i made the mistake of starting myself off thinking of another server idea a couple weeks ago. would be too much work to actually do (especially for something that would fizzle out within a month after being played by ~15 people total) but i like developing ideas and this is the best place i can think to spill it out. more conventional than the server i tried to do a year (?) or so ago (classes, levels) but still some stuff.
i'm gonna say how stuff "will" be a lot simply because expressing everything as "would" would be tiring.
War has ravaged the world. Everyone starts in refugee city Halas (it has natural defences in the form of mountains and random water in front of it). Quests start there.
Rewards/Progression
Main thing: item rewards are separated out into several independent streams of progression, to avoid the situation where one stream (i.e. raids) render all the others mostly irrelevant.
Main slot (non-aug) gear:
Armor and weapons come exclusively from tradeskills. Tradeskills will work a bit differently (more below). All tradeskill-made gear and tradeskill components will be tradeable (the gear will be attuneable/bind on equip); hunting down rare components to make yourself a new piece of gear or to trade for something you want would be a large part of the game at all levels.
Augs
Much personal progression will come in the form of augs. All tradeskill-made gear will have 5 aug slots, each relating to a different source of progression:
1. Quest
2. Dungeon
3. Raid
4. Tradeskill
5. Event
All augs would be reusable like our current quest augs. Otherwise, it's pretty straight forward: when you do quests, you get Quest augs as rewards; when you're out exping, you're hunting for both tradeskill components and Dungeon augs; raids will net you raid augs along with high-end tradeskill components and recipes. Tradeskill augs would be tradeskill-made and, unique among the augs, tradeable (though still attuned on use). Quest, Dungeon and Raid augs would mostly be specific to the things that drop them, like most items now, while higher-end tradeskill augs will mostly come from extremely rare world drop components (e.g. can drop from anything over level x, but only 1 in 50000 to 500000 kills). A few tradeskill augs might be no drop, e.g. if you get really good at blacksmithing you can make yourself a Grandmaster Blacksmith's Super Aug for yourself, probably from common components. Event augs would be the rarest of the bunch, existing exclusively to reward players for participating in GM events and automated world events like our War. Probably won't have much stats in most cases, but will be attractive for players at all levels just for the sheer difficulty of filling Event aug slots at all (not to mention the bragging rights of having rarer ones).
Oh, and probably pretty much all augs would be Lore.
Exactly how much the stats of all these augs and the tradeskill-made gear would balance out is an open question. Ultimately the tradeskill-made gear would probably be the biggest single source of raw stats, though augs would certainly be capable of providing interesting things like procs, worn effects, weapon damage, etc. Things may get a bit chaotic: since all the aug types are separate they would have no necessary influence on each other's stats: indeed, it would be easy to see the first set of Raid augs being a fair bit worse than the Dungeon augs you would be expected to have come there with -- any Raid aug is a boost over an empty aug slot, after all. It would certainly be harder to say e.g. how much HP a warrior should have at tier X, if nothing else.
Tradeskills/Economy
Tradeskills would be an active and continuous part of the game; everyone would be encouraged to take up at least one, and -- even if they don't -- to pool resources (naturally accumulated through killing things) with friends/guildies to build each other gear.
Tradeskills would be less grindy. When you have the components for a recipe you know, it will succeed, and if you haven't hit the "trivial"/max skillup point for that recipe, your tradeskill will go up a point. The main difficulty will be in gathering all the right components for what you want to make.
Secondly, tradeskills would be a little more interesting. Rather than just being able to make whatever once you have enough skill, you need to learn recipes. Some recipes will naturally be learned as you skill up (e.g. graduating from copper stuff to iron stuff as you gain blacksmithing skill) while others will be heirarchical: make this recipe, learn the next recipe in the set. Might allow some limited "paths" to progress though, e.g. a smith that specializes in weapons while only having the most basic armor recipes. Some recipes may also be drops; a dungeon might have its own unique recipes, for example, and raid zones theirs.
