Season's greetings, Transposers!
As the holiday spirits fills the air, we wanted to take a moment to wish each and every one of you a fantastic holiday season, filled with warmth and joy! In the end, isn't that exactly what Wantless is all about?
Song of Silence
While we were aiming for a December release, the Song of Silence update will instead be releasing in January. We're still working on fine-tuning and including some of your feedback, and we're sorry for the additional delay. As we polish things up, here is a little sneak peek for you:
Our special someone is getting ready to "spin" into action. Prepare for a challenge!
Neural Forging
Moving on to the other topic of today. We have mentioned neural forging in the past, but with the release of the Early Access, now seems like a good time to cover the basics again and offer a few more details on skill creation.
The players who haven’t tried Wantless yet might be curious about its unusual skill crafting feature. It's actually quite simple. It all happens in the Neural forge, and here’s how it works!
As you help patients and face their torments, you’ll undoubtedly loot crafting components for the forge. They’re called synapses.
There are 3 types of synapses:
- Form Synapses determine your skill’s range, shape (or area of effect), and the number of effects it can have.
- Effect Synapses determine what your skill does to its targets. There are lots of different effects in Wantless, and many more we intend to implement. That could be anything ranging from dealing damage, to applying health regeneration buffs, poisoning, stunning, or pushing an enemy away.
- Efficiency Synapses determine how many Action Points (your primary resource in combat) it costs to use the skill, along with its cooldown.
To forge a skill, all you need to do is combine at least one of each synapse type (you can use multiple effect synapses in a single skill).
Below is a video overview of the Neural Forge by Paul Plays Games. Paul has produced in depths video guides and playthroughs of Wantless, so if you're interested, do check out his channel.
Now, what’s keeping you from forging “Apocalypse on demand” (of course you can customize your skills’ name!), a giant area-of-effect skill that inflicts multiple debuffs and unreasonable damage on its targets, for a low AP cost? Enter Discipline.
Discipline
More powerful synapses combine into skills that cost more Discipline, a limited resource you get to increase as you level-up. You cannot fight with skills that cost more discipline than you have available. And “Apocalypse on demand” might just be above your pay grade... for now.
What if you get a cool synapse and aren’t sure whether you should save it for later? Use it now, synapses aren’t lost when combined into skills. You can disassemble a skill at will to reuse its components. You can also upgrade existing skills by changing some of its synapses.
Synapses come with quality levels, ranging from common to legendary. Higher quality synapses come with a number of random modifiers. A debuff could last 1 extra turn, a form could have extra range.
Advanced considerations
Now that we have covered the basics, here are a few more tips to consider!
- Offense Effect synapses, such as the ones that debuff or deal damage, do not hit you or your allies. Likewise, defense synapses do not affect enemies.
- Some powerful synapses have a minimum cooldown, which means the skill they compose will always have at least that much cooldown, no matter the Efficiency synapse you use.
- Effect order is a thing, a skill that reduces resistances and then deals damage, is more effective than a skill that does the same thing the other way around.
- Synapses have tiers, and you won’t be looting certain components until later in the game. Highest-tier synapses can only be obtained through Synapse fusion, another system, for another devblog.
- Currently, movement effects are always moved first in the effect order, though that might change in the future.
That's it for today! Hopefully this clarifies the Neural forge and sets you all out on your quest for crafting the perfect skill! We can't wait to see what you all come up with so be sure to share that with us online!
Join the Community!
You can find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, or you may head over to our Discord server. We have also set up a community section over on Reddit where you can freely share and engage in discussions about Wantless.
We are grateful for your time and your continued support.
Stay tuned for more news!