Strive: upcoming combat/skills revamp

Hello everyone. This will be some infodump on the upcoming update we are working on. Currently we are focused on one major change which will wrap up the combat aspects of the game. In this update we'll revamp combat skills. There's 2 major changes related. 

1. Skills are no longer obtained with skill points, skill points are removed and instead skills will be tied to classes and masteries (more on that later). 

2. The enemy elemental resistances will be evened out. This is basically done to make all masteries more viable, it will make combat somewhat easier as you no longer gonna need to look up enemy resistances when deciding what to attack them with.

I could go into a lengthy details on how we've ended up here, but to put it shortly, my original combat design intention did not really worked out and had multiple issues with it without any major benefits. It was aimed to make fights more thought out but with how sandboxish the game is it could be very easily overcome.

So what's the new system to replace it? Mastery system. Think of magic masteries, like fire mastery, water mastery and so on. Two major subcategories will be covering all physical(combat)t and magic effects. For combat effects the masteries are Warfare, Protection, Marksmanship, Stealth and Leadership, while magic masteries will consist of 7 elemental types - fire, water, air, earth, light, dark and mind. The classes will provide mastery points which can be assigned to masteries, or can have inbuilt masteries in them (i.e. druid having free earth mastery point and acolyte have free light mastery). The skills will be locked behind mastery level, I.e. unlocking Protection level 1 will grant your character Taunt skill, and Leadership level 1 will grant First aid. While this is not strictly sound and balanced system combat wise, it will make the roleplaying/immersion aspect a lot better by being able to specialize in certain playstyles and magic types.

We'll also be adding some new basic effects like "Wet" which will make characters take more damage from lightning attacks and become frozen more easily. We are also adding new exploration only skills which will give more options outside of combat, like teleport or resource collection.

This update shall make it roughly by the second week of November (likely as experimental release first). By that time we'll likely also fit in a minor quest or two with it. 

Displaced Status:

We are happy to announce that the game has entered post-production state being pretty much complete so we are currently working on the distribution plans. Since this is all new to us, I'm not entirely sure how long this is gonna take. Once we have any sort of date and ensure agreement I'll provide more information.

Also if by some chance you have any proposition related to that, feel free to contact me.

That's pretty much all I wanted to tell about this time. As usual, I want to thank everyone for your support and see you next month.