This'll be a bit of a longer post as I've noticed I'm getting some higher votes on these kind of posts which I appreciate as it may make more people aware of our upcoming game. We will discuss some of the basic ideas behind the battle system in our game, healer and creature synergies, the different aspects of PvE and PvP and different values healer items can bring forth to make the battles even spicier.
I think that when I've mentioned that the game is quite complex under the hood I have not been overestimating it, so this may give you some idea of the different aspects that may be easy to learn for casual players but harder to master.
This is something that's been a little bit controversial to some testers and other stakeholders I've discussed this with, they don't really understand why we'd opt for this method upon leveling so I'll be going through a few reasonings. Here's a list of how the different types compare against each other, i.e. how effective type creature moves are vs creature types.
The idea here is that when you enter an encounter, you'll find out what wild enemy creature you're facing and then you get to choose what creature you send out. Let's say in this example you're facing a grass type creature so you're first instinct would be to send out a fire type creature because fire type moves would do 1.5x more damage on grass type creatures as you can see by the spreadsheet above.
We've already implemented a system that records your type vs type battle history and shows it for each creature in colored dots, example green if you did weak vs strong, orange if it was a neutral battle and red if you chose strong vs weak type. This'll give you an idea of your odds upon level up to get max, mid or low stat/rarity gain.
For players that don't really care much about optimizing their creature stats, the game won't be "too punishing", they may lose a little bit of rarity score over many levels because they're opting in for constant easy battles that won't cost them much resources in terms of healer mana, mana potions and elixirs, or other food buffs. Instead, if you opt in for the tough battles, it'll be more rewarding as you'll be able to increase creature stat rarity by a lot more than what you risk losing. This means a creature at level 1 with average blue rarity stats could end up with average purple or orange stats (epic-legendary) and a creature closer to legendary stats could end up with max holo stats at max level if you always opt in for the tough battles.
This is also what's going to introduce a "leased leveling" system and demand in the game, where you as a collector may look for players who will level up your creatures "the hard way" for you at a cost. This'll require some trust as they could end up going the easy route and remove potential your creature could've had of gaining increased rarity score and stats, so we may introduce a reputation/feedback system here as well.
Anyway, in the future we'll also be adding new creature types slowly similar to healer classes, slowly because we gotta make sure it won't throw the balance in the game off.
There'll be additional synergies between healers and creatures, either by improving the heals cast on the creature types a certain class synergizes with or by adding additional resistance when battling against such creatures. Here's some examples to give you an idea.
Forest Healer will synergize with Grass and Bug type, this means that if you're playing a Forest healer and have those creature types in your party your heals and buffs may affect those creatures slightly more than creatures of other types. Obviously these cannot be too strong, else the meta of the game would be that every healer always has the creature types they synergize with, it may at times even be a trap in PvP if the enemy expects your forest healer to always have bug and grass type so he'll attempt to counter you with Fire and Ice type creatures for instance.
Resistances will work differently, they'll instead make creatures moves from Grass and Bug less effective on any of your creature types as long as you're playing the Forest healer. This gives and additional layer on PvP and PvE strategies.
Creatures gain XP when another creature is defeated, they need to however deal damage to enemy creatures to earn a share of the XP.
We definitely want to prevent "boosting" of creatures, for instance in older games of this kind you may see players send out a low level creature first into the scene to face a high level enemy creature, then quickly swap it out before the enemy creature gets to do a move on it which would most likely insta K.O. your lowbie creature. At the end of the battle after your higher level creature defeats the enemy the lower level creature would share 50% or so of the XP gained by defeating the high level one which boosts the low level creature by many levels.
Thus we're instead basing this off of how much damage your creatures do, they get a share of the XP. However if your creature faints it won't receive any xp, no matter how much damage it did, and the next creature won't receive full xp for the damage your now fainted creature managed to do - that xp is simply lost.
We don't want players to cheat their way to easy xp and avoid the grinds that others have to play through, no matter if they've already done the grinds before or not.
Healers will generally receive around 3x less XP than your creatures, this is because we want players to have at least 3 creatures around the same level as your healer when leveling up.
PvP will generally not give players and creatures any XP, this is because in PvP you don't want to think about what type is battling against what type because there the only thing that matters is victory. There'll instead be different rewards there rather than XP. Some players may even not want to level up creatures or healers so they can stay at certain brackets with them, there'll also be an option to "halt" XP gain so that you can still do PvE with those creatures and healers you want to stay in a certain bracket so you can continue to face wild creatures for material gathering or item finding+crafting for those specific levels.
There may be some differences in how stats affect creatures and players between PvE and PvP, this is because we understand that balancing this kind of game can be highly difficult for each level brackets and then also between PvE and PvP, thus there'll be a form of "cheat code" for us to aid the balancing of PvP compared to PvE by altering how certain stats or resistances or items scale in PvP. More info on that as we get closer.
Naturally, PvP which will be more competitive and harder to get good at, will be more rewarding in terms of top players and other participants being able to receive items, materials and zing rewards there that may be very, very hard and rare to find in PvE. They may also be able to receive league/bracket/seasonal titles, achievements, profile picture banners, healer item skins, and various rare loot such as capture devices, mounts, bagpacks, etc, from soulbound to tradable that may be time restricted as well and never to be able to be collected/won again in the future.
Our focus is definitely to make PvP the more rewarding aspect of the game, but there'll definitely be a lot of room for different PvE aspects as well.
We are quite excited of everything we have planned and are hoping that we'll be able to catch up to those plans soon so you can all participate in the game. Let me know what you thought of some of the things mentioned here in the post today!
