This is to give a little more overview on the thought process I had when making this fan class, along with its challenges.
I think Last Epoch has an extremely interesting class system.
I love making builds. There are a ton of different combinations, skills are able to change drastically, and its fun to explore the possibilities.
This system opens an interesting, difficult.. and time consuming.. puzzle for making new classes.
It isn't just "OK, here is Firebolt".
But: How can I make "Firebolt" work for potential other Masteries, how do I theme this for other things, what are cool combinations/nodes you can do?
Passive skill trees need to be open for different builds, but it can be difficult not to make everything "+% damage" or make everything have extra passives to make it seem cooler.
Not to say I succeeded at all of that... But its something I tried to be aware of.
Originally my idea was to create a class that would excel extremely well at one thing.
I called it "The Savant", but this became a little cryptic and probably wouldn't make sense when read.
One thing I also knew that I wanted to make a Alchemist and Bard, and Engineer naturally sort-of fitted in this as well.
These all sort of fit together to make the current Artisan.
Main Damage Types:
Fire, Electric, Physical, Ranged
Main Attribute:
Attunement
Weapons:
Bows Mainly (my idea is to make them Harps basically)
Potential New Equipment:
Off-Hand Slot Harp Pick
Play Style:
Large amount of buffs, DoT Ailments, Large Sonic Booms. They can have multiple, different buffs that help their defenses.
Main Damage Types:
Electric, Melee, Minion
Main Attribute:
Intelligence
Weapons:
1-Handed [Maces]
Maces in particular, as it would feel more in-line with what an Engineer would use
Potential New Equipment:
Off-Hand Slot Toolset
Play Style:
Uses "Augments" to enhance self/make minions. Ward is their main defense.
Side note:
Augments are basically something the Engineer makes and attaches to themselves.
This could just be a "Upgrade", like adding something to your weapon, or it could be an actual Minion.
This isn't like Companion where you can only have X amount. You can have as many as you want. At least that is the current idea.
Main Damage Types:
Poison, Necrotic, Void
Main Attribute:
Vitality
Weapons:
1-Handed [Wands/Scepters]
Potential New Equipment:
Off-Hand Alchemy Set
Play Style:
Heavily uses Healing Potions; Pays life for some abilities. Can have extremely high health.
One thing that I worried about was making these feel like different classes from what exists already.
I hope I did it well, but these are the potential problems I see:
Using Bows already makes it a contender for the Marksman.. or rogue in general.
That is one reason I strayed away from Dexterity on this character.
But also, the Marksman also uses quite a lot of the same Elements.
My hope is that the feel of the skills, music composition, and relying heavily on Buffs will separate this out.
Another contender with the Rogue.. and Forge Guard.
Engineers could be crafty and make traps.. which is what the Rogue does already.
I wanted to steer away from this and go more of the minion/enhancement route.
But, this can also lead to conflicts with the Forge Guard
I am hoping that the Augment mechanic and heavily reliance on Electric damage (and theme) helps separate these classes.
Rogue, my mortal enemy. While the Rogue only really has "Acid Flask" as an Alchemist skill, it is sort of the quintessential Alchemist skill.. and one I tried to stay away from, as much as one can.
Additionally, the Rogue also has a sub-theme of Healing Potions in its passive trees/unqiue items.
One thing I did a bit different was making the alchemist a bit.. unhinged.
So, they deal damage to themselves through some skills (which the Acolyte does this as well, so I tried to be careful to not make it too similar).
For this class, I leaned extremely heavily into Healing Potions. I hope that this reliance, and different Alchemy type moves, makes them feel different.
Passive Tree
The Artisan Tree was more of the "Savant" idea I had originally
I plan to eventually update this, but I wanted to keep it for posterity sakes for now
The original idea of the Savant was that they did really well in one thing, but because of that, would make other things worse
As for the skills, each skill is to try and encompass "general" skills, such as "Study" that each Mastery might use.
