Goblin Squad Member
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So, I realized today that people on the forums really like to quote the blogs, and that isn't as easy to do when the blog is a video, so I'm going to start transcribing the video blogs for easier reference; maybe somebody will find a use for this. I'm doing a little editing and a tiny bit of paraphrasing, but I'm trying to stick very closely to the original wording. Starting with the first vlog, Thunderstrike:
Stephen: I'm Stephen Cheney, I'm a game designer at Goblinworks.
Lee: Welcome to the first of our Goblinworks video blog "Q&A" videos. As you've probably seen on the forums, We did a post last week asking people for questions about Pathfinder Online and we're going to be answering a few of them every other week with our video blogs. So, for this week, we've chosen a question, it was actually the first question that was posed to us, posted by Sepherum, who said:
"I don't think I'm alone in wanting some more details about divine magic and abilities."
So, in our system, we have... well, in MMO's in general, equipment is often limited by slots. For example, you have a chest slot. Pathfinder tabletop does the same thing: you have armor slots, ring slots, etc. We have expanded that idea so that you have a limited number of slots for skills and abilities at a given time.
We really wanted it to be a real choice of, "What am I going to now, I've got to get my gear matched up with the abilities I have slotted (because there's interactions between those) and make sure I'm as effective as possible in the role I am shooting for."
We can start with this: do clerics have orisons?
Stephen: Yes, clerics have orisons. They use what we are currently calling a phylactery (Paizo didn't like the term so we're looking for a better one) which will essentially work similarly to a mage's wand. You will have a charge-based item that you put attacks on and you can slot it as you want. Based on things you've learned. Some of them may have a lot of restrictions, some may not.
Lee: This will effectively function as a cleric version of a weapon. If you have a longsword, you slot longsword attacks into it, if you have a rapier you slot rapier attacks into it, if you have a phylactery (name to be changed) you would slot maybe Holy Light or weak Cures and stuff like that into it.
They [orisons] cost stamina, so that means you can use them multiple times during a given fight, and you would generally be throwing them around a lot.
Stephen: But like wands and staves they use charges.
Lee: They do use charges, so you have to be careful; you can't throw them around unlimited.
Stephen: The holy symbol for clerics is equivalent to the spellbook for wizards and the trophy charm for fighters; it is their implement. So all cleric spells that are not orisons (which go on the phylactery) go into the holy symbol. There's where you'll get your Cures, and any cleric spell from tabletop that we're able to come up with an analog for goes in there if it's not super low level.
Lee: For more domain focused abilities, or things like Channel Positive/Negative Energy, those will go in other slots we have, which are either Situational slots or Utility slots. Utility slots are typically things that you will be able to use several times per fight. They consume stamina, whereas Situationals are things you'll normally use a certain number of times over a longer period because they consume power. So Channel Positive/Negative Energy are things that consume power, but they don't take up slots in your holy symbol directly.
Now Sepherum said, "I don't think I'm alone in wanting some more details about divine magic and abilities." So, talking more in a general sense about what divine magic is going to do... We need to talk really quick about another system which we haven't really talked about in public yet. We figured it's a good time to go over it because it ties into the cleric. As we discussed previously, we don't have critical hits in the way that Pathfinder tabletop does, because unpredictable damage spikes are not fun in PvP. Going from okay to dead with no choices made on your part, you didn't know anything was coming, you couldn't do anything about it, the randomness of "suddenly this guy does 3 to 4 times as much damage" isn't fun. So we didn't want to do critical hits in the same way. But we wanted to keep the concept. So the system we're working on right now is a system we call the Injury system. Every time you get a critical hit on someone, they start building up this pool of injury points. If their total number of Injury points ever becomes higher than their current hit point total they start suffering a lot of penalties.
Hit points come back every fight; we didn't want hit points to be a thing where you're constantly going back to town to heal hit points, because in an MMO having to stop and use very rare resources to heal yourself continually is not a lot of fun. But we still wanted to have an impetus that drives you back to town and forces you to make choices about if you can take this fight or not. So we've basically built up the injury system as this: over time, your injuries will build up as you get more and more critical hits, to the point that you really should get a cleric to heal you (which we'll get to in a minute) or you should get back to town and get rid of them [the injuries] in another fashion, such as hanging out in a tavern or doing something else.
Stephen: And when we previously talked about injuries, we'd conceived of them more as modular effects that came off of critical hits, sort of like other games have done, like bashed head, torn ligament, or whatever. What we realized when we were talking about that in more detail was that:
A, it was a lot of long term debuff for programming to have to track that be this huge overhead on the system, and you'd have all these debuffs stacking up in your bar that you'd have to keep track of.
B: It would be impossible for you to parse it in the heat of the moment in combat. You'd see all these injuries, you've got to mouse over them to see what they are, and it's really hard to have a lot of injuries and have each one be meaningful.
So what we're doing instead is sort of this very approachable, gameable meter so that goes up that somebody can just glance at your hit points and go, "He's about to drop below injuries, maybe as the healer I should do something about it."
Lee: Cleric really has the power to remove injury points from a character. So in the middle of a fight, the cleric has to make the tactical choice of, "If I heal that guy, I may get his hit points above his injuries and remove them [the debuffs] that way, or I can just get rid of his injuries," and after fights clerics prolong the ability for groups to stay in the field and not have to go to town to heal and stuff, because they're basically able to increase their long-term effectiveness.