Third: there is no money. Everything works on a barter economy; you trade components and finished products for other components and finished products that you desire. On the one hand, this means you'll mostly tend to trade with people around your own level (generally not much incentive to barter "downward"). For similar reasons, farming won't be very effective (doesn't matter how much Eldritch Ultrametal you gather up if no one has anything you want to trade in return for it, and vice versa). On there other hand, there could easily be exceptions. In the Tradeskill aug example above, for instance, one could easily see some low-end schmuck ending up with an ultra-rare world drop component and have high-end guilds enter a bidding war offering finished high-end raid gear for it. A saavy negotiator might even be able to snag a whole set of raid gear this way over time without doing any raiding themselves (though they wouldn't be as powerful as a real raider, lacking in raid augs).
General stuff: I would see there being 3 big tradeskills with the others maybe being there but less important: Blacksmithing, Sewing, Jewelcrafting. Even then, the big three aren't really made equal; smithing has an obvious monopoly on weapons. Jewelcrafting could be granted exclusive right to rods, wands and gemmed staves and emphasize bracelets and necklaces for casters. Sewing might be a bit screwed, but still prominent providing most armor for leather and silk classes. Hard to think how to shoehorn any weapons in. Not sure what to think about bags either; large, portable tradeskill containers will be freely available and idk how much I'd want to bother with item sizes and weights.
Baking and brewing would make stat food and drink, probably nothing too crazy. Maybe Make Poison could be made central to what rogues do the way fletching would be to rangers... Alchemy? Pottery, tinkering, ehh... Definitely no Fishing, because seriously, screw fishing.
Classes/Skills/Etc.
Some general points: no guild trainers; spells and abilities would be (mostly?) learned automatically when you level up (some room for dropped/raid-gained spells maybe). Long-lasting, statless food and drink would be freely available from the starting town since there's no money, same with aug removers.
No long term buffs; your stats come from your gear, your group members are there to provide their active capabilities. Everyone has inherent SoW speed by default.
Melees: want to de-emphasize auto attacks and put more on endurance-costing abilities (and spells for hybrids). Also want to disable button-based skills like Kick and Taunt and replace them with more controllable, decision-requiring, and interesting endurance-costing stuff (e.g. Rogues' Backstab button would do nothing (maybe give a message telling you why not), and instead they would start, at level 1, with a Combat Ability called Backstab, the base damage and endurance cost of which would scale with weapon ratio and level). Also want to forget about skill-ups and getting skills at certain levels as much as possible; all melees would start with perfect double attack ('cept bards and bsts) and would get perfect dual wield when possible if they are a dual wield class (the ability to actually equip weapons in the offhand is hardcoded into the client by class+level, i believe... otherwise would make everyone start off with it like monks).
Healers: not sure, but think I'd want to give heals a combined percent-plus-flat mana cost. E.g. Heal of Goodness costs 2% + 50 mana. Not much else to say!
Pet classes: get pet spell(s) at level 1, lasts forever. Pet's level and stats go up with the caster's level.
Specific class concept changes:
Cleric - still super healer, possibly an inherent ability to distribute a small portion of over-healing to nearby group members (like that one tome i did). Some melee ability with melee range hammer nukes and such.
Druid - chloromancer-ish. Actively combines healing with direct damage, with leeway to focus on one over the other. Inherent ability to heal nearby group members for (say) 25% of single target DD damage or 10% of AE DD damage. Some kind of mechanic to designate a target to receive healing portions of combined heal+nukes. Damage shields appear as short-term, in combat offensive spells.
Shaman - still melee debuff master. Rather than having canni, a portion of their spells (certain heals, maybe some DoTs) will have % HP costs in place of mana costs. Will be possible to function using purely mana-based heals and such, but weaving them in with sacrifice-based heals and dots will increase the shaman's flexibility, power and longevity at a cost of increased risk and the need to keep their own hp up. To go along with that: inherently heals 1% more for each 1% HP missing; sacrifice-based heals will extract their cost first to be self-boosting.