Active Skills
Some skill tries to encompass "general" skills, such as "Study" that each Mastery might use
But, there are skills that are more geared towards specific Masteries as well, such as "Echoing Tune".
While this might seem a little heavy handed, name wise, I tried to also make these skills double entendres.
In this example, Engineers can also "Tune" things up. As indicated by the Major skill node "Tune Up".
However.. I am fairly bad at naming things.. these could all use updates..
Passive Tree
The Bard tree focuses heavily in buffs.
However, I didn't want the Bard to be just a support.
So, I tried to make sure they could hold their own with things buffing themselves, or getting benefits from said buffs.
Some skill nodes will gain benefits from having more buffs
But there are some Active Skills that do this as well
As a side note, since most things say "Allies", this means minions as well.
So, with the help of some more "Engineer" skills, you can have a little team of buff minions.
There are probably issues with how I basically created an Aura in the skill tree.
I like the idea, but it could potentially be too strong
Also, I have a lot of potentially high rates for debuffs/buff chances, like "Chance to Ignite".
Especially since these can be applied to allies, there are probably a lot of issues here.
Active Skills
"Echoing Tune"->"Positive Echos" shows where stacking buffs for a Bard can be useful, aside from just buffs being useful
This incentivizes the Bard to want to get more buffs, at least for this node
I have a sneaking suspicion that "Assemble A Chorus" is a very, very dangerous Skill.
But I did want the Bard to have a Minion that was more of their own and not an Engineer minion.
"Composition" I hope does not feel like the Rune Master.
They are different in their own ways, but similar.
Also, it would be fun to play some songs with the notes.
Maybe at the detriment to player in towns...
Passive Tree
The skill trees heavily rely on Augments and Augment Minions
Potentially, for the Bard/Alchemist, Augment Minions could be turned to just Minions, for skills like "Chorus"
But, I feel it would make less sense for the Engineer tree to do this
Having "Augment" damage might make things more complicated than intended
Aside from potential confusion of Augment vs Augment Minion for players
I believe this means there would have to be a whole new group of for Offense; I.e. Melee, Bow, Spell, ..., Augment
The main concern for this is adding a new affix to the item pool, and is only usable for one class
Active Skills
Engineers really focus on Augments
Potentially too much; even Necromancers have Non-Minion skills they incorporate into their kit
But, Augments are multi-purpose (minions, melee attacks, spells, etc), so it might be fine
I am not sure about the "intuitiveness" of Augments
Mainly, if a player sees "Augment" would they think they can only have one?
And to that question: Should there only be one? Or maybe just one for each "slot" (Helmet, Weapon, etc)?
I do like the visualization of having like 8 augments/minions attached to you though.
Passive Tree
This skill tree is.. spooky.
There is a lot of Healing Potion related nodes.
Healing Potions fits the theme of the class, of course.
But, I don't know how well the game experience would be with all these fundamental changes to Health Potions.
A class that could potentially have 20 to 40 Health Potions likely causes huge imbalances.
Max Potion increases might need to be tuned down in general.
In general, I want the flow of the class to be sacrificing Health and/or Health Potions to be able to use their skills.
I didn't want the reliance of Ward to come into play, thus why their Mastery Passive doesn't allow gaining Ward.
This does hurt diversity a bit, but with such high Health pools and Ward support for Engineers, I feel there would be an imbalance there.
However, this might not be the case and could change.
Active Skills
The "Potion Explosion" skill seems fun..
But I don't know if its effect will either be astronomically good with all the support from the skill tree.
Or that Health Potions won't drop enough for it to matter.
I do wonder if Blink Flash should exist as a 15 Point skill.
I wanted to have this open for other classes to use, as a new means for a Transport skill.
However, I am not sure if I wanted to give those classes access to Void skills.
Blink Flash does feel like a Void-type skill though, and I probably wouldn't want to change that, except via Major Nodes.
I plan to update this project every once in a while.
My next goal is to put this into a Godot skill planner, so that it is easier to digest.