Monday Meeting: House Patch Feedback & Support Skills Intro

With Fred back in town we had a meeting, as mentioned last week, where we discussed two important things: the new housing patch feedback and something I know many have long awaited... the support skills!

When it comes to the housing build tools, there actually haven't been much feedback to speak about, which we take as a good thing: hopefully that means they weren't too confusing! There are still some things we'd like to polish, though - for instance, some kind of visual effect for the clear and delete functions (as the items/rooms disappear).

We also want you to be able to add more than one door to a room, and by doing so connecting it to others. To do this, we'll add a 'connect' button in the menu, which allows you to add another doorway between two rooms that are next to each other but not yet connected.

What about the support skills, then? Well, we've come up with eight different skills, which will be introduced in more detail at a later date. For now, let's talk about the changes compared to what the support trees look like now:

For one, the skill category will change name from "Support" to the more versatile "Utility". Our reasoning is that with a name like support, many players who expect to play the classical support role will automatically hone in on the support tree without checking the other trees first. However, while these new utility skills will likely make playing a support-like character more fun (compared to the current skills), we want to make a point of the fact that you can pick and choose from any of the skill categories, and use the Utility ones as bonus abilities, rather than either ignoring the tree or focusing too much on it due to the support name.

Inside Utility category there will be three trees: Offensive (3 skills), Defensive (3 skills) and Buffs (2 skills). The old support skills will be completely removed.

Finally, the utility skills won't use the charge system, and won't use up gold points. The way we've designed them now, they will cap at 5 skill points and only use silver - but this might change as we begin to prototype them and play around with them within the game.