Holidays, my creatures of the night!
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Lots of love and a pint of blood,
/The Marketing Team