Hello Everyone!
Last time we covered some of the design decisions on why we swapped to the stance system. Today we’ll focus on Fia and some of the changes this made to her kit. Fia’s two stances are Battlemage and Flameborne. When in Battlemage stance, she primarily focuses on Melee attacks and supplementing those with useful spells, both offensively and defensively.
While she previously used to be able to pick from a pool of abilities, we found that players didn’t really deviate from the main damaging ones, because it wasn’t clear that the other spells had any real advantages.
Splitting them up into 2 separate stances that you can toggle between frees them up to be able to choose when they want to use situational abilities, and when they want to burst their target down.
This also allowed us to expose more of the underlying systems in the form of passive abilities. We’ve developed the poise and focus systems quite a bit between all of the characters, and this lets players be able to have more control over those systems.
For example, Fia used to be able to use her defensive ability to be able to parry anything in the game, but that didn’t feel quite right, when she got hit by a massive attack from a boss, and deflected it with the same ease as Shold, who was made to be able to block anything. So we introduced a threshold where she can still successfully deflect any attack, but if it’s too strong, she still gets knocked down, but takes no damage. Players can now choose to spend a point in increasing the defensive power she has when defending, or optionally just choose to dodge that attack.
Watch on YouTube Failing deflect against large enemies
Watch on YouTube Now we can deflect
In addition, you can really go all in on defense if you so choose, by adding an ignition effect when defending that will burn anyone you defend against, and significantly increase your focus generation when you successfully deflect an attack, letting you immediately start casting an offensive spell.
We’ve tried to take this kind of approach for all of the passives, where we either expose previously hidden systems or we add extra components to let you really customize how you want to play the character.
Along with the passives, there were new spells that were made for each stance, with the goal of supporting the overall playstyle for that stance.
The Battlemage stance received a new Fire Cone ability that can deal significant close range damage in a wide area. This can be expanded to increase the range or to stun enemies caught in it.
The Flamesword spell is now fully featured as well, offering an option to upgrade from fast kicks to dedicated heavy and charged swings with the sword. These attacks have been designed with enemy groups in mind, so its a good choice to deal with large groups, instead of using the dagger.
The Flameborne stance is still under heavy development, but at the moment, you can enter this stance at any time, and begin to burn your focus pool, but your abilities don’t cost anything.
Fia’s Light attacks are replaced with a Fireshard combo and heavy attacks cast a chargeable fireball, significantly increasing damage with each charge level (up to 3.)
That’s all for this week. Catch ya later✌️