Stoneshard Skill System Overview

While the team at Ink Stains Games continues working on a playable prologue for their roguelike RPG Stoneshard, the latest developer update brings us an overview of the game’s skill system that will offer dozens of skill branches in three distinct categories and a total of 30 character levels to master them. A bit on that:

Greetings, travellers!

Stoneshard devteam is back online with a new devlog! Still working on the prologue, but we have good news: soon it’ll be ready. We’ve got through a lot of stuff for the past weeks, while some other things still need tinkering. Anyway,this log is not about our general progress, but about one of the most important changes we’ve made this year – skill system.

We based our skill tree developing process on two immutable principles: it should be intuitive, so that new players could get on immediately, and it should give a huge experimenting field. Path of Exile skill system happened to be the best variant at first, but we declined it, because it broke the first principle, even though it looks impressive and stylish. We’ve developed a bunch of concepts before finding the right solution.

Final variant represents several dozens of skill branches separated in three categories:

• Weaponry. These skills empower some weapon types. Active skills become available only with the right weapon equipped. They demand no resources, but have cooldowns.
• Sorcery. All that spell stuff is here. Cast whatever you want until mana ends. In case you don’t want to find yourself mana-exhausted in the middle of the fight – sign up for mana management studies.
• Utility. Everything that can’t be divided in previous categories. Dual Wielding, Survival, Sabotage etc. belong here.

Each branch has 8 skills: four actives and four passives. You need to activate active ones (surprisingly), and passive one provide some valuable enhancement (along with small obligatory stat bonus).They are separated in 4 tiers, with two skills per each tier. Upon reaching even levels your character will gain 1 SP (Skill Point) to unlock any tier available. And yes, this means you get two skills at once. By the way, you won’t be able to get to the top tier skills right on level six: most high tier abilities need to be unlocked first. Find a certain mentor or read a treatise to do so.

At level 30 – the highest possible level – your character will be able to master 4 skill branches, or unlock half of the tiers for 8 branches, or any other combination. Just don’t forget that you’ll have only 16 SP. We plan about 30 skill branches in total, which means thousands of possible combinations. First tiers of 11 different branches will be available in the prologue, by the way.

It’s worth mentioning that different classes start with different skills unlocked. Berserk can immediately start levelling his Dual Wielding along with Axes mastery, while Nomad can learn Survival and Bows right from the start. Just a reminder: there aren’t any strict class requirements for different skills, so the starting branches just show which skills are the most suitable for this class from the developer’s point of view. You still can choose your own way and master Psimancy as a Berserk, it’ll just take a little longer.

That’s all for today. Stay online!