The skills renaissance explained

Our Lead Game Designer has taken some time out to give you all a rundown of what you can expect in terms of skills in the near future of Drakensang Online
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The skills renaissance is here!

As was announced in Release 44, the first of the new skills for character classes has been unlocked. Many of you have already taken advantage of this exciting opportunity and have tried out some of the new skills at your disposal. Many of you have also noticed the changes that have been made to the spellweaver’s lightning shots and have been asking the same questions: will these changes lead to specific developments in the game? Will the game stay as it already is? Will the quick slot bar be enlarged so that we can use all of our new skills? These are all very good questions and this article is intended to give you an overview of the upcoming developments in Drakensang.

Towards the end of last year, we began plans to create a stronger character individualization system for players – which naturally led to us reevaluating skills. We felt that there weren’t enough skills available, since almost all players were using the same skill in battle and since it was difficult to distinguish characters from each other. We decided that skill variety should play a significant role in distinguishing between two characters in the same class. This is why we sought to develop five new skills for each class, and thereby almost double the amount of skills available.

Before we came up with the concepts for the new skills, we revisited our development plans for the three classes in Drakensang. It became clear to us early on that we first had to reconstruct some pre-existing skills in order to implement our ideas and create adequate space in the game for the new skills. The spellweaver’s lightning shot was one of such pre-existing skills – after the skill revision in December, the lightning shot was such a powerful maneuver, that it basically made all other skills superfluous. The paralyzing onslaught skill for warriors was also dominating the class at the time. We resolved to implement these necessary changes and viewed them as a part of skill development.

We didn’t want to secretly develop skills for months at a time without any feedback from the players, so we decided to publish the new skills piece by piece. The way we did this was to publish new skills in a series of small releases, an example being Release 44. In the spellweaver‘s case, we also decided to implement the changes we made to the lightning shot right away, since it was overshadowing the chain of lightning skill. We will also be introducing additional changes in concordance with new skills. In the meantime, balance problems could very well crop up. However, you can be sure that, once we have published the latest skills and introduced the new talent system, we will thoroughly review and polish up all skills.

Don’t forget that the development of new skills is just the first step! At the end of this whole process, there will also be an entirely new talent system for Drakensang Online, which will, for the first time ever, make it possible to completely individualize your character. You will have the opportunity to set yourself apart from other dragon warriors, spellweavers and rangers by choosing your own talents and skills. It will take a little more time before we are finished with the new talent system, but until then you can expect new skills and tweaks to be regularly released.

In the very near future, we will announce more details about the upcoming talent system and the plans for the quick slot bar.

I hope I have been able to shed some light on the role of the current changes in Drakensang and that you enjoy the updates when carrying out your quests in Duria!

Best,

Robin Henkys

Original Article