Beast Forms: Merge Skills and Modifiers Suggestion.
Just ahead of time: I'm excluding lycanthropy skills from this discussion.
So right now we've... Cow, Deer, Giant Bat, Pig, Rabbit and Spider for animal forms. That's a fair amount of variety, and you'd expect each animal to behave differently, as they already do. So this is just a "quick" idea insofar as I'm making it up as I go, but I figure it's worth looking at how we could enhance the animal experience by merging combat abilities into a "single" skillset - sort of; I'll explain what I mean by this in a minute.
First, though - why would we need this? By in large, animal forms are and should be a niche thing within the game - constantly designing entire kits for new animals would inevitably decrease the variety we'd expect to see from the available forms within the game. If we have more unified animal skills, we can look at:
A) Having an "Animal" group of skills
B) Having a unique "paper doll" for equipment for animals, including the removal of weapons
C) Let players pick an animal form based on preference for that animal
D) Give each animal game-play tweaks rather than combat tweaks.
So how could it work?
First, we'd have an "Animal" skill (0 - 125), with a sub-category for each specific animal much like phrenology or anatomy would.
As you level up a specific animal form, you'll acquire attacks that are useful for that form, as well as the usual bonuses; for example, at level 1 you might start with a specific "Hoof" based attack. It'd be possible to unlock this attack by becoming any animal with hooves.
The animal skill itself would unlock more generic abilities as well (perhaps replacing Survival instincts).
Each animal form's unique moves would be categorized as "Unique"; I'll refer to this later.
Akin to Sword skills, you'll be able to learn variations of certain attacks (I.e. "Heavy Hoof Stomp"), which would share a cooldown with the regular version but have different functionality; these would be learned from NPCs.
Here's a few example abilities:
"Impale" - Deal X damage to your opponent, and cause them to bleed over 30 seconds.
Requires horns or antlers.
"Stomp" - Deal X damage to your opponent, and stun them for Y seconds.
Requires hooves.
"Bite" - Deal X damage to your opponent, and crush their armour dealing Y armour damage.
Requires fangs.
Equipment
First off, let's look at how modifiers would appear on gear -
An animal piece could have the following modifiers, for example:
"Your [Basic] attacks have X bonus damage and restore Y more power."
"Attacks utilising teeth now cause your target to bleed for X damage over Y duration"
"Attacks utilising hooves cause your opponent to be unable to evade for Y seconds."
These would work for abilities shared across animal forms. For unique abilities, we'd have something like:
"Unique abilities have their cooldown reduced by 10%."
"Unique abilities deal 5% more damage, and cause you to heal for 5% of the damage dealt."
"Unique abilities that provide supportive bonuses, such as armour, power, or health, restore 25% more."
"Unique abilities that provide buffs last 25% longer."
"Unique abilities that provide debuffs are 25% more powerful."
Now then, we can look at how animals would equip themselves:
Instead of the "Human" paperdoll, they'd have access to an animal one (shared across all forms).
The specifics here don't matter - but by in large, animals wouldn't be able to equip traditional armour/weapons and would have their own set of items that can be shared between animal players.
While in a certain form, modifiers will have a bias for the player's form.
For example, it will be more likely that a cow will receive hoof-based modifiers instead of fanged-based modifiers.
Hopefully that makes some amount of sense, I just figured I'd have a stab at it and see if we could at least think about ways to make it easier to implement new forms without being disruptive to other areas of the game. Ultimately the specifics here may be a bit too convoluted to actually be implemented, but it's still fun to think about.
Plus it would mean new animal forms could be added secretly without having equipment dropped in game that exposes its existence!
