Hi there! I’m gonna reveal class art every week and talk about their design as I do. I’m gonna go start to end alphabetically, so meet the Bard and the Berserker!

On roles and sub-roles

I’m going to be talking about roles a lot in these posts. This is because I designed every class using Total//Effect’s role and sub-role concepts as a basis. Each class has three sub-roles: two from one role and one from another. The sub-role indicated in text with bold is the “primary” focus, and each class has a primary sub-role that no other class has. I also have an image highlighting them for each class!

These roles and sub-roles don’t do anything directly, they’re just a design tool I use to shape the kinds of abilities I give them.

The Bard

Minstrels are a Thing in heroic fantasy. Everyone loves to be self-referential about stories within stories, and rightly so: it’s cool and people should do it more. For its tales and skillset, I tried to focus on that aspect: peacemaking, inspiration, pulling on heartstrings, getting in your head, promoting social behavior, all the good things that art can do.

What a Bard ends up as in games has been way stickier over time. In Valiant Horizion, the Bard’s roles are Supporter (subroles Heal and Boost) and Defender (subrole Disable). From the beginning, I knew I wanted a non-standard healer. Cleric/White Mage/etc is so like…D&D, you know? I wanted something that would stand out. Given the change from HP/Health/etc to Vigor, something that invigorates characters would make sense. I knew I wanted some kind of “performer” class so Bard seemed like a perfect fit for it!

I’m generally in favor of full-support classes. (More on that later when we get to the Tactician. I love that “lazylord” archetype.) But I don’t think every support class needs to be full-support, you know? And Bard in particular feels like it would be a weird fit for it. I wanted to emphasize that idea of a performer, someone who’s constantly dancing around and flourishing and giving out praise and throwing around insults and confusing enemies. And as such, their non-movement Standard is an attack rather than a support ability, while the other two really emphasize smart placement and dancing around.

This more active/offensive focus is also something to cap off a different thing: The thing with healing as a focus is that it only matters if players are…getting harmed! If you’re all very good at the game it won’t happen too much. So they’ve got a few other tricks, some more supportive and some more offensive. But their dedicated-healing power is extremely good - if you’re going to spend an action for that, it makes perfect sense that it had better be worth your time, and it definitely is.

The Berserker

I like the idea of someone who just tears shit up and can’t be stopped. Conceptually, this is where its tales and skillset are going: no thoughts, just (angry) vibes. Its Exhaust suggestions amplify this even further.

Mechanically, it feels like the Berserker (which typically goes by Barbarian, but that name/concept sucks for a lot of reasons) is frequently a “you gain a short term buff that makes you better at fighting/staying alive”. Sometimes it’s paired with being worse at defending yourself. Sometimes it’s coupled with some kind of cooldown period afterwards because you’re all tuckered out from being angry or whatever. Sometimes you can do one big thing and tucker yourself out immediately.

I decided very quickly to throw that buff-concept out the window. Partially because the relationship-ability-swapping stuff would make that kind of special self-buff hard unless I made it a very complicated Trait, but partially because I don’t think it’s that interesting as a thing to pin a class on. It’s just another kind of buff, you know? I’d rather have something that signifies a certain kind of behavior in action rather than in a modification of action.

The Berserker’s roles/subroles are Attacker (Spread, Exploit) and Defender (Provoke). (Exploit is kind of a catch-all sub-role for Other Offensive Stuff: in this case it’s mostly offensive abilities that integrate movement.) I made a few non-obvious choices when picking primary sub-roles for classes and this is a big one: Berserker’s got way more AOE and multi-target stuff going on by default. It felt right: its default stance is indiscriminate destruction rather than highly focused attacks. Having an AOE ability as its main standard, being able to splash single-target damage, and having an attack+move standard makes them able to constantly stay on the offensive even while repositioning or finishing targets and hit a surprisingly high number of targets per action. It also has the best Vigor and recovery around, so in a pinch it can take more punishment than its more offensive focus might indicate - as such, its Provoke abilities (which penalize enemies who don’t attack them) won’t be too much of a problem if they’re judiciously used. (A few self-defense abilities or defensive buffs from others wouldn’t go amiss though, as it doesn’t have any built-in resistances - it can take another hit or two and bounce back more easily but that’s about it.)

Next time, I’ll dig into Blazemagus and Champion!