Today we'll talk a little bit about healer items, including some of the items acquired from the alpha vials that'll give players a nice boost for starters!
Healers without any items will feel quite powerless, their mana pool is going to be small, their regeneration close to non-existant and their base healing won't heal your creatures for much. This is by design.
For you gamers out there, our inspiration for healer items mainly comes from games such as world of warcraft and diablo. A thing we feel WoW missed out on is by making items identical from each other, i.e. when you loot a certain item, it'll always have the exact same stats. This is however not the case in Diablo which has min-max ranges for certain stats on items or potential to have or not have certain stat affixes at all. While our min-max won't be as crazy as diablo, it'll still be enough to strive players to want to have the items that perfectly fit their healer and the talent they've chosen along with as high stats as possible.
Another thing to mention here compared to games mentioned above, while some things like "twinks" in WoW were merely accidental in nature, for us it'll be something we'd want players to strive towards and be rewarded for it. Twinks means healer and creature teams that purposely have decided to not level up their healer and creatures any further so they can continue to participate and compete in certain PvP brackets for zing rewards such as materials, crafted mystery items and zing! This means we're going to offer a wide variety of different items for every level bracket both in found items, quest items and crafted items.
Our rarity range goes from green, blue, epic, orange and holo color.
Items and creatures will all have a "rarity score", this determines how rare and powerful your creature and items are. This also makes sure that your creatures and items will remain that rarity even if balancing changes occur where we may change how much a min-max range of a certain item's healing power is for that certain rarity. Meaning, even if you have an item of the highest rarity - holo, it doesn't mean it may not get adjusted in terms of actual stats it gives you but it won't ever have lower stats than a similar item of legendary/orange rarity.
Let's take a look at the healer gloves coming from the Alpa Vial for a few examples.
These are the healer gloves for the Forest Class, left are gloves of Epic (purple) rarity and on the right are gloves of Holo rarity. Now, these numbers are not final, but it'll give you an idea.
Alpha Forest Healing Gloves
Bound to Account
Requires level 1 to equip, requires Forest Class to equip
Mana Pool +142
Healing Power +24
Regeneration +4 mpm
Luck +16
Okay, so let's go through what these stats mean.
Mana Pool means how much extra mana you receive when equipping these gloves, if your healer currently has a total of 300 total mana, after equipping these items they'll have 442 mana.
Healing Power increases your healing abilities' strength, if your direct heal ability recovers 50 health of your creature, this one will add another 24 to it.
Mana Regeneration in Holozing will be how much mana you generate every minute, the gloves will increase your mana generation by 4 mana per minute.
The Luck stat will affect your encounter rate and capture success rate.
Now, what you may not see, is that on the back-end we will have a minimum and maximum amount of stats the Epic Starter Gloves can get compared to the Holo one. In this case it could be (in the order of above):
- 120-160
- 20-28
- 4-6
- 12-20
The odds of hitting the higher ranges will also be weighted similar to creature stat odds: 50% chance for the lower 50% of the range, 35% chance for 50-85% range, then 14%, 0.9% and 0.1% for the absolute max stats. Although keep in mind at lower levels it'd be easier to hit the latter ranges due to a lack of enough numbers.
Now, you can imagine that the Holo Glove's stat window may range higher than these ones with a small chance that maxed out epic gloves may surpass really unlucky holo gloves rng if the min window of a Holo stat is within the window of a Epic stat. Example if Green gloves mana pool is 120-160 and Holo gloves mana pool is 150-190.
Keep in mind these are examples for now, after proper alpha testing we are also going to take feedback and advice from community input to find the close to perfect balance as we can, even then the stats may still change over different updates and patches.
The thing to keep in mind here, is that while the Alpha healing gloves will give people an easy start to having more powerful heals and a more efficient journey through their first battle encounters, this does not mean that players won't be able to find similar gloves in the wild after defeating creatures or by using their professions to craft gloves. We don't want people to feel like they have to buy a starter vial or pick up items from the marketplace from other players who've bought an alpha vial to be able to compete, they'll be able to craft items of similar strength albeit lower odds as other gloves may range from green to holo rarity.
Another thing to note is that items found or crafted at higher levels, which require healers to be a certain level to be used, will have their base minimum window be slightly higher than the ones you craft or receive from the alpha vials at level 1. For instance, green rarity gloves at level 3 may have similar stat window then blue rarity gloves at level 1. This encourages players to constantly look for new upgrades to replace their current existing items as they're leveling up and then salvaging their previous gloves for some materials in exchange.
The unique thing with items from the Alpha Vials is also that those items will be "bound to account", meaning you can use those items on any healer on your account, but only one at a time. For instance, if the healer you're actively playing right now reaches level 10 and receives an upgrade in gloves that surpasses the stats of the alpha healing gloves, you can unequip the gloves and equip them on your second healer who may stick to battling other players at the level 1 PvP bracket. Thus they can be re-used, while other items that are found or crafted may get soulbound to the healer upon equipping or may be soulbound when a healer finds or crafts them instantly.
Account bound items can also not be traded, you will have to unequip those items off of your healer if you want to trade your healer away. While healer-bound items can be traded away with your healer but can't be equipped on other healers.
There will also be about 8-10 different item slots for healers, from rings to necklaces to earrings to bracers, boots, clothing, headwear and eyewear, they'll all have a chance to increasing your stats and you'll be able to find items for those slots as you level up and improve your profession level to craft them. Furthermore you will also be able to "upgrade" items and add minerals to them if you have the right profession or know someone who'll do it for you!
I realize this post may have gotten a bit technical and potentially too much in depth for regular players as there's a lot to cover, but if you have any questions feel free to ask! Thanks for reading!