Etherborn Reforged
- Sam Bayless
- Aug 1
- 6 min read
The circles of power are expanding Etherborn... Those who you at first thought too weak have returned to prove themselves anew. It is a new era, and you will have to adapt if you want to survive.
Major Class Upgrades ⬆️
The focus of this update is to power up many of the classes to make them viable for the end game. In order to achieve this, we have looked at the different class types and re-evaluated their utility. In many cases, this has included adding new and more powerful abilities.
We want to make sure that each class has a unique feel that players can take advantage of. As a result, we have changed the way that abilities work in the skill tree. From now on, abilities will automatically level up with a character without spending any skill tree points. This means all of your class abilities will be available to you without sacrificing any stats. Level 10 characters will still have 55 points to distribute on their tree (the same as before).
We have also added a new type of abilities called "passive". These abilities provide benefits for being added to your action bar without having to be actively used. They have different conditions in which they trigger including some that are always active. Read through the different class changes below to get some examples.
Note: The changes we have made in this release are highly impactful. We have done our best to balance them, but it is impossible to do a perfect job. We will very likely ship minor updates that will tune the balance for new abilities.
Summoner
The most dramatic changes in this release are for summoner classes. We have completely revamped how summoning and minions work in order to make it an end game viable play style.
Existing summon skills on items have been changed to "ambush" skills. These skill swill summon a group of minions which will fight for you for a short time at the target area. They will not follow you and are intended as a short term burst of power. Summon classes have a new set of skills called "minion" skills. These will summon one minion at a time which will follow you and never time out. Depending on the skill and its level there will be a max number of simultaneous minions you can summon. Minion summon abilities do not ever roll on items.
Minion's level is now determined by your summon power stat. The higher the summon power the higher your minion's level. Furthermore, minions attack, defense and health will be increased based on their owners. So, the more powerful the owner is, the more powerful the minions will be. Below is table with some points giving you a feel for the impact of increased summon power...
Summon Power | Minion Level | Stats Boost from Owner |
0 | 1 | 25% |
25 | 2 | 26.25% |
50 | 4 | 27.5% |
75 | 5 | 28.75% |
100 | 6 | 30% |
150 | 7 | 32.5% |
200 | 9 | 35% |
300 | 12 | 40% |
400 | 14 | 45% |
500 | 17 | 50% |
600 | 19 | 55% |
Based on these changes, it will be critical to maximize your summon power while still maximizing your own character strength to be effective as a summoner.
The summoner class now has the following skills...
Note: The Steam Engineer is also considered a summon class using robots and pillars.
Rogue
Rogues have been upgraded to make them a high-speed close combat DPS powerhouse. In order to achieve this, their skills are now the following...
Stealth: classic ability for survival
Thousand Cuts: Release a burst of short range projectiles
Cheat Death: Passive skill which saves your life when taking a killing blow
Along with this, the Rogue now has a new class trait called "Dual Wield". Classes with Dual Wield can equip a "Shiv" offhand which has a new affix called "Vulnerable". Vulnerable makes enemies that you hit take additional damage from you for each future hit. Each stack of vulnerable has a 30 second duration and there is a max damage increase of 10x for vulnerable stacks. This ability will make Rogues very deadly in long lasting single target fights like bosses and legendary elites.
Steam Engineer
The Steam Engineer is also considered a summon class with the ability to summon robot minions and lightning pillars to fight on its behalf. Building a successful Steam Engineer will be very similar to the Summoner class.
Clockwork Mender
The Clockwork Mender is mostly the same but with an uplift in its healing ability to be better in parties. Their healing skill now summons healing pillars which will channel heal skills to you and your allies.
Redhorn
Redhorn skills have been changed to the following:
Fire Burst: Unleash a burst of fire projectilsand your allies more life steal
Fireball: Deal AOE fire damage at a target area
Ogre
Orges are leaning more into their roots as a poison focused class. They have a new ability called Corrosive Strike. This ability deals a high amount of damage in a long rectangular area. The trick is that the damage is divided evenly between all hit enemies. This makes it dynamic as both a single target and many target attack.
Elementalist
The Elementalist now has the Ice Explosion ability. This gives them excellent utility for controlling the battlefield by chilling enemies and slowing their movement. Beyond that, this class has the new "Mage" class trait. Mage classes can equip the new "Tome" offhand which has the "Free Cast" affix. Free cast gives your abilities a chance to cost 0 energy allowing you to unleash them even more frequently.
Warrior
The warrior is mostly the same but has been given a new ability called Massive Strike. This ability unleashes a single large projectile with a massive boost in damage. It is an excellent skill for single target damage taking down bosses and elites.
Other Changes
There are a handful of other tweaks that have been made based on player feedback and to open up more build types. They include the following...
Skill tree bonuses for Health Per Energy have been increased
Skill tree bonuses for Threat have been increased
Skill tree bonuses for Reflect Damage have been increased
The energy penalty for casting multiple AOE DOTs has been reduced from 20% to 10%
The overall power a character can achieve is now higher. As a result, enemies health in levels 17+ has been increased.
Tune Your Builds More Effectively 🏗️
With all of these class changes we expect that players will want a way to quickly experiment with different items to try and optimize their builds. In order to help this along, we have added a training dummy to the town. The training dummy takes damage like a normal level 10 enemy. It will also record how much damage you are dealing and show you stats such as your DPS and max hit damage.
World Boss Achievements 🏆
The time has come to unlock a new tier of challenging end game content!
As part of our 300K NFT.io volume celebration we added the new concept of on-chain achievements. We are now expanding on these to provide achievements for defeating powerful end game bosses.
There are a new set of craftable quest keys called "Boss Keys". These keys will allow you start a high-level world event boss which will award an achievement if defeated. They keys have 3 tiers...
Tier | Level | Achievement |
1 | 18 | Bronze |
2 | 19 | Silver |
3 | 20 | Gold |
Once you defeat the boss, the achievement will be minted to your active wallet. Each achievement can only be minted once per wallet and the achievements are frozen to that wallet (cannot be transferred or sold). The achievements unlock perks like stat bonuses and titles.
Note: With this release we will only be opening up crafting for the tier 1 keys at first. We will open up the other tiers after we ensure the balance is reasonable.
Encyclopedia Upgrades 📘
As we continue to add more ways to play Etherscape, it is important that we also add the necessary tools for new players to learn all the concepts in the game. To help with this, we have added a new Stats / Buffs section to the Encyclopedia which has descriptions about all the different stats and buffs in the game.
In addition to that, we have also improved that class selection screen to give more information to players when selecting...
Farewell 👋
Etherborn we are excited to see how you will rise in power and overcome new challenges! Best of luck to you all as you continue your adventures! You can read the release notes on the whitepaper here.
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