Service Abilities

Developer Journal (Page 2 of 2)

Disable Device
Heroes often find coffers and treasure chests that are trapped and locked. Rogues are adept at disabling traps and locks, thereby helping their fellow adventurers gain access to their hard-won loot.

Sure Footing
Rangers can call on the powers of Elanthia itself to grant characters with increased movement speed in outdoor environments, and resistance to knockback effects.

Imbue
Wizards can channel magical energies into those magical items that use wyr, making them more resistant to damage. They can also use this ability to recharge some magical items that have been drained of their power.

Soul jar
Necromancers can create magical talismans that hold a portion of the target character’s soul. A character in possession of such a talisman incurs reduced penalties when returned to life through resurrection, departing, or other means.

Resurrection
Clerics have the ability to bring the dead back to life, causing a character to suffer either item damage or an experience debt (decided by the player whose character is being resurrected). Additionally, the character’s body is moved adjacent to the Cleric, and has some of its health and endurance recovered.

Loresinging
Sometimes Heroes will find ancient magical items with unrecognizable and/or inactive properties. A Bard’s loresinging ability can uncover the true nature of these items and reactivate their power.

Healing
As a character suffers damage to his health, he also slowly acquires wounds that require more deliberate care from a Healer than a quick healing spell will provide. With enough such wounds, a character’s abilities suffer penalties, and he will find himself unable to benefit from the effects of friendly spells.

It may seem that with so many service abilities, that characters will be constantly scouring town to find service providers. I assure you that this is not the case. Not all services are created equal, so while some may be needed somewhat commonly, like opening trapped treasure boxes, many are purely optional, such as getting a Soul Jar or having Sure Footing cast on you. It is our desire that taking advantage of service abilities fits into the regular routine of your Heroes, and that they not dominate his time. In the meantime, we hope that while acquiring services brings you into contact with interesting personalities that you can depend on and grow to trust.

Hero’s Journey’s minimap is fully integrated into the services system, having features for easily advertising your services, as well as making it easy to locate others whose services you want. When players open the services dialog, they can either toggle their own service beacons, or filter for those that they seek. Characters with active service beacons are displayed on each other player’s minimap with icons indicating the type of services being provided. This lets players take advantage of various locations in and around towns to “set up shop."

Well I’m running out of space, so while there’s more I could go into about how these systems work, I’m going to have to stop hear. We hope to hear your feedback on the forums here, so go post your thoughts! Thanks for letting me ramble at you; Steph should be back soon with more.

-Mike Paddock, Lead Systems Designer

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