Healing

Players cannot heal enemy mobs.

You cannot heal enemy mobs. There's just really not a a relevant use-case for that when it comes to the design mechanics of such a thing, other than its primary use, which would be to grief other players. – Steven Sharif

Cleric classes are the only classes that can fill the role of a primary healer. Classes with Cleric as a secondary archetype will have self-healing benefits as well as limited healing benefits to other players.

No one is going to fill the role of a primary healer other than the healer archetype; but there will be secondary class options that you can select, which will provide you with some level of sustainability under restoration, most of that will be centralized to yourself, especially in the case of a Paladin. – Steven Sharif

This section contains information from Alpha-1 testing. It will be updated when new information is made available.

Skill	Icon	Rank 1	Rank 2	Rank 3
Cleansing Wave		Releases a wave of healing energy to a target ally restoring health and conferring a heal over time. The wave jumps to 1 additional ally within range for each stack of conviction the caster has and places a buff on each recipient. Whenever a target with this buff receives a healing effect, the buff is consumed and removes the most recent negative effect that the target received.
Communal Restoration		Restore health to all party members in range. For each point of Conviction the caster possesses, targets receive an additional 1% of their maximum health as temporary hit points for 10 seconds.
Devotion		Launch an orb of energy into the air that will fall upon your target, healing them.	The energy orb will travel faster and heal for more.	The target will be infused with a slow, long-lasting healing effect.
Divine Censure		Hurls a radiant spear at the target, dealing damage.	Further attacks upon the target have a chance to heal the attacker.	The target has a chance to deal damage to itself when it attacks.
Divine Light		Heals your target with a flash of light. Reduces the cooldown of Devotion and Radiant Burst.	Increased healing.	Reduced mana cost.
Drain Essence		Drain your target for damage over time, and gain return mana to yourself over the duration.	Heals you over the duration.	Reduced cooldown.
Hallowed Ground		Fills the surrounding area with radiant energy that damages enemies.	The area provides a healing aura for allies.	Allies within the area will receive boosted magical defense. Enemies within the area will deal less physical damage.
Judgment		Heals an ally, restoring life to the target. If cast on an enemy, it damages the target with radiant energy and has a chance to generate Conviction.
Radiant Burst		Heals allies around you in a wide area for a large amount. Stacks up to 3 times.	Heals for a greater amount.	Cooldown removed.
Regeneration		Bathe your target with restorative energy that heals them over time.	Reduced mana cost.	Applies a 5% healing received bonus to the target.

Cleric augments

Classes with Cleric as a secondary archetype are able to choose between life or death augments.

• Choosing life augments will provide self-healing benefits as well as limited life-giving benefits to other players.
• Some cleric augments applied to certain skills will indirectly provide the ability to heal others. These will not replace the need for a cleric archetype.
• Cleric augments will radically change the type of summons available from the summoner primary archetype.
  • Skeletons, zombies and other undead summons will be possible with death based augments.

Any class that's going to choose Cleric as a secondary class will have the ability to pick from those augments to influence their skills to affect the life of others around you. – Steven Sharif

Health

Health is a stat in Ashes of Creation.

• Players that are not in the same party, raid, alliance, or guild will not be able to see other player's health percentages or exact health bar values.
  • This is not currently implemented in Alpha-1.

• A player's name plate will deteriorate to give an indication of how much damage they have taken.

With regards to seeing another player's health: As you know their name plate will deteriorate or give you an indication of like hey they've taken damage they're significantly injured, but you're not going to get a percentage. You're not gonna get an exact bar value, unless you're in their party or in their raid. – Steven Sharif

Roles

Ashes of Creation has the traditional trinity of Tank, DPS (damage dealers) and Support (healer or non-healer) roles.

We have our eight base archetypes; and the trinity is a pretty strong influence with regards to the eight base classes. However the area in which we actually begin to play with that line between the trinity is in the secondary classes that you can pick. That's where we begin to blend those spaces and allow people a little bit of influence over their role and whether or not they fit perfectly within a particular category within the trinity. – Steven Sharif

• Although traditional roles are present, players should not feel branded by their primary archetype.
• Skill augments available through the class system allow characters to be personalized outside of their primary role.
• Players can also double down on their archetype choice to strengthen their primary role.

