Hey all! This week, I wanted to talk about another game mechanic we've not touched on much yet. Elemental Resistances provide percentage-based modifiers to incoming damage when that damage is of a specific element. This can either increase or decrease the amount of damage taken depending on the attack used. Classes in Crystal Horizons have their own Elemental Resistance modifiers, which are applied to the unit additively when that class is selected.
For an example, in some of our previous updates we've shows off the Reclass window, where relevant stats for each class are displayed. For the sake of convenience, I'll take a screenshot from a previous update, showing Lumimancer's stats at Level 10. Lumimancers receive 20% less damage from Light aspected attacks, such as other Lumimancer spells or an Archer with Light Arrows, but are vulnerable to the Dark element due to their -15% value. In the screenshot, the class also has a 5% resistance to some other elements, but we have since removed that due to some class design frameworks I'll talk about shortly.
In terms of how total Elemental Resistance is calculated, we assume that the base unit has a 0% value in all elements. The Elemental Resistance values from the class are then added directly to those values. Equipment is then calculated and applied, and then finally any relevant status effects are applied. We're still working out exactly how we want to apply equipment and status resistances, whether that's additive or multiplicative; further testing should help us decide exactly how we want to handle it, or if we want to make any other changes to the formula.
Now, to follow up on those class design frameworks I mentioned earlier. Internally, we categorize our classes into one of five categories depending on their skills, stats, weapon availability and expected playstyle. These categories will likely not be relevant for the game itself, and are expected to be used solely for our own organisational benefit. The five categories we use are as follows: Tank, Melee Martial, Ranged Martial, Full Caster and Partial Caster. I'll briefly touch on each category and talk about where each of our revealed classes fit right now.
Tanks are designed with high survivability first, and often feature skills that allow them to control the battlefield effectively. Knight is the only class we've revealed in this category, and is the reason why I've brought this topic up in an update about Elemental Resistances. In order to help with their expected playstyle, classes in this category have the highest total Elemental Resistance across all elements. We decided that the weak multi-resist would be something exclusive to Tanks (mostly), so removed it from the classes that otherwise had it.
Melee Martial classes include Thief and Berserker; classes that primarily deal physical damage with melee weapons. Ranged Martial classes are similar, but trade some raw power for attack range. Archer is the only revealed Ranged Martial class so far. The main distinctions between Full Casters and Partial Casters are whether or not the class has the Staff weapon, and how reliant they are on casting spells and consuming MP. Lumimancer, Pyromancer and Stormcaller are considered Full Casters for this reason. Stormcaller is a unique case, as the other two are Staff only, but Stormcaller can also use Bows. Despite this, the class is still designed to primarily use spells, and have class skills that alter the functionality of Bows to achieve this.
Partial Casters are the most broad role. These are classes that utilize both physical damage and magical damage, both skills and spells. Unlike Full Casters, these classes cannot use Staves, and therefore are unable to access Staff weaponskills to recover MP or augment spell properties. Instead, these classes are expected to utilize basic attacks, weaponskills, FP-spending skills and MP-spending spells in order to balance their resource consumption and generation. Some of our most complex class designs fall into this role, including Enchanter and Occultist.
I've been very brief with my explanations here, but I primarily wanted to talk about the distribution of resistances across these categories. Tanks generally have the most resistances, Full Casters and Partial Casters have strong resistances to elements that their spells cover, and Melee Martial and Ranged Martial classes have few to no base resistances, but also no weaknesses. This doesn't account for class skills or equipment, however. While this system may make some classes weaker in some scenarios, most spellcasters have access to more than one damaging element and should be able to work around bad matchups.
I'll stop there for today; progress on getting the Closed Beta ready is going well, I'll share more info next week as we come closer to the date we initially projected. With that, thanks for tuning in, and see you next week!