Magician - earth pet still tanky rooter, air pet monk-ish melee, fire pet is a fragile nuker, water pet is a mini-healer. Fire pet will not bother approaching melee range with their target, prefering to hang back and continuously cast fire-based nukes. Water pet will cast small-to-medium-ish single-target heals on the mage and their group members using a simple AI; however, only people within a relatively short range will be considered potential heal targets, allowing the mage to use positioning and /pet guard to manipulate the pet into e.g. focusing on keeping the group's real healer alive and such. Both caster pets interruptible using /pet back off, and neither has to worry about mana use, will just keep casting forever. Water pet will announce its heals to the group (not sure if the pet message channel would be best, or the group channel).
Beastlord - pet takes its stats directly from the beastlord, mirroring not only its master's stats and vitals, but also their melee attack rate and expected damage. Beastlords will essentially control a little doppelganger of themselves; abilities and spells will be focused on mutual boosts and simultaneous attacks, etc. Super pet synergy class. Able to do roughly equal damage to two different targets at once (bar procs). Very weak without pet.
Necromancer - dot master with unimpressive pet as expected. Enters lich mode when running 3 or more dots on a single target, draining their own HP to ramp up dot damage the longer lich mode is held. (Was considering giving necros tools to have a secondary role as a competent but second rate, purely sacrifice-based healer dependent on lifetaps to keep their own HP up... don't necessarily want to have that become an obligation to keep a heal loaded and watch HP bars when all they wanna do is waste things down, though.)
Paladin - secondary role as uniquely melee-centric healer/defender. Needs more thought.
Shadowknight - secondary role as melee-centric nuker. Also needs more thought. Or maybe something from my old "SKs can do lots of damage, but only in proportion with how badly they are getting thrashed" idea from years and years ago.
Bard - Work in 1hander + instrument thing; more songs that require certain instruments throughout the levels. Maybe work that into a more distinct jack-of-all-trades thing; bard can be a competent but second-rate healer with a guitar but can't deal much damage without a flute or drum in, etc. Some kind of "warm up time" upon switching instruments to prevent continuous swapping. Still some songs that can be used whenever (e.g. basic CC), but generally expected to take up a particular temporary, instrument-specific role. More mana-needingness. Dunno about a melody system but probably not continuous cycle of clicking either.
Ranger - Bowssss. Whole bunch of fast-casting, long range, long cooldown "bow" nukes and spells, maybe with a minimum range on them. Additionally rangers are natural fletchers; when a ranger is around, arrow components will drop quite commonly (they have keen eyes and a better sense of the usefulness of twigs, you see). Maybe change how arrow damage affects bow damage.
Berserker - ???
Other classes - dunno. No particular ideas for my preferred class oddly enough.
Mechanics stuff
Mana and endurance refill within 3 ticks outside combat, no meditating. 1 minute for HP.
AC and resists - as far as damage goes, simplify these into continuously curved diminishing returns percent mitigation:
melee damage = melee damage * (500 / (500 + AC))
E.g. 50 AC provides ~9% mitigation, 250 provides ~33%, 500 provides 50%, 1000 provides ~66%, 3000 provides ~85.7% ...
Similar for resists:
nuke/dot damage = nuke/dot damage * (250 / (250 + resist))
E.g. same mitigation as the ACs above at half the total values (25 resist = ~9%, 250 = 50%, etc).
Auto attack damage (before AGI bonus and AC reduction) is randomized between [WeaponDMG] and [WeaponDMG * 2]. Accuracy is set at 95% regardless of level differences etc. Probably won't be much haste to be had.
Stats:
STR - 1% extra Combat Ability damage per point.
AGI - 1% extra melee autoattack damage per point.
DEX - 1% extra proc damage/healing per point (in place of other stats)
STA - 1% extra Combat Ability and spell hate generation per point, maybe self-defensive effects as well.
INT - 1% extra nuke/dot damage per point.
WIS - 1% extra healing per point (seperate from e.g. shaman % bonus, all % bonuses act on base values without multiplying each other synergistically)
CHA - less debuff resists etc..?
COR - what
Everyone starts with 10 in all core stats plus whatever distribution they chose on the char creation screen.
Maybe muck with what avoidance skills people get and how effective they are. Maybe just use Dodge and have other avoidance skills reserved for ability effects or item things.
