Game Design: Player Classes

What's an RPG game without classes?
Classes define the hierarchical roles that form a society. Social animals like apes and wolves have distinct roles between the alpha and beta. Each member has their own function to contribute to their community. Class defines the separations in social, professional, and financial status.

Class Roles 

RPG classes focus on the distinctions between professions. NPCs fill roles of farmers, craftsmen, and tradesmen, while players are offered the more exciting profession associated with combat and war. These classes are defined by their specialties in combat. Infantry soldiers take the front-line, pilots provide aerial support, and priests provide spiritual support.

Each unit has various strengths and weaknesses, so a versatile team is needed to address all possibilities. The classic trinity from MMOs describe three roles:
  1. Tank: Absorbs damage from enemies
  2. Damage: Deals damage to enemies
    1. Melee damage
    2. Ranged damage
  3. Healing: Heal damage from enemies
These distinct roles were developed for fighting against simple enemy AI behavior, but they've also been adapted to apply to PvP games. The capability in these roles can be measured by character attributes:
  • Strength: Endurance and physical damage
    • Warrior (Tank)
  • Agility: Mobility, attack speed, and bursts of damage
    • Rogue (Melee Damage)
  • Dexterity: Critical strikes, attack range, flexibility
    • Hunter (Ranged Damage)
  • Intelligence: Elemental damage
    • Mage (Magic Damage)
  • Spirit: Healing and supportive buffs
    • Priest (Healing)

My Design

My starting classes would be the listed above. Each class would have the following:
  • 1 Passive Trait
  • 1 Damage / Utility Skill
  • 1 Movement Skill
Below are the current skills I’ve planned for the five classes:


These skills would define the class' ideal position and role in combat. Originally, I was thinking about 4 skills each, however that might be too clutter. Each skill should be highly impactful and require strategic timing, rather than using whenever available. If a skill is optimal when spammed without thought, it doesn’t need to be an active skill.

Class Advancement

Since progression is a core design element, I don’t want to limit a class to a single role. A class advancement system will allow players to customize each unit’s specialty. Upon reaching a certain level, units could advance to further specialize in a 2nd attribute. This could be a different attribute (Strength + Spirit) or the same attribute (Strength + Strength). The base passives and skills would gain extra perks to inherit the 2nd attribute's role:
  • Strength: Gain endurance and power in melee range
  • Agility: Gain mobility and faster cooldowns
  • Dexterity: Gain critical strike damages and range
  • Intelligence: Gain extra elemental effects and resistance
  • Spirit: Gain extra supportive buffs and divine damage
This blurs the lines between the tank-damage-healing roles, and can create unique team dynamics. A unit can specialize into a "pure" role (Strength-Strength) to become a dedicated tank, or hybridize (Strength-Agility) to become a sturdy damage-dealer.

Preview: Warrior Classes

I've brainstormed the advancement options for the Warrior:

Throughout the iterations, the Warrior still retains their core identity and toolkit. A Warrior specializing in Spirit would still be quite different from a Priest specializing in Strength. I haven't thought of all the permutations yet; it'd be 55 (25) total combinations. It'll take a lot of work to design and balance each one, but I think it'll be a neat system (and that's all that matters).

Conclusion

  • The player classes will be based on the trinity of damage, tank, and healer roles
  • Five attributes will capture these different roles, and be represented by each class
  • The class advancement lets units hybridize between roles, which will create numerous party combinations

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