Class abilities

Alpha-1 preview primary skills.

If from the eight archetypes whatever you choose as your secondary, you're going to receive a choice of augments that relate to some core ideal of that class. You know like a tank is about controlling the battlefield, is about surviving. The mage is about dealing damage and elements and ability in AoEs. The rogue is going to be about stealth and critical damage. So those augments are going to to play towards those identities. – Steven Sharif

The idea behind the system is that you're kind of skirting the line through these augmentations of your role, right. We have the traditional holy trinity that's present in class designs for MMOs and it's often that those either are not deviated at all or completely deviated from entirely. The augment is to kind of offer a balance between that where you still maintain the semblance of that trinity system while offering the opportunity to customize your play experience towards one of the other angles in the triangle. – Steven Sharif

Primary skills (class abilities) are based on a player's archetype. Players can personalize their primary skills with augmentation from a secondary archetype.

The design behind augments is to not just change the flavor so that it reflects the secondary archetype, but it also fundamentally changes the core components of a skill. – Steven Sharif

• Each secondary archetype offers four different schools of augmentation. Each augment school affects a primary archetype's skills in different ways.
  • For example: A Mage offers Teleportation and elemental schools of augments. These augments will affect a Fighter's primary skills differently than a Cleric's.
  • Each augmentation has a level requirement.
    • Augments do not cost skill points. It was previously stated that certain augments will have more expense required on the skill point side.

There's going to be a certain threshold at which you can no longer augment your active abilities based on the decisions you've augmented previous abilities, so you'll have to pick and choose which ones you want to apply the augments towards. – Steven Sharif

• Choosing the same primary and secondary archetype increases focus on that archetype.

• Augments to primary skills will fundamentally change the way the ability works: Adapting what the ability once did to incorporate the identity of the secondary archetype.
  • The progression system for augments is very similar to the class progression system.

• Changing the augmentations on your skills will require you to go to a NPC in a Village node or higher.
• Some spell colors and general FX change based on augments.
  • Active skills could look totally different after an augment gets applied.

• Outside of class-specific skills there may be a subset of universal skills, such as active block and dodge.
• Class skills are not affected by the type of weapon that is equipped.

Primary skills in Alpha-2 are expected to be very different to those in Alpha-1.

The ability list in Alpha One is nowhere near what the ability list will be, especially from like a level/progression standpoint. So you can expect it to be incredibly different. – Steven Sharif

Skill points

Alpha-1 preview skills user interface.

This is where players allocate skill points into either their active skills, their passive abilities- which can augment their usage of weapons and armors and health regeneration and passive stats and stuff like that-- but on the weapons side of things, that's where you will spec into certain types of procs based off of weapon groupings. So we've talked a little bit about this in the past: If you have a dagger, daggers might have a chance to proc a bleed on your weapon attack and that would synergize with an active skills' ability like let's say Backstab that does additional damage if the target is under a bleed effect. Now we have said in the past that players will be able to allocate skill points into their active skills that are more geared towards either action combat or tab targeting. – Steven Sharif

Players receive skill points as they level. These can be used to level up skills (increase their rank) within their active, passive or combat/weapon skill trees.

• It will not be possible to max all skills in a skill tree.
• In terms of skill progression, players can choose to go "wide" and get a number of different abilities, or go "deep" into a few specific abilities.
• Players are able to reset and reallocate their skill points.
• Augments do not cost skill points. It was previously stated that certain augments will have more expense required on the skill point side.

Making active skills capable of receiving additional skill point allocations and unlocking additional features so that from a player agency standpoint it's going to be up to you whether or not you want to be more diverse but less depth- wider and not taller, in some of these skill choices. Or if you want to be very very tall, that's going to be something that is up to the player in that regard. – Steven Sharif

Balancing

Balancing in Ashes of Creation is group focused not based on 1v1 combat.