Everyone starts with a Gate clicky (charm slot?)
overall probably too different again. thankfully lost the will to poke at coding any of this after only two days
i'm gonna say how stuff "will" be a lot simply because expressing everything as "would" would be tiring.
War has ravaged the world. Everyone starts in refugee city Halas (it has natural defences in the form of mountains and random water in front of it). Quests start there.
Rewards/Progression
Main thing: item rewards are separated out into several independent streams of progression, to avoid the situation where one stream (i.e. raids) render all the others mostly irrelevant.
Main slot (non-aug) gear:
Armor and weapons come exclusively from tradeskills. Tradeskills will work a bit differently (more below). All tradeskill-made gear and tradeskill components will be tradeable (the gear will be attuneable/bind on equip); hunting down rare components to make yourself a new piece of gear or to trade for something you want would be a large part of the game at all levels.
Augs
Much personal progression will come in the form of augs. All tradeskill-made gear will have 5 aug slots, each relating to a different source of progression:
1. Quest
2. Dungeon
3. Raid
4. Tradeskill
5. Event
All augs would be reusable like our current quest augs. Otherwise, it's pretty straight forward: when you do quests, you get Quest augs as rewards; when you're out exping, you're hunting for both tradeskill components and Dungeon augs; raids will net you raid augs along with high-end tradeskill components and recipes. Tradeskill augs would be tradeskill-made and, unique among the augs, tradeable (though still attuned on use). Quest, Dungeon and Raid augs would mostly be specific to the things that drop them, like most items now, while higher-end tradeskill augs will mostly come from extremely rare world drop components (e.g. can drop from anything over level x, but only 1 in 50000 to 500000 kills). A few tradeskill augs might be no drop, e.g. if you get really good at blacksmithing you can make yourself a Grandmaster Blacksmith's Super Aug for yourself, probably from common components. Event augs would be the rarest of the bunch, existing exclusively to reward players for participating in GM events and automated world events like our War. Probably won't have much stats in most cases, but will be attractive for players at all levels just for the sheer difficulty of filling Event aug slots at all (not to mention the bragging rights of having rarer ones).
Oh, and probably pretty much all augs would be Lore.
Exactly how much the stats of all these augs and the tradeskill-made gear would balance out is an open question. Ultimately the tradeskill-made gear would probably be the biggest single source of raw stats, though augs would certainly be capable of providing interesting things like procs, worn effects, weapon damage, etc. Things may get a bit chaotic: since all the aug types are separate they would have no necessary influence on each other's stats: indeed, it would be easy to see the first set of Raid augs being a fair bit worse than the Dungeon augs you would be expected to have come there with -- any Raid aug is a boost over an empty aug slot, after all. It would certainly be harder to say e.g. how much HP a warrior should have at tier X, if nothing else.
Tradeskills/Economy
Tradeskills would be an active and continuous part of the game; everyone would be encouraged to take up at least one, and -- even if they don't -- to pool resources (naturally accumulated through killing things) with friends/guildies to build each other gear.
Tradeskills would be less grindy. When you have the components for a recipe you know, it will succeed, and if you haven't hit the "trivial"/max skillup point for that recipe, your tradeskill will go up a point. The main difficulty will be in gathering all the right components for what you want to make.
Secondly, tradeskills would be a little more interesting. Rather than just being able to make whatever once you have enough skill, you need to learn recipes. Some recipes will naturally be learned as you skill up (e.g. graduating from copper stuff to iron stuff as you gain blacksmithing skill) while others will be heirarchical: make this recipe, learn the next recipe in the set. Might allow some limited "paths" to progress though, e.g. a smith that specializes in weapons while only having the most basic armor recipes. Some recipes may also be drops; a dungeon might have its own unique recipes, for example, and raid zones theirs.
