Handling Hero Abilities In The New Quest | Patreon Weekly #333

Hey Patrons! In this weekly I’m going to go over how I plan to integrate hero abilities into the upcoming quest. There’ll also be an Audio Q&A next week! You can ask questions in a comment here or in the Patreon discord.

Currently all base hero powers and most subclass powers tie into equipment, often specific unique equipment. A quest that takes away all your existing equipment then naturally has a problem of how hero abilities should be handled. There’s a temptation to just turn all hero powers off for the duration of the quest, but character progression is a major part of the game, and so doing this would feel awful.

So then there’s the issue of how to best balance hero abilities in this new context. I want to let the player use their hero powers without making the quest overly-defined by them, and also without massively advantaging certain classes or subclasses.

My initial thought was to simply give heroes a copy of their unique items at the start of the quest, letting them immediately access their powers. The problem here is that some powers are much more strongly tied to equipment than others. Giving the Berserker his seal back is almost no benefit at all without upgraded armor, meanwhile giving the Priest their book back would give them access to holy lance, a spell strong enough to let them skip early parts of the quest!

So the next thought was to try and limit hero powers in some way on a case-by-case basis, but that starts to feel really arbitrary really quick. To go back to the previous example, The Cleric might not be able to access their subclass spells at all, meanwhile the Warrior would still need a buff like starting with better default armor. It also feels more than a little odd to take all of the player’s tools away and them immediately give them back one of the biggest ones.

I think what makes the most sense is to make unique class items (and maybe abilities too) a part of progression in the quest itself! This could serve as an excellent midway goal, where the player would first want to get strong enough to take on a special ‘defeat a mid-strength guardian to get a copy of your hero item’ room before going on to think about the boss. This should hopefully guide the player through the quest a bit better, and also solves the power imbalance by forcing the player to gear up first.

It’s also relatively easy for me to tune the reward behind the scenes. The Cleric and Rogue would probably just get their items, whereas classes with abilities that are more item dependant (the Duelist being the best example) could easily get a powerful item in addition to their hero abilities.