SHDL#03 Classes & Skills

With MOBAs set as reference, then came the time to sit down, open a wiki for League of Legends' champions and abilities and get to work on designing the characters.

The character pack had clear-cut classes but I didnt want to make them too orthodox. Priests would still give good support and Knights would still tank well but I wanted to give them all twists as well as making them all self-suficient enough to clear the game solo (within a spectrum of difficulty) but not so much as to alienate players and their expectations.

My reasoning for the twists was to look at the archetypes people are used to in terms of fantasy classes (in my case it was Ragnarok Online) and figure out their shortcomings so that I could try to fix them in interesting ways.

Roughly-inspired by LoL's characters, I gave mine a set number of atributes:

• Damage was a given, but I further divided it into area or direct, to differentiate between playstyles.

• Crowd Control would contain all status effects, along with forced mobility knockbacks and roots.

• Sustain would roughly cover all means of extending one's life, be it invulnerability, shielding, damage-absorption/reflection, health-regen or self-healing.

• Support covers everything positive you can directly do to your teammates, from healing and buffs to sharing skill effects. Self-inflicted good stuff doesnt count, thats sustain.

I chose to avoid mobility as a direct atribute because I didnt want any character to be too good or too bad a it, so even tho some skills do provide mobility (like charges and jumps), and characters have different movement speeds, they all roughly have enough to navigate.

Next thing I did was pick a proficiency and a weakness for each character, based on these atributes:

1. The swordsman is supposed to be the base-line, good for beginners to learn the game but not great at anything. This is also how RPGs usually do this class, so I tried to give him extra independence to be a good pick solo and some nice synergies for co-op.

2. The assassin is... well, an assassin, so she had to be good at dealing high damage to single targets. Her usual shortcoming is that, apart from being fragile, she's lacks team synergy so I gave her surprising amounts of support to be fun to play with, while giving her no area damage, to focus her efforts on finishing.

3. The warrior is normally a bruiser, kinda mellow in both damage dealing and tanking, but this direction didnt feel interesting with two other classes doing both of theses jobs better. Instead, I gave him good crowd control but barely any damage, so that people really play mindful of his effects and dont just button-mash. He also lacks support skills, because totally controlling the battlefield is already too good for a teammate.

4. The mage is usually a walking nuke, good at obliterating single and/or multiple targets, at the cost of being fragile and bad at teamplay, very similar to the assassin. I kept her area damage strong as well as kept her fragility, but gave her no direct damage and some nice support options, so that she needs to play smart with stragglers and works better in a team.

5. The knight is usually just a damage-sponge, lacking specific shortcomings and being more of an uninteresting archetype in general. I wanted to make players feel awesome playing him, so I gave him nice single target damage to go along with his sustain, as well as some interesting creepy skills, to make you feel powerful and fearsome even being slow and limited.

6. The priest is usually a walking potion bag, barely capable of keeping himself alive or clearing enemies, and just being a dedicated skill bar to keep spamming buffs at allies so I gave him nice general damage to be independent and a good contributor in co-op, but also made all his skills synergyze in fun ways to make so that playing as him is not only useful, but satisfying.

7. The archer was left for last, not only because archers are usually specialists with very niche skillsets, and I couldnt nicely fit her on any specific attribute, but because I like this character archetype that exists opposite to the swordsman's: an also well-balanced character that can cover several bases but only works if you play it really well. The archer can do almost anything, but will need a lot of practice to do it well.

With the skills in mind, I could now better visualize all the systems needed for combat. Status effects were something I was trying to avoid, since theyre just numbers going up or down without much player agency, but I tried to use them in interesting ways and avoid redundancy. Most are dynamic like pushes/pulls and knowbacks and the more classic ones like poisoning or stunning are used for comboing by the classes that apply them.