Devlog #9 - Gearing Up

Adventuring in the Stormtossed Isle is not a feat for everybody, let alone for careless mercenaries who do not gear up before departing for the next adventure…

In today’s devlog for Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades, we will discuss a core element that will accompany all of your playthroughs–the equipment system.

For an RPG, it is crucial to know and understand how getting better items and equipment works. Without proper gear, your party’s defense and offensive power will be lower and, at times, too low to face a dungeon or a specific enemy.

Reading this devlog will definitely give you an advantage to begin your adventure in the best possible way!

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Understanding the gear slots

Before diving into the specifics, it’s necessary to specify that, in Pathbreakers, you will find lots of different gear types. This means that your units have access to weapons, armors, and consumables that they can equip for specific playstyles and builds.

Starting with the weapons: they can be 1-handed melee (dagger, sword, mace, shortspear, staff), 2-handed melee (polearm, greatsword), or 2-handed ranged (gun, bow, crossbow).

Besides these weapon types, there are also others available to enemies only.

You can also opt to go unarmed, although only monks or classes with special passive effects can pull this off well.

While discussing offensive types of gear is great, we also need to be able to sustain foes' attacks… and that’s where our armor slots come in.

There are three main armor slots: shield, head, and body. The last two pieces of gear are subdivided into three armor types with different defensive and damage reduction stats. They are cloth, light, and heavy.

Different classes can equip different types of armor and different types of weapons.

The stats

Equipment can have a lot of different stats and values, but the core values for armors are:

• Defense

  a higher defense stat reduces your chance of getting hit in combat.

  Combat hits are split into 4 outcomes

  a miss, a glance, a hit, and a crit. The defense stat influences all those values. A unit's defense is directly opposed to its attacker's Accuracy value.

• Damage Reduction: This reduces physical damage taken. There are some intricacies to how this works, but basically a higher damage reduction means you take a smaller % of the damage inflicted.

• Elemental Damage Reduction: This is similar to the above, but there is a different value for every type of element in the game (fire, electricity, water, dark, and holy).

• HP: Raw hit points.

In general, heavy armor focuses on Damage Reduction and hit points, light armor has higher defense and some hit points, and cloth armor tends to focus mostly on elemental damage reduction.

For weapons, the core stats are:

• Damage range: the basic damage range of the weapon. That value will be multiplied by various other stats (such as the damage value of the skill you're using, the bonus from your corresponding stat (strength, dexterity, intelligence), and all sorts of other values from the game's elaborate passives).

• Intelligence Bonus: a raw bonus to your intelligence, which affects spell damage.

• Action Point cost: the cost of making a regular attack with the weapon, in terms of action points. (A unit starts their turn with a set number of action points, and those are used to attack or move, etc).

• Range: the range at which the weapon can attack. Most melee weapons are at 1 and ranged weapons around 5, although this can vary.

• Damage Reduction Penetration: the amount of Damage Reduction points the weapon ignores.

• Bleed Chance: the base chance of causing bleeding on the target.

In general, mage weapons (staves, maces) will have some intelligence bonus, whereas most other weapons will not.

Two-handers will have higher damage and often a higher action point cost.

Each weapon type has a distinct focus among the above values, in addition to other special effects. Polearms, for example, have a melee range of 2, which allows you to put a little extra distance between yourself and your enemies.

On top of the above differences, each weapon type has 2 distinct "lines". The 2 lines each have different traits that encourage different styles of play.

For example, the main lines for the greatsword are:

Double-edged greatswords (default): high damage, 4 ap cost attacks.

Greatsabers (encourage mobility): 35% more damage, 6 ap cost attacks. Moving before attacking grants a further 35% damage bonus.

Similarly, the crossbow has both a regular light crossbow version and a 'point blank' heavy crossbow version, which allows close-range attacks to do more damage, but with an overall reduced range.

There are pros and cons to each of the 2 main lines for each weapon, and it'll depend on your playstyle and the way you've built your units for how much mileage you get from each.

Lastly, there’s also a concept of “weapon attachments” (we’re still working on the name, haha), where you can modify a weapon by attaching an “enchantment” to it. Some will increase damage, penetration, or add status effects to the weapon, for example. There are a large number of them, and they are mostly found or crafted. It adds another layer of customization to the whole weapon system.

Gear rarity

All of the points we’ve discussed are about the stats and setups you'll see for most regular weapons, but Pathbreakers' gear is also divided into Normal, Legendary, and Unique gear.

• Normal gear is most of the gear you'll encounter, and it is subdivided into quality tiers.

• Legendary gear is rarer and usually involves higher stats and many small bonus features on the gear, like a Polearm with Damage Reduction penetration (which a normal Polearm doesn't have) and higher damage values.

• Unique gear is much rarer, and there's only one of each in existence. For example, there will be only a single staff named “The Conduit” with its unique effects, so doubles do not exist at this rarity level. They boast all sorts of special features, from higher stats, bonus stats, bonus passives, and even bonus abilities.

How the consumables work

The remaining items you can use to empower your units in Pathbreakers are the consumables. The way they work is unusual compared to other games, but if you played our other title, Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark, then the system will mostly feel familiar.

We’ve lumped consumables in with the other gear here because you have to equip them similarly to those. However, they are still quite different from regular equipment. There's a limited amount of consumable types in the game to keep things streamlined. For example, there's one Health Potion type (rather than, say, small, medium, and large health potions). Instead of having many different health potions to manage, you'll be able to upgrade them through the crafting system to increase their potency, the amount you can carry, and so on.

You also don't have to buy health potions in stores. Instead, you can buy or find recipes to upgrade your potions, or recipes for other consumable types you might not have yet (javelins or mana potions, for example).

Your team will then have access to many consumables that you can equip on each unit so you can use them in combat. In between battles, the crafting system will automatically replenish your supplies of consumables (amongst many other things it handles) using your supply crafting materials.

What this means in practice is you don't have to worry overmuch about using up consumables, since you can always craft them right back. That being said, creating them will take a few hours of game-time and cost a small sum, so you should still think about what you're doing before you down a flagon.

Each unit can equip one consumable by default, although guild talents and passives can increase that amount up to four.

One of the Rogue’s advanced classes, the Alchemist, has many extra options with consumables, so keep an eye out for them if you like to fling flasks around on the battlefield.

And that’s it for today’s devlog! We are curious to know, after this read, what your thoughts are and which builds you are going to make for your first run.

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