[EU] [EP10] Rising Force: New abilities and skills

Source : Cabal EU Tester’s Blog

 

Welcome back to the Tester’s Blog! For those of you familiar with this you know what to expect. For any new readers, in this blog I take a closer look at the coming updates, and answer any questions that you might have (if possible and within reason, of course!). There is quite a lot of text ahead, so grab a coffee, sit back, and let’s take a look at some skill and ability changes coming with Rising Force.

Before I start I’d like to direct your attention to our livestreams from the test server. If you have not had a look yet, head over to our Youtube channel where they are available. The streams should give you a brief idea of what to expect from the awesome new Tower of the Dead B3F dungeon, and the new PvP Battleground, as well as give you a quick look at the new Archridium sets.

Today’s blog will focus on some of the changes with the skills and stats. This is not really a very exciting topic for a livestream – unless you like staring at skill descriptions, of course – but very well suited to the more leisurely approach of a blog. I will start with the most fundamental changes, and work through as many as can fit into the space of a blog.

Basic Stats

Let us start and consider what ESTsoft calls stat-balance changes. The short version is that they have changed the ability values of weapons, armours, accessories, and buff potions. We are looking at a fairly comprehensive overhaul here. The basic stats also give new effects:

• STR: Increases Damage Reduction and Attack for all Battle Styles
• DEX (BL and FB): Increases Attack
• DEX (All): Increases Evasion, Attack Rate, Defence Rate
• INT (All): Increases Magic Attack and Resistance

Your character will still have the same basic stats as before, purely in terms of how many points you have allocated to STR, DEX and INT, but you will notice some rather big changes on things like your Attack and Defence stats. But don’t think everything will become too easy now!

The developers also changed the difficulty level and monster levels for all the dungeons. It will be up to you to find out exactly how much changed, but I am sure that you will find some challenges in unexpected places.

Sword and Magic Skills

Another really big change is that the entire skill system has been restructured. Instead of Sword, Magic, Upgrade and Special skills you now have Attack, Support, Enchantment, and Special tabs. Every skill that you can use to attack, from magic arrows to Transcender sword skills will be grouped into one tab, called Attack. Some of your buffs and debuffs, most notably the short buffs, and skills such as Dash and Fade Step were moved into the Support group. and your longer buffs like Aura Barrier are passive – this simply means that you never have to cast them, they are always applied once you have learned them, no duration or rebuff every required. This also does mean that if you use an Odd Circle all your passive buffs will be immediately effective (And yes, it is likely that there will be a ‘show buff effects’ option in the future, in order to remove the visuals of a skill like Aura Barrier). The separate skill ranks for Sword and Magic is now a thing of the past, you will only see a single, unified skill rank. This is long overdue in my mind, especially since it has been years since you had to level your Sword and Magic skills separately. Simplicity is almost always a good thing.

You will also notice some changes on the skill levels. When you first log in after Rising Force is live all your skills will be set back to level 1, and all your skill points refunded. However, don’t worry too much about remembering which skills are on which level, since yet another change is that all skills now have fixed cooldowns. So it does not matter if your Warrior has Whirlwind on level 1 or on level 20, as the cooldown will be the same. Only the damage and other effects change as the skill levels.

New Skills and Abilities

Now this is where things get interesting! As you may remember if you watched the first livestream I said that this update is as big a change as Episode 2 was – and I stand by that statement. The new abilities and new skills will have a big impact on the gameplay. The first three new abilities can come from your character class, or items, or even from specific skills. They are:

• DMG Reduce: When attacked this reduces the damage received (fairly obvious)
• Accuracy: This increases the attack success rate, and counteracts the opponent’s evasion rate
• Piercing: This increases the damage on successful attacks, and the classes with a base piercing rate will counters their opponent’s defence rate

Your skills will also have some new abilities, and the more analytical players will of course work out their combos to make use of these new abilities.

• Domination: When domination is active the character cannot move or use skills.
• Immobile: The character cannot move or use movement-related skills.
• Silence: The character cannot use any skills for the duration.
• Immune to status changes: No status changes can happen
• Complete Evasion: All attacks are evaded (yes, even combo)
• Reflect Damage: Reflects a portion of damage back to the opponent.

With great power comes, well, changed abilities. Consider the Intuition skill on a Blader. It now grants Complete Evasion, but only for 12 seconds, and costs 300 SP to active with an 80 second cooldown. The Instant Immunity skill is another example: This is limited to Warriors, and also consumes SP on activation. The list of skills with changed abilities is quite a long one, and perhaps better suited to the patch notes or a certain external information blog maintained by one of the players from Mercury EN.

There are also a couple of new skills, but not yet the new attack skills (those are only coming with the third part of the Rising Force update, we’re getting Part 1 and Part 2 now). Two for the Wizard, two for the Force Bladers, and one each for the Force Archer and Force Shielder:

• Magic Control (WI): Self-buff that increases Magic Attack
• Spirit Shield (WI): A barrier that reduces damage
• Astral Enchant (FB): Enchant your sword using a sub-weapon
• Art of Curse (FB): Debuff that reduces the opponent’s resistance (this one is long-awaited, I know)
• Quick Move (FA): Increases Evasion
• Reflex Shield (FS): Reflects attacks using the Astral Shield

These are good additional tools to have for each class, and serves to shore up some slight imbalances that exist at the moment.

The last big change is that some skills have been changed to become ‘Instant’ skills. This simply means that they can be activated while other skills are being used, and can also be activated during combo – they don’t count towards the combo, and doesn’t break it either.

We will of course post all the skill changes, for every class, in the patch notes once they become publically available (I would have taken them from the patch note draft thread, but I received updated notes this morning and I have not yet had the chance to make all the corrections needed).

As always, ask any questions you may have about the skill changes, or suggestions about which part of the update you want me to take a closer look at with the next blog update, in the comments.

Until the next livestream / blog!
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