Discussing Healer abilities, items and talent trees

Holo everyone!

As we're moving closer to a closed alpha of the game, I wanted to start discussing some of the things we've been implementing lately and how we see them working in the game.

Just recently we've been implementing unique healer abilities for each of the 3 classes we have in Holozing; Nature, Ocean and Light.

As most of you who've been following the project know, it'll be a turn-based game similar to Pokemon, Hearthstone/Gods Unchained, etc, but it won't be a card-based game. The cards in our game are the containers that keep your creatures inside and you will need "empty cards" to capture creatures out in the wild.

During gameplay, you get to choose what your next move is, whether you want you creature to perform an aggressive/offensive move, or you want to use an item from your backpack or simply switch creatures on the next turn, or lastly decide to instead cast a healing spell on your creature. All of these "cost" 1 turn, i.e. you can't both have your creature do an attack and cast a healing ability on the same turn, same goes for attempting to capture a wild creature, if you fail to capture it, it'll go ahead and do its own move that turn.

Okay, so this being a turn-based game means that healing abilities have to stand out, they have to be worth using since your creature will just stand there and get healed but not be able to do a move that turn. Thus they have to be powerful and costly in terms of mana and also scarce through ability points. Mana is something I'm sure most readers know and understand, if your mana runs out you won't be able to cast any more healing abilities unless you use a mana potion one turn. Ability points means how often you can use a healing spell until you have to let it recharge.

Now let's get into some of the healing abilities we've been implementing currently.

Ocean Healer:

Healing Rain lvl 1, this spell is learned at lvl 1 for each Ocean healer. It'll cost a certain amount of mana and have a limited amout of ability points. What it does is:

Heal a creature for base 50 HP per turn for 3 to 5 turns, the heal happens at the beginning of the turn before creatures have made their usual moves. While the spell is active, it can heal any friendly creature that's on the field.

Okay, so let's go through this spell in detail. The "base" means that this is how much the spell will heal a creature without considering the Healing Power stat that can exist on certain healer items. For instance if you have a few items with + 20 Healing Power, it will be more than 50 HP heal per turn. This heal is also powerful because it will most of the time heal as soon as the round starts, there will be very few creature moves that will outspeed this heal, but more on that another time. The other cool thing about this spell is that it "remains" on the battlefield, so if your creature faints or you decide to switch creature next round, the new creature will keep getting healed by Healing Rain. 3 to 5 turns simply means it randomly picks if it will heal for a minimum of 3 turns up to a maximum of 5 turns until the spell runs out. Healing Rain cannot stack, if you cast another Healing Rain while one is already up, it will simply replace the previous one not stack with it to heal 2x +50 base HP to your creature.

The second Ocean Healer ability is a bit simpler:

Aqua Pulse level 1,

Sends out a wave of water as a direct heal to your friendly creature, healing it for 200 HP before any creatures have made their turns.* (I'll use an asterisk here to remind readers that there will be very few creature moves that can outspeed healing spells)

This one is quite simple and self-explanatory, Healing Power will here also boost the amount it heals for but keep in mind that similar to creature moves, healing abilities have range too, so a heal won't always heal for exactly 200 HP.

Nature Healer:

Thorn Shield level 1, this is a shield and won't directly heal the creature but it will place a shield on it preventing a base 150 HP from being removed from it. A shield works simply as a buffer, an enemy creature has to do damage to remove the shield before it can start lowering the creatures Health Points again.

While Thorn Shield is active, enemy creatures damaging the creature with the shield will suffer base 30 HP damage per hit for as long as the shield is active.

As some of you gamers out there reading this may have realized, this is a more "offensive" shield as attackers will take damage every time they try to bring the shield's absorption down. This of course means you will want to do a big attack to remove the shield as fast as possible if you are the enemy player instead of doing smaller attacks. Thorn Shield similarly cannot stack, you can just replace the current existing one with a new shield. Enemies will be able to tell looking at the creature's HP that it is shielded.

Blossom Bloom level 1, another "simpler" healing ability for the Nature class, sends out a direct flowery heal, healing your creature for 200 base HP.

Light Healer:

Sacred Shield level 1

Places a shield on a friendly creature that will absorb base 150 Damage and if the shield remains active at the end of the turn, heals the creature for base 50 HP.

Similar to Thorn Shield, this one also absorbs damage but instead of doing damage to incoming attacks, it will heal the creature further at the end of the turn if the shield isn't depleted. Meaning that if you are facing a wild creature that keeps doing smaller attacking moves on you, you may get a lot of heals over many rounds while you are attempting to capture the enemy creature.

Solar Flare level 1

Sends out a direct shining flash of a heal on your friendly creature, healing it for a base 200 HP. *

Alright, now that you've read about the first couple of healing spells we are implementing to each class, I'd wanna take the time to discuss that these are just the first ones with many to come as the healer levels up and learns new ones. Also a reminder that Healers don't improve on stats upon level up, they have to acquire new items to equip to improve their healing efficiency, mana regeneration, etc. Some of these healing abilities will also "evolve", where at a certain level you will learn for instance "Healing Rain level 2" as a Nature healer to keep up and maintain similar stats compared to your creatures who gain stats every level.

Items will be quite similar to other games and RPG's you may have played in the past, most will require you to be a certain level to be able to equip them and most will have certain rarities. This means that if you are level 12 and you have a lot of items that are of high rarity but you got them at level 1-5, they may not be as great as lower rarity items that you obtain when you get them at level 12 and require lvl 10+ to equip. Meaning you have to constantly keep replacing older items if you want your healing spells to keep up in battles, but since we won't be adding an unending amount of healing spells you get to learn as you level up, some of your spells will just evolve to do more base healing compared to what they did at level 1.

Going more in depth on how items work, how to get them, how to get rid of them, etc, in another post.

Talents.

To separate Healers a bit more from each other, since there's only 3 classes, there will also be different talets you can pick as you level up your healer. These will have different effects and affect your healing style quite a bit. One nature healer who decided to go down one of the talent trees will play quite differently compared to one who picked the other side.

There won't be too much concrete info on Talent trees yet as we have decided to add this at a later point in the development of the game as we already have too much things in the game and players want to play. :P

Something to keep in mind, though, that there'll be other things aside from items and gear that'll set apart healers of the same class from each other. While these talents won't have a MAJOR effect on the healer, they'll definitely make a dent later on at higher levels similarly to how some passive abilities of creatures may, especially if you aren't aware of what they are for that specific creature.

Anyway, that's it for this post, let me know your thoughts and if you have any questions. I didn't post this on the official @holozing account because a lot is still undetermined and we do hope the alpha testing will give us a lot more concrete numbers that'll balance the healing classes out properly so they'll all be as fair as possible to pick to play. Feel free to ask in the comment section if there's anything you're curious about!

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