Elements

There will be elements (such as Air, Fire, Water, Lightning) in Ashes of Creation each with their own resistances.

• Other elemental influences may include Darkness, Light and Planar.

• The Mage archetype offers four elemental schools as augments to a character's primary skills.

• Elements may have more influence in certain seasons and climates. For example, frost abilities may be stronger in winter. This affects both PvE and PvP.

• There may be ley lines and strong magical places in the world that change or alter the way spells work.

We've discussed a little bit about how the seasons and biomes will react with different types of skills. Like if you have a fireball and it's summer it might be a little bit different. If it's winter and you have a frost ability it might be different. – Steven Sharif

We want to get a nice spread of abilities that that are influenced by what's going on your zone. – Jeffrey Bard

Elemental skills

The idea behind magic is you're manipulating the elements. They don't just have to be fire, ice, water and air. They can be darkness, they can be light, they can be planar; a lot of different types of "elemental influences". – Steven Sharif

This section contains information from early testing phases. It will be updated as soon as new information is made available.

Skill	Icon	Rank 1	Rank 2	Rank 3
Fireball		Hurl a ball of fire toward your target, dealing direct damage upon impact.	Increased damage.	Burns the target for additional damage over time.
Flame line		Shoot an arrow that leaves behind a trail of flames.	Arrow explodes upon reaching the end of its distance.	Enemies take burning damage for entering the flames.
Lava Storm		Creates a field of lava at the selected location. Deals area damage over time.	Increased damage. Increased duration.	Increased damage. Increased duration.
Thundershock		Shoots forward a beam of lightning that damages enemies in a line in front of you.	Increased damage.	Now knocks down hit targets.

Mage augments

Mages will offer four Elemental schools of augmentation, such as Teleportation, Fire, Frost and Lightning (electrical).

Say for instance, I am a Ranger that has a Charge bolt ability as my primary active skill and I've chosen Mage as my secondary and applied the elemental to it. I now have a Frost charge bolt, and if I fire that frostbolt and hit a target, they may be freezing for a period of time as a debuff and that might slow their speed. If a wizard applies a nuke on a target and that nuke is a frost-based nuke, those two stacking elements might then either further snare (slow the target) or paralyze and freeze the target. So, there are combination out effects that build up: A primary, secondary and some ancillary effect occurs when those are combined. – Steven Sharif

There's going to be four schools of augmentation for each archetype. One of the schools for the mage is the teleport school. You can take that teleport augment, apply it to your charge skill: now instead of charging x distance over time you're going to immediately teleport to the target dealing x damage and a condition modifier. If you were to apply the elemental school to your class ability you would then instead you would charge x distance; upon reaching target you would set the target ablaze if it's fire or you would electrocute them and deal with damage over time. – Steven Sharif

See also

• Skills
• Augments
• Environments