Hey Everyone,
I wanted to devote this Dev Blog to the recent content release for Smoldering Trenches and Ashbreather Enclave. With this update we introduced itemization updates that have raised many great questions. My goal with this post is to outline our long-term vision, and share how we’re incorporating your feedback as we refine this system.
Every Point Matters
One of our core goals for itemization is that every additional stat point has a noticeable impact on your character’s performance. This is a defining goal, meaning we have architected our itemization and progression as a whole with this goal in mind. Let’s take a quick look at one of the games Pantheon is heavily inspired by: EverQuest. One of my (admittedly few) criticisms of EverQuest was in the relatively low impact of attributes. In my experience, players needed large amounts of a single stat to feel anything like a meaningful increase in power or effectiveness. And certainly on the smaller scale of individual item upgrades, getting a +3 or +5 or even a +10 to most stats in EverQuest felt largely negligible. This is one area where Pantheon is taking a decisively different approach: low stat numbers with high impact per point.
Where Does Power Come From?
To better understand the recent stat updates, it’s important to clarify how player power is determined and how it scales. In many MMOs character power was heavily tied to player level, where gaining a level or two often had a greater impact on combat outcomes than adding 50 points of Charisma or 100 points of Agility. This again is where we’re taking a different approach in order to give our stats higher impact. One of the most fundamental RPG experiences is the notion of leveling up, and getting innately stronger by doing so. Leveling up in Pantheon does make your character stronger: it increases your Health and Mana pool, allows you to raise skills caps, grants combat bonuses towards NPCs as you outlevel them, and provides a stat bonus every 5 levels (which I’ll elaborate on in a bit). But the primary way your character’s power increases is through the stats you obtain and improve via gear and buffs.
Now, this approach creates a challenge: without relying on level-ups as the primary driver of player power (in order to make stats from gear and buffs more impactful), players naturally become more dependent on gear and buffs to feel any sense of progression… so if no gear is dropping, your power progression will be limited no matter how many levels you gain. But how exactly are we avoiding this gear-related power stagnation?
Two Ways of Power Baselining
The first form of power baselining is through what we’ve internally classified as “uncommon” gear. An example of this is the gear that drops off of the bandits near Availia. It is relatively easy for melee characters in their first few levels to get a total of +2 STR and +2 STA from the four pieces of Scuffed armor that drop in this area. Likewise, caster and priest classes
have a total of +2 WIS and +2 INT they can get from the Grassweave armor in the same camps. This approach is expanded throughout the other group-centric camps in each zone. “Uncommon” gear is intentionally low stat and relatively easy to obtain for the sake of characters having a path to improve their baseline as they level up. But this “uncommon” gear is not intended to be the goal, or something that you chase. These items are heavily surpassed in power by the rare, ultra rare and epic grade items that drop from bosses, are crafted via rare crafting recipes, or rewarded to players after completing perilous quests.
The second form of additional power baselining is coming soon and will be available to characters as they level up. We will be adding power milestones every five levels; this will add a nice bit of ‘oomf’ back to leveling up. To do this, we will be updating the current traits you can buy from the Class Trait vendors to give a +1 to all stats instead of the current +1 to a specific stat. Eventually this stat bump will occur automatically as part of the level up event every five levels. But for now, players will still need to pick up these traits from the Class Trait vendors every five levels as they do currently.
With these additional baselining stats flowing through levels, we are able to reassess the increased stats on gear that recently debuted in the Enclave.
How will this change items? What will tooltips look like next? I’m not going to spill all the beans, but here are a few key changes:
- A non-raid item will have a maximum of 4 attributes (STR, STA, etc.)
- A non-raid item will have a maximum of 2 secondary effects (+Resist, +Dodge chance, etc.)
- We will be pulling way back on negative attributes, using it only sparingly once a larger overall item pool has been implemented.
“Soft-Specialization” in Pantheon
The last thing to cover is the design intent behind “soft specialization”, i.e. how classes are able to amplify specific groups of abilities by leaning into specific stats. We’ll start with a quick overview using the Rogue as an example. The Rogue has many different abilities ranging from direct physical attacks, stealth, traps, poison procs, armor debuffs, bleeds, and more.
In most cases, an ability will have a shared theme with other abilities within a class kit, and “soft-speccing” will allow players to amplify the abilities within that theme via a specific stat. In the case of the Rogue, their direct physical attacks are amplified by Agility, their poison-based attacks are amplified by Intellect, and their bleed-based attacks are amplified by Stamina. You can see which stat modifies a specific ability, and what aspect of the ability it modifies, in that ability’s tooltip:
(An important note here is that these stat-based modifiers are in addition to what the stats do innately. In the example above, Stamina is still increasing your overall Hit Points regardless of what abilities it is modifying.)
The reason to bring up this system is because it has an impact on how items are statted. In order to allow players to explore their class specialization more deeply, some items may contain “non-meta” stats that allow for heavy specialization into specific abilities, as well as items that allow for a more balanced approach. The goal of itemization is to make sure player power doesn’t stagnate, but also to provide room for players to make true trade-offs with their soft-speccing. If you want to be a glass cannon, only able to take a few hits before you go splat, we want to support that.
A Final Word
We are excited to have you on this journey with us as we dial in player power. The needle we’re trying to thread here is a tricky one. Not just with combat and stats, but with the kind of classically spirited game we’re making as a whole: balancing inspiration with innovation, classic feel vs. evolution, etc. Our approach to combat and stats is on the more unique side. I firmly believe that when all is said and done, the result will be a solid blend of familiarity and fresh depth.
As always, your feedback is invaluable. So as you play, keep telling us what you think. As we progress, keep evaluating and giving honest feedback. I hope this writeup helped you see a little more clearly into the intent behind our item and stat iterations. I’m looking forward to our next content update - see you in Terminus!
Chris “Joppa” Perkins
Creative Director