Pre-Alpha Ranger Abilities

It's taken a little longer than I hoped to get the latest post up, mostly due to the fact that I've been bogged down with some technical details in preparation for the stress test I hope to do later this month.

Without further ado, here's a quick look at the Ranger abilities as they exist right now:

(Keep in mind this is all still very early days so there will likely be substantial changes to each class before Beta).

As you can see in general from the video, I've added a few new things. In particular, there's now proper ability icons that show how long the ability is on cooldown, as well as the player's health and mana bars shown on the bow. Additionally, we have the beginnings of floating combat text which shows up when you do damage to a monster, and status icons to show debuffs on the monster.

The Ranger Class

Right now the Ranger focuses on being a control + damage class. The basic action that you'll be doing a lot of is shooting a bow. In VR, this requires not only actually aiming (which you will get better at as you play the game more), but it also requires the moderately physical action of pulling back the "bow string" over and over again.

The Ranger can then imbue each arrow fired with a small smattering of abilities. Right now they can choose to poison the target, create an area of effect that does constant damage wherever the arrow hits, or supercharge the arrow so it does massive damage to a single target. The bottom-right ability is currently a self-buff that increases the Ranger's own damage by 25% for the duration of the buff.

In addition to the arrows, the Ranger has a trap on their hip that they can throw out onto the battlefield. By default, the trap just does damage to a single target that passes over it. However, if the Ranger uses an ability, they can also imbue the trap (instead of their arrow) with the ability's properties. So for example, they could use the poison ability which would cause the trap to not only damage but also poison the target it explodes on.

In addition to these abilities, the Ranger is going to get at least once crowd control ability to bind a target in place. Right now the Ranger's resource isn't really implemented, but I'm thinking of doing something where the Ranger builds up "focus" as a resource; the focus would be built up by hitting targets without missing (so the more targets you hit in a row the higher your focus goes), multiplied by the distance from which you hit them. So if you are far away and hitting a target lots of times, you will build up more focus than if you are hitting it from point-blank range. I haven't decided yet if the focus will be used as a spendable resource required to use abilities (like mana), or if it's going to more like a base modifier for all Ranger damage (so basically the more "on fire" you are, the more damage you are doing).

Overall State of the Project

The project is continuing to move along nicely. I'm still targetting a late September stress test. I would like to have at least one other class in by then so you could play around with them (with the understanding, of course, that they are totally not complete yet and not balanced). But worst-case scenario you will be able to get in the game, see other people, and shoot some monsters as a Ranger.

If you'd like to discuss this post, you can do so on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/52l0nw/orbusvrmmoprealpharangertest/