Third: there is no money. Everything works on a barter economy; you trade components and finished products for other components and finished products that you desire. On the one hand, this means you'll mostly tend to trade with people around your own level (generally not much incentive to barter "downward"). For similar reasons, farming won't be very effective (doesn't matter how much Eldritch Ultrametal you gather up if no one has anything you want to trade in return for it, and vice versa). On there other hand, there could easily be exceptions. In the Tradeskill aug example above, for instance, one could easily see some low-end schmuck ending up with an ultra-rare world drop component and have high-end guilds enter a bidding war offering finished high-end raid gear for it. A saavy negotiator might even be able to snag a whole set of raid gear this way over time without doing any raiding themselves (though they wouldn't be as powerful as a real raider, lacking in raid augs).
General stuff: I would see there being 3 big tradeskills with the others maybe being there but less important: Blacksmithing, Sewing, Jewelcrafting. Even then, the big three aren't really made equal; smithing has an obvious monopoly on weapons. Jewelcrafting could be granted exclusive right to rods, wands and gemmed staves and emphasize bracelets and necklaces for casters. Sewing might be a bit screwed, but still prominent providing most armor for leather and silk classes. Hard to think how to shoehorn any weapons in. Not sure what to think about bags either; large, portable tradeskill containers will be freely available and idk how much I'd want to bother with item sizes and weights.
Baking and brewing would make stat food and drink, probably nothing too crazy. Maybe Make Poison could be made central to what rogues do the way fletching would be to rangers... Alchemy? Pottery, tinkering, ehh... Definitely no Fishing, because seriously, screw fishing.
Classes/Skills/Etc.
Some general points: no guild trainers; spells and abilities would be (mostly?) learned automatically when you level up (some room for dropped/raid-gained spells maybe). Long-lasting, statless food and drink would be freely available from the starting town since there's no money, same with aug removers.
No long term buffs; your stats come from your gear, your group members are there to provide their active capabilities. Everyone has inherent SoW speed by default.
Melees: want to de-emphasize auto attacks and put more on endurance-costing abilities (and spells for hybrids). Also want to disable button-based skills like Kick and Taunt and replace them with more controllable, decision-requiring, and interesting endurance-costing stuff (e.g. Rogues' Backstab button would do nothing (maybe give a message telling you why not), and instead they would start, at level 1, with a Combat Ability called Backstab, the base damage and endurance cost of which would scale with weapon ratio and level). Also want to forget about skill-ups and getting skills at certain levels as much as possible; all melees would start with perfect double attack ('cept bards and bsts) and would get perfect dual wield when possible if they are a dual wield class (the ability to actually equip weapons in the offhand is hardcoded into the client by class+level, i believe... otherwise would make everyone start off with it like monks).
Healers: not sure, but think I'd want to give heals a combined percent-plus-flat mana cost. E.g. Heal of Goodness costs 2% + 50 mana. Not much else to say!
Pet classes: get pet spell(s) at level 1, lasts forever. Pet's level and stats go up with the caster's level.
Specific class concept changes:
Cleric - still super healer, possibly an inherent ability to distribute a small portion of over-healing to nearby group members (like that one tome i did). Some melee ability with melee range hammer nukes and such.
Druid - chloromancer-ish. Actively combines healing with direct damage, with leeway to focus on one over the other. Inherent ability to heal nearby group members for (say) 25% of single target DD damage or 10% of AE DD damage. Some kind of mechanic to designate a target to receive healing portions of combined heal+nukes. Damage shields appear as short-term, in combat offensive spells.
Shaman - still melee debuff master. Rather than having canni, a portion of their spells (certain heals, maybe some DoTs) will have % HP costs in place of mana costs. Will be possible to function using purely mana-based heals and such, but weaving them in with sacrifice-based heals and dots will increase the shaman's flexibility, power and longevity at a cost of increased risk and the need to keep their own hp up. To go along with that: inherently heals 1% more for each 1% HP missing; sacrifice-based heals will extract their cost first to be self-boosting.
Magician - earth pet still tanky rooter, air pet monk-ish melee, fire pet is a fragile nuker, water pet is a mini-healer. Fire pet will not bother approaching melee range with their target, prefering to hang back and continuously cast fire-based nukes. Water pet will cast small-to-medium-ish single-target heals on the mage and their group members using a simple AI; however, only people within a relatively short range will be considered potential heal targets, allowing the mage to use positioning and /pet guard to manipulate the pet into e.g. focusing on keeping the group's real healer alive and such. Both caster pets interruptible using /pet back off, and neither has to worry about mana use, will just keep casting forever. Water pet will announce its heals to the group (not sure if the pet message channel would be best, or the group channel).
