Healer talents are something I've been working on planning out this week so I wanted to give you all a little idea what to look forward to.
As we've mentioned in the past, healers will be different in cosmetics only when minted. A healer without any items equipped will have the same stats as any other healer of that class and can be traded at any time with other accounts. Their XP, talents, stats history and items (unless account-bound items) will also be able to be traded off to other players although with certain restrictions for usage in games based on recent trades to prevent abuse.
I created a quick AI prompt of what a healer talent tree might look like to give you an idea:
Now as a quick note, the icon's above are not all going to mean anything in our game, it's just the AI prompt going wild. Healers won't have offensive abilities but may give buffs that'll improve a creatures damage output and defenses.
The idea with talent trees is to attempt to make the few healer classes we have stand out a bit extra from one another aside from items from gear.
Talents will be unlocked upon healers reaching higher levels. Healers level ups are going to be a lot slower than creatures, encouraging players to have a party of 3-5 creatures around the same level as the healer rather than just focusing all your resources and time on leveling up one creature to get to max as soon as possible.
If a creature levels up much past your healer, it will start to disobey your commands and do nothing to waste your turns.
There will be two different trees for starters for every healer class, you will be able to apply points on the different trees based on your level. To unlock the next step on that branch means you will need to level higher and apply points to the previous talent to unlock the next one. The talent tree will attempt to give you something really good by the end so you're encouraged to go all the way on the same branch rather than going halfsies.
The focus on these trees will be the decision between raw healing power and offense compared to longetivity and defense. I.e. one of the branches will give your healing abilities more healing power (your base heals having a higher heal output), higher crit chance and higher offensive buffs to your creatures while the other will tend more towards mana regeneration, bigger mana pool and increase defensive buffs for your creatures.
Talents can be unlearned but it will cost holo dust and a certain zing amount, potentially tied to a hbd value for cases where the price of zing may be volatile so the "value" is the same no matter when people get into the game or decide to unlearn their talents. A healer won't lose their points upon an unlearn, they'll just have the ability to re-apply them again in different slots based on what they want to focus on now or if they want the talents to match with their gear or amplify the gear's focus on stats.
For each class, ocean, light and forest, they'll be a bit similar to each other, i.e. raw healing power vs longetivity but still unique in terms of what they'll focus on specifically. I.e. Light healers raw healing power tree may focus a bit extra on crit chance and large heals while a forest healers raw healing power tree may focus on healing over rounds raw power.
Anyway, that's kind of all there is to it by now. Hope it gave you a bit more of an overview of it. In the next post we'll start looking into healing gear and what's waiting for you there.