Continuing on my post from a few weeks ago regarding the contents of the Alpha Vials, if you read it I guess you can tell that there's a lot to them as only the creature part fit into that post without making it way too long. A tl;dr from that post for those that didn't read it:
The 4 Holozing starter creatures will be limited to vials only, you won't be able to capture them in the game. In future next edition vials they will still exist but at a much lower drop rate and with lower chance of stat rarity compared to alpha. These creatures will however not be distinct to creature you can capture in terms of power or abilities, owning these creatures won't give you additional "strength" in Player vs Player battles, meaning that creatures you capture in combat can be just as strong. You do however need a creature, a healer and a few starting items to properly play the game when beta launches, while these assets may become leasable in the future and other requirements put in place for you to play without the need to purchase a vial and mint a healer, this won't exist early on.
Now let's look into some of the other items in the Alpha vial while discussing their use-case and in turn give you a better idea of how the beta of the game will work.
Alpha designed Healing Gloves
These will come with a class restriction, i.e. if you've minted an Ocean healer but receive Nature Class Healing Gloves you will have to trade them in for the ones that fit your class. Healing Gloves will come in two different rarities, Epic and Holo.
Here's a screenshot along with Consumables showcasing the two unique rarities along with class restrictions.
The Alpha healing gloves will have a unique design that players cannot craft by themselves through healer professions. Similar to the creatures, though, this does not mean that craftable or found gloves cannot be as just as strong in stats as them. The healing gloves will increase the stats of the Healers with Epic having certain stat ranges while the Holo ones have higher ranges of stat amounts along with an additional stat. For instance the Epic Healing gloves can give you something like
- 18 Luck
- 24 Healing Power
- 12 Mana Regen
While the Holo one would include all 4 Healer stats:
- 32 Luck
- 38 Healing Power
- 22 Mana Regen
- 48 Mana Pool
To give you a quick overview of what these stats are meant to do:
Luck will mainly affect your capture success rate. While each unique creature will have their own capture difficulty, gear from healer items along with capture device and ammo rarity may increase your luck to increase your odds of capturing even the hardest creatures. Luck may also affect how many encounters you can receive on a daily basis. One thing to note, however, is that you need to have your "luck" gear set equipped at all times for this to take effect, meaning if you have gear you'd rather wanna use in PvE due to increased heals or mana generation you'll have to use the set with the highest amount of luck for it to work when attempting to capture the creature or when awaiting encounters. Then switch to the other set when you know you're about to do PvP battles, etc.
Healing Power is quite straight forward, it increases the base heal amount of your abilities, if your "Healing rain heals a creature for 50 HP per turn, having 50 Healing Power may increase that to 100 +/- 20% range.
Mana Regen will determine how fast your mana regenerates when your healer is idle and not in battles, for instance 20 mana per hour. This also requires you to have those items with mana regen equipped for it to actively regen your mana. There'll be potions and elixirs that boost regen as well. Mana Regen will however also boost your ability points regeneration.
Mana Pool stands for your total mana, this stat also affects your critical strike chance of your heals!
As mentioned in the past, compared to creatures the healers themselves don't possess any stats. Thus their stats don't increase as they level up but leveling up enables them to craft and acquire new items that increase in stats based on their level requirements. For instance, as healers start getting to level 5 they'll be able to craft and find Healing gloves that are of higher item level but at the same time require a healer to be at least level 5 to be able to equip and use them. Their increased level requirement means they will also be superior to items at lower levels such as the Alpha Healing Gloves that only require a healer to level 1 to be equipped. The range of items is similar to creatures, from green to holo, this means that healing gloves acquired at later levels, even at the lowest rarity will eventually give you more stats than the Holo Healing Gloves you received from the Alpha Vial.
So healers will have to constantly keep swapping gear as they level up until they reach the level cap of the beta which is planned to be level 30. This naturally means that eventually as healers get to max level it'll be all about getting the highest rarity items with the highest range to increase your healing abilities for PvP or your mana generation and luck for PvE.
Another thing we've discussed in the past is that items in our game will have unique restrictions based on their usage and how they're found. There are currently 3 categories planned for them:
account-bound items, these will be soulbound nfts with certain restrictions. For instance if you want to trade a healer off in the market you will need to remove any account-bound gear it has equipped in order to trade it, or simply the item will remain in your account and not follow the trade to another account. Account-bound items have perks however in the form of allowing other healers on your account to use these items. The Alpha Healing Gloves for instance are account-bound, meaning that once your first healer reaches a certain level where they'll get new items to replace the alpha ones you'll be able to re-use the alpha healing gloves on another healer of low level or one that hasn't found any better gloves yet.
bound-on-find items, certain items will be bound to the healer itself when the item is crafted or found which could happen from quests or random creature encounters. This is one of the more restricted alternatives, you won't be able to trade this item off to another healer or account at all, you either use it on the healer that found it or you salvage it for holo dust + other potential materials.
bound-on-use items, these are the "zing makers" if you will, most craftable items will be tradable allowing players to make use of their professions to fill the need of other healers looking for item upgrades. Although crafting will come with diverse material costs and require some zing to be burned upon each craft along with taking effort to level professions up - especially for the higher level craftable items, this is where professions will be able to make some of that zing back by crafting bound-on-use items.
Okay this post got a bit long again so I'll cut it off here for now. The idea behind this series is to have a place for players to find these easily later and to also create a shorter FAQ with the info in here along with giving readers a better grasp of how the game's going to be.
Let me know what you thought of the healing gloves, the healer stats and thoughts behind them! Hope you're still excited for the game even though it's been taking longer than expected for it to launch, but maybe you can understand that there's a lot involved by reading these posts. ^^