Beastlord - pet takes its stats directly from the beastlord, mirroring not only its master's stats and vitals, but also their melee attack rate and expected damage. Beastlords will essentially control a little doppelganger of themselves; abilities and spells will be focused on mutual boosts and simultaneous attacks, etc. Super pet synergy class. Able to do roughly equal damage to two different targets at once (bar procs). Very weak without pet.
Necromancer - dot master with unimpressive pet as expected. Enters lich mode when running 3 or more dots on a single target, draining their own HP to ramp up dot damage the longer lich mode is held. (Was considering giving necros tools to have a secondary role as a competent but second rate, purely sacrifice-based healer dependent on lifetaps to keep their own HP up... don't necessarily want to have that become an obligation to keep a heal loaded and watch HP bars when all they wanna do is waste things down, though.)
Paladin - secondary role as uniquely melee-centric healer/defender. Needs more thought.
Shadowknight - secondary role as melee-centric nuker. Also needs more thought. Or maybe something from my old "SKs can do lots of damage, but only in proportion with how badly they are getting thrashed" idea from years and years ago.
Bard - Work in 1hander + instrument thing; more songs that require certain instruments throughout the levels. Maybe work that into a more distinct jack-of-all-trades thing; bard can be a competent but second-rate healer with a guitar but can't deal much damage without a flute or drum in, etc. Some kind of "warm up time" upon switching instruments to prevent continuous swapping. Still some songs that can be used whenever (e.g. basic CC), but generally expected to take up a particular temporary, instrument-specific role. More mana-needingness. Dunno about a melody system but probably not continuous cycle of clicking either.
Ranger - Bowssss. Whole bunch of fast-casting, long range, long cooldown "bow" nukes and spells, maybe with a minimum range on them. Additionally rangers are natural fletchers; when a ranger is around, arrow components will drop quite commonly (they have keen eyes and a better sense of the usefulness of twigs, you see). Maybe change how arrow damage affects bow damage.
Berserker - ???
Other classes - dunno. No particular ideas for my preferred class oddly enough.
Mechanics stuff
Mana and endurance refill within 3 ticks outside combat, no meditating. 1 minute for HP.
AC and resists - as far as damage goes, simplify these into continuously curved diminishing returns percent mitigation:
melee damage = melee damage * (500 / (500 + AC))
E.g. 50 AC provides ~9% mitigation, 250 provides ~33%, 500 provides 50%, 1000 provides ~66%, 3000 provides ~85.7% ...
Similar for resists:
nuke/dot damage = nuke/dot damage * (250 / (250 + resist))
E.g. same mitigation as the ACs above at half the total values (25 resist = ~9%, 250 = 50%, etc).
Auto attack damage (before AGI bonus and AC reduction) is randomized between [WeaponDMG] and [WeaponDMG * 2]. Accuracy is set at 95% regardless of level differences etc. Probably won't be much haste to be had.
Stats:
STR - 1% extra Combat Ability damage per point.
AGI - 1% extra melee autoattack damage per point.
DEX - 1% extra proc damage/healing per point (in place of other stats)
STA - 1% extra Combat Ability and spell hate generation per point, maybe self-defensive effects as well.
INT - 1% extra nuke/dot damage per point.
WIS - 1% extra healing per point (seperate from e.g. shaman % bonus, all % bonuses act on base values without multiplying each other synergistically)
CHA - less debuff resists etc..?
COR - what
Everyone starts with 10 in all core stats plus whatever distribution they chose on the char creation screen.
Maybe muck with what avoidance skills people get and how effective they are. Maybe just use Dodge and have other avoidance skills reserved for ability effects or item things.
Everyone starts with a Gate clicky (charm slot?)
overall probably too different again. thankfully lost the will to poke at coding any of this after only two days
