Goblin Squad Member
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Wow, I'm lazy. Better late then never, I suppose. The good news is that there isn't really any transcribing to be done on the map blog, so I can maybe catch up. :) Anyways, here it is:
Stephen: And I'm Stephen Cheney, also a game designer on Pathfinder Online.
Lee: "What base classes will be available in early enrollment? Are there going to be any archetypes in early enrollment? When will further classes, including prestige classes, be added? Is there a development roadmap for any of this juicy class-related goodness?"
So, for the first part, what base classes will be available for early enrollment. We're going to have the fighter, rogue, wizard, and cleric. Shortly thereafter we're going to get the aristocrat, commoner, and expert online. Well, the aristocrat's probably going to be a little later, because the aristocrat is very settlement-focused, and until we have the settlement stuff up and running the aristocrat isn't going to have a whole lot to do. The commoner is focused on professions and harvesting, and the refining of resources, and the expert is our crafter-focused class.
Then, once we get to some time in early enrollment, and those classes we're pretty happy with, then we're going to start looking at adding more of the core. Barbarian, paladin, sorcerer, and bard (to a lesser extent) are the easiest ones for us to add, so those will probably be first, and this is a place where we'll probably do some crowdforging, because for a lot of these, the difficulty in [implementing] these different classes is not that great, so we'll probably be asking the players, "Which of these do you all want us to do?" There will of course be tradeoffs and priorities that have to be set, and things of that nature, but those four classes are sort of like the next tier of classes.
Then, sometime most likely after early enrollment, once we get to open enrollment, we're going to look at bringing in the ranger, druid, and monk. Those are last because they have a lot of technical or artistic concerns that make them much more work intensive than other classes. For example, animal companions: there's a lot of AI tech. and other stuff that has to go into making animal companions work, and monks will need like a billion custom animations to make their attacks and weapons and everything look cool. So that's the plan through early enrollment, into the beginning of open enrollment.
So, second question: are there going to be any archetypes in early enrollment, which I'm going to hand to Stephen.
Stephen: So, not necessarily in the sense that you're asking. We're mining the archetypes for inspiration across the role as a whole. Each role right now has three armor feats. An armor feat is the feat you slot to take advantage of the keywords on your armor. As we pointed out before, most gear has keywords on it, as opposed to a straight power increase. You're not going to be able to put on a suit of Tier 3 armor as a low level character and get the full benefit out of it. It's going to work very similar to any armor you can wear of your own level, because you don't have the armor feat that activates the keywords.
So we've basically focused the roles in three different methods; some of the role options are fairly similar, and some of them widely diverge. For example, the fighter's choices right now for armor are Unbreakable, Dragoon, and Archer, which are inspired by the fighter archetypes. So Unbreakable is your heavy armor fighter, the Dragoon is a more mobile heavy weapon fighter, and the archer is obviously an archer.
Lee: Day 1 of early enrollment is going to be fairly limited. For example, wizards are [only] going to have Evocation and a smattering of other spells.
Stephen: Blasty stuff is very easy to do.
Lee: Blasty stuff is very easy to do. We are limited in the amount of buffs and debuffs (as those require a lot more tech) that we can do. So basically wizards are going to start out very blasty, and clerics will start out very healy, but as we go on those will get more diverse. We obviously want to have a cool width and breadth of spells, but the technical and artistic requirements of these limit us to what we can do right off the bat.
The crafting system; we're actually working on it right now. Characters are going to be running around and gathering resources; they're going to be able to refine those resources and turn those resources into items.
Stephen: The crafting classes will come in with special abilities that make you the best at crafting in the game, or the best at gathering in the game, but they're not going to preclude getting the skills unless you do those at the normal level.
Lee: So, just like a fighter can go whack on a mineral node and get resources out of it, and expert can pick up a sword and go stab people, so it's all a matter of where you want to put your points and spend your time.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think it would be very helpful for those of us intending to pursue the class archetypes that will be developed last if we could know from early EE which skills we can safely train for our intended class. A monk would likely not be able to use plate armor so he would not wish to train plate armor.
To further this consideration, perhaps at least a description of these later archetypes might be afforded? Should we rely on the Pathfinder core rules or do we foresee any significant deviation/variations?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think it would be very helpful for those of us intending to pursue the class archetypes that will be developed last if we could know from early EE which skills we can safely train for our intended class. A monk would likely not be able to use plate armor so he would not wish to train plate armor.
To further this consideration, perhaps at least a description of these later archetypes might be afforded? Should we rely on the Pathfinder core rules or do we foresee any significant deviation/variations?
I think there's a reasonably good chance we'll get a general description of the later Roles (that probably won't differ much from the Classes entry in the PRD).
However, Ryan has explicitly ruled out telling us exactly which skills will be applicable to the Roles which aren't released yet, but I'm having trouble finding it right now.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thanks, Shane. I must say that it's surprising how short the transcribed video presentations are. Perhaps because they don't need to go into the same minute details as written out blog updates.
The first one was significantly more words than these next two. Probably just varying based on how much talking they need to do to get their point across.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I also thought there was significantly less info in the first three videoblogs (not the last one!)then in the written blogs that we we were used to. I think this has to do with the fact that the written blogs often covered whole systems that were not layed out to us yet, while the videoblog tries to answer specific questions in more detail.
I think 4-5 minutes is a bit short though for a 2-weekly update and think they could cover several posts from the "ask Lee Hammock" thread rather then just one. I do not think we will run out of questions any time soon, in fact I think there will come more once alpha info starts rolling in.
I also realize that a videoblog is a lot of work and I love to see the dev talk about their game in person. The last blog was *very* meaty (also lasted 2.5 times as long) and they said that at some point they may do a lightning round, which I am looking forward to(lots of TBD probably :D).
Anyway, I feel like one those hungry Orcs that are bringing the halflings to Sauron, that said "We needsssome meat!".
We needssss alpha!
Shane, much appreciated, so much easier to quickly find a reference in the written word.