We did want to make clerics so that they weren't just people who stood in the back and watched bars go up and down, because that's not really fun. Our clerics are very much like Pathfinder, they're medium armor wearers, they can probably play as a shield and mace cleric to go in and beat people up in melee combat. They're not going to be doing as much damage as the melee fighter but you can still whip spells at people, you can still heal people. The clerics job is not to stand in the back and watch bars go up and down, he's supposed to get in and mix it up, heal people as he can and also deal with injuries when they become problematic.
Stephen: And importantly, as in tabletop, most of your heals are touch-based, so you're going to have to be in danger to heal somebody.
Lee: Right, so there is no standing in the back with the mages and healing, you have to run to the front, put yourself in harm's way, wear some good armor, and get in there to actually help your team out.
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Goblin Squad Member
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So, I realized today that people on the forums really like to quote the blogs, and that isn't as easy to do when the blog is a video, so I'm going to start transcribing the video blogs for easier reference; maybe somebody will find a use for this. I'm doing a little editing and a tiny bit of paraphrasing, but I'm trying to stick very closely to the original wording. Starting with the first vlog, Thunderstrike:
** spoiler omitted **...
Absolutely marvelous, Sir Gifford!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Man, this is a lot more work than I thought. They really fit a lot of talking into a couple minutes! :)
Tell me about it! I've done a few transcriptions myself and it's definitely a lot of work.
It would be really great if you would include the name of the Blog in the Thread title if you do this in the future. I'll List them along with the other Transcriptions I've done.
[Edit] Hrm... Just realized I haven't listed my Transcripts either. I'll put them somewhere during the week.
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Goblin Squad Member
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But we still wanted to have an impetus that drives you back to town and forces you to make choices about if you can take this fight or not. So we've basically built up the injury system as this: over time, your injuries will build up as you get more and more critical hits, to the point that you really should get a cleric to heal you (which we'll get to in a minute) or you should get back to town and get rid of them [the injuries] in another fashion, such as hanging out in a tavern or doing something else.
Big fan of this idea to cycle back to town after your avatar starts to degrade seriously via injury.
@Devs: If the injury is to the head, does it knock out your targetting ability/accuracy until healed perhaps is a form of injury that could be used?; perhaps leg would be loss of movement or reduced movement and arm changing which skills not use-able and body/trunk affects stamina/power and hp rates/total refill? I mean all of these could be forms of debuff identified by which part of your body is injured. Don't know what spirit injury could do if that is another tag for type of injury debuff.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I was planning on transcribing more videos (the most recent blog, plus more as they come) and putting them in this thread, which is why I didn't put the blog title in the thread name. You think I should do one for each blog instead?
If there's a lot of discussion between them, it'll be really hard to find each one.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Devs: If the injury is to the head, does it knock out your targetting ability/accuracy until healed perhaps is a form of injury that could be used?; perhaps leg would be loss of movement or reduced movement and arm changing which skills not use-able and body/trunk affects stamina/power and hp rates/total refill? I mean all of these could be forms of debuff identified by which part of your body is injured. Don't know what spirit injury could do if that is another tag for type of injury debuff.
They went over why they didn't want to do a system like that; basically adding a bunch of smaller debuffs like that would make combat generally more confusing, and if you get a debuff for each crit then each debuff has to be relatively weak so that crit builds aren't super strong (or else they would have to be powerful and rare, which goes back to their point of randomly losing fights being unfun). So then you have a whole bunch of minor debuffs clogging up the buff bar, and it's harder to figure out exactly what's happening due to crits as a result. If it's consolidated into a single bar, with a single set of debuffs, then it is easier for the players to understand the consequences of injuries and respond to them appropriately.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I was planning on transcribing more videos (the most recent blog, plus more as they come) and putting them in this thread, which is why I didn't put the blog title in the thread name. You think I should do one for each blog instead?If there's a lot of discussion between them, it'll be really hard to find each one.
That's a fair point. I suppose making a new thread for each doesn't exactly hurt anyone either...
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Devs: If the injury is to the head, does it knock out your targetting ability/accuracy until healed perhaps is a form of injury that could be used?; perhaps leg would be loss of movement or reduced movement and arm changing which skills not use-able and body/trunk affects stamina/power and hp rates/total refill? I mean all of these could be forms of debuff identified by which part of your body is injured. Don't know what spirit injury could do if that is another tag for type of injury debuff.They went over why they didn't want to do a system like that; basically adding a bunch of smaller debuffs like that would make combat generally more confusing, and if you get a debuff for each crit then each debuff has to be relatively weak so that crit builds aren't super strong (or else they would have to be powerful and rare, which goes back to their point of randomly losing fights being unfun). So then you have a whole bunch of minor debuffs clogging up the buff bar, and it's harder to figure out exactly what's happening due to crits as a result. If it's consolidated into a single bar, with a single set of debuffs, then it is easier for the players to understand the consequences of injuries and respond to them appropriately.
I guess that is more robust. But I would have liked to have the interplay between different attacks targetting different injuries. Oh well it could be imagined that head-feet combo > any other combo I suppose...
So maybe the debuffs are variable instead of constant in the new system?
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Goblin Squad Member
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@ Pax Shane Gifford
It is too bad that you can't just put the transcript in the actual discussion thread. You know, keep it all together... ;)
I could do that. Though it'll have the same problem Nihimon was talking about: it'll get lost in the discussion unless I get it out right away (which I can't really do with my school schedule on Wednesdays).
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Goblin Squad Member
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I could do that. Though it'll have the same problem Nihimon was talking about: it'll get lost in the discussion unless I get it out right away (which I can't really do with my school schedule on Wednesdays).@ Pax Shane Gifford
It is too bad that you can't just put the transcript in the actual discussion thread. You know, keep it all together... ;)
Understood. Please forgive my "smarty pants" comment. :)