• 1v1 matchups will have a rock-paper-scissors dynamic, where one class will be superior to another.

There will be match ups in 1v1s where one class will be superior to another; and that application should be a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. We want there to be counter-play between the different classes... Instead it's going to be a group focused balance, where as long as you have the diversity of classes present, that's going to be an equal level playing field. It's going to be very dependent on skill and strategy. – Steven Sharif

• Alpha-1 testing was focused on core functionality rather than combat balance.

• Alpha-2 testing will begin to focus on balancing once populations and encounters have been put in place and are deep in testing.

From an engagement or encounter perspective, obviously we do a finger-in-the wind kind of balance pass, but a lot of that stuff from our encounters team doesn't get done until populations are in place and those encounter designs get a little bit more time to bake. – Steven Sharif

The sixty four (64) classes are partitioned into eight primary archetypes. Balancing of active skills only relates to these eight primary archetypes.

• There are four primary groups of augments assigned to each base archetype. Balancing of augments relates to the four augment groups for each of the eight archetypes.

Even though augments do radically change the way your active skills provide you abilities, there's still a primary focus on the base archetype itself and not the 64 whole classes. – Steven Sharif

We're not really talking about 64 true classes, we're talking about eight classes with 64 variants... There isn't as much variance between the 64 classes as you might expect. It's not like there are you know 64 different versions of... radically different classes. – Jeffrey Bard

• Certain secondary archetypes are capable of "bridging the gap" between their counterpart.

Certain archetypes are capable of moving the gap between their counterpart per-se. If I am a Tank archetype and a Mage is my counter, I can take a Mage secondary and kind of bridge the divide slightly; and then move my identity that direction ever so slightly. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation Apocalypse healing

Healing in Ashes of Creation Apocalypse will be reticle based (action targeted).

• Healing skills are proximity based: Centered on self or centered on projectile impact.
• There will be healing potion bursts (healing grenades) that will grant life to allies.
• Healing is part of Class kits that come into play during the testing of Ashes of Creation Apocalypse castle sieges.

We have a few design theories on action combat and healing to began with phase one. Part of that will be the implementation of a class system into the castle siege and horde mode of phase one. Those will be kits that play out as skills available from an action perspective. You'll be able to target in proximity, basically so positioning is going to matter. Importantly, for healers being close to the individual party members you wish to heal. Additionally, you'll have reticle based healing methods. This would be a template that could be launched in that direction as a pulse of heels or augments. So there's a lot of different systems are playing with that you'll see more of when we get to those when we get to the castle siege system and the Ashes of Creation Apocalypse horde mode. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation Apocalypse healing potions

- None -

Ashes of Creation Apocalypse class kits

Classes in Ashes of Creation Apocalypse castle sieges and Ashes of Creation Apocalypse horde mode. Emblem designs by Ryan Richmond.

Six classes will be present in Ashes of Creation Apocalypse castle sieges and Ashes of Creation Apocalypse horde mode.

• Warrior classes
  • Guardian
  • Weapon Master

• DPS classes
  • Archwizard
  • Hawkeye

• Support classes
  • High Priest
  • Engineer

These classes relate to the trinity of classes: Tank, DPS and Support.

• Skills/abilities are not tied specifically to weapons in castle siege mode.
  • It was previously stated that weapon skills are applied to augment a class' base skills.
• Base class skills may be able to be selected from a host of available skills for that class based on a player's progression within that season.

We had a little bit of an idea that we're going to explore with regards to each of the classes having a range of skills and abilities that players can customize that skill kit based on their progression within a season, let's say; and that progression can be gained from any of the modes and it would grant you the ability to kind of customize that skill kit for the before the siege mode or the horde mode. But that's something that might come at a later date. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation Apocalypse classes only apply to Ashes of Creation Apocalypse castle sieges and Ashes of Creation Apocalypse horde mode.

See also

• Healing over time
• Health
• Archetypes
• Classes