Channeler Guild Work
Spells and Skills proposal
Tonight I submitted a proposal for Channeler prime along with a full spec for abilities that make up the three secondaries and nine tertiaries. Big props to Fjorn for helping me get out of a creative rut and to Kereth who helped bigtime when it came down to brass tacks and figuring out if something was feasible for its intended level. The first proposal that contained just the secondaries spurred a lot of great discussion among the staff and I feel like this latest draft is now much stronger and more compelling for the player.
Guildhalls
What good are guilds without a place to join them? This week I laid the groundwork for one of the secondary guild areas and have mapped out the other two on paper. The channeler guild hall is currently a half finished sketch that should be complete by sometime tomorrow night.
Yup - that's right - at least four new areas coming with this guild release!
Stay tuned!
The Guild Pipeline
All the talk about channeler lately left a few of you wondering - what about some of the other guilds that need some love? Starstorm brought it up today and we had a lively discussion on channels that I thought should be shared here for the benefit of folks who may not have been online.
Biomancer Secondaries
The staff had a long discussion a few months back about biomancer and brainstormed ideas with regard to updated secondary guilds. The work has been on hold because we are all focused on getting channeler out the door, but all that prelimary discussion has already happened and we have a pretty good idea of where to take the project once Channeler is live and in the wild.
Psionicist
The psionicist guild is also slated to get some love. It's in a weird place right now and I had talked about it a lot before the Channeler project found its way onto my deliverables list. There are a couple things slated to change about the guild including giving it a little more martial prowess and changing the names of the secondaries back to their original design names.
The Phantom guild is slated to be updated and changed and made a Psionicist secondary as well as being a potential joinable from Channeler. The Phantom guild conversion is still completely in the design phase so really that's about all I can say about it with any certainty at this time.
Fighter Guild and Formations
Yup - everyone noticed that threat started to show up on skills and spells a few months ago. This is part of the work to bring this long broken feature online as well as open up some interesting mechanics. I can't really say much more but - it's pretty exciting stuff that's coming down the pipe.
Templar
We know that Templars have crazy weird stats and still get crazy hybrid melee stats instead of caster stats. This is going to get looked at along with a general eye toward their balance in their role and a clarification of what that role should look like in parties. For now - if you have ideas - pass them along to Torr who has been working closely with me for months as I pepper him with questions as I doodle out a gameplan.
TL;DR
To make a long story short - the current pipeline looks like this:
- Channeler + Secondaries
- Biomancer Secondaries
- Psionicist + Secondaries
- Fighter Formations
- Templar Stat Revamp
Have fun out there and keep up the good work!
And one more thing...
I issue weekly challenges to the staff about the number of bugs I want to see across all queues on Saturday morning.
This week - Kereth issued an aggressive challenge of his own about the number of bugs in the queue.
I am proud to report that - for the fourth week running - we made or beat the challenge by a good number. Everybody praise a staff member (and I don't mean me you silly kids) and let them know how much you appreciate all their effort toward making the game a better place.