Marksman

Welcome back to Class Design Diary! We are finishing up with the Explorer Archers, and since I've covered most of the Archer-related context in the previous post, I'll try to keep this entry fully focused on Marksman alone. Let's go right in!

Rangefinder 2nd Job

Most of you are wondering what Marksman's Specialized Skill would be, especially since we made Sharp Eyes an exclusive skill for Bow Masters. Marksman will be receiving something very similar in concept too, but with an entirely different "activation" requirement:

Rangefinder is Marksman's Specialized Skill, which will be automatically learnt in its 2nd Job advancement. Similarly to our revamped Sharp Eyes, Rangefinder has 2 components, an active and a passive:

The active component involves gaining a Rangefinder stack, which grants +20% Damage (upgraded to +40% in 4th Job) to the Marksman itself, but also a party buff of +5% Weapon Mastery. In 4th Job, the party buff expands, granting an additional 15% Minimum Critical Damage.

Our vision is for the Explorer Archers to have the class identity of dynamic party support; that is to say, granting significant party buffs via active gameplay, instead of just lazily pressing 1 buff button and calling it a day.

But what exactly is the activation requirement to gain a Rangefinder stack? This is where the Marksman gameplay differs significantly from its Bow Master counterpart. In order to gain a stack, the Marksman has to land an attack on an enemy from at least 550 range away. This consequently means that you won't be gaining a stack if you attack an enemy any nearer than 550 range away. Hence, Marksman's core identity is about attacking and providing support from long range. And speaking of long:

The passive component of Rangefinder grants +400 extra attack range to the Marksman. And yeah, the extra range is just, STUPID long. So while there is obviously a need to prioritise player positioning for Marksman, rest assured, it won't be too difficult a task to shoot from beyond 550 range.

Additionally, a stack of Rangefinder lasts a total of 8 seconds, more than twice as long as the 3-second stack duration of Bow Master's Sharp Eyes. The extended duration of the stack is meant to ensure that the Marksman can retain the offensive buff long enough that the player can comfortably reposition to be in Rangefinder range again. This will be extremely helpful especially during training situations, as you have a comfortable buffer period to shoot down mobs in close range before needing to reposition again to reapply the buff.

Birb Visuals 3rd Job

Moving on to the 3rd Job changes. Firstly, I forgot to introduce some new upgraded visuals for the Fire and Ice birbs (Marksman has the ice one)!

Mortal Blow 3rd Job

For the exact same rationale applied to Bow Master, we also reworked Mortal Blow for Marksman. However, its effect is slightly different, since Marksman's playstyle is also different.

Aggressive Resistance 3rd Job

It also received two new utility skills to match with Bow Master.

Aggressive Resistance converts a portion of your damage dealt into a shield that absorbs up to 60% of the damage you take. So using a skill that does a higher damage line will result in a sturdier damage shield generated.

Pain Killer 3rd Job

The second is an analogue to Bow Master's Focused Fury, Pain Killer. It's basically an active cooldown that immediately cures you of one instance of an abnormal status, which can come in clutch during bossing.

Piercing Arrow 3rd Job

We have also moved Piercing Arrow from 4th to 3rd Job. Marksman will thus gain access to its patented mobbing skill earlier, with reduced damage values and mob hit count in 3rd Job. This should help out with platform-based mobbing and be an amazing horizontal complement to Arrow Eruption's vertical prowess.

Arrow Illusion 4th Job

Lastly, the penultimate 4th Job of Marksman. We added a new utility skill, which is actually a spiritual successor to the underused Puppet skill: Arrow Illusion.

As the successor to Puppet, it also has a large HP pool to tank hits from enemies. It does a few things more than Puppet, such as periodically damaging enemies, reflecting up to 1200% damage, as well as the most important effect of aggroing enemies to it. And yes, it even works on bosses, something that Marksman would greatly appreciate especially when it comes to soloing bossing content, in order to shun away those pesky bosses which follow the player.

Snipe 4th Job

Marksman still has its signature Snipe skill, a cooldown-based attack that does extra damage to bosses. However, we condensed its multiple damage lines into just one HUGE 4410% (on bosses) singular damage line. That hurts, trust me.

Goodbye, Ultimate Strafe 4th Job

However, we decided to remove its one and only single-target attacking skill, Ultimate Strafe. There was nothing really problematic with the skill itself, and it's vital to Marksman's single-target DPS output. What we didn't like is that the skill did not seem to fit the class identity of Marksman, whose skill kit is all about shooting arrows strongly, but slowly as well.

Wait, that's it? You mean the lunatic class designer simply didn't like the sight of Marksman having giga hands to load and shoot 5 arrows at once, and decided to nuke its single-target capabilities for that reason? What's with the unhealthy obsession of trying to make everything fit into a unique class identity?

And as the lunatic class designer himself, allow me to explain. Class identity is indeed one of my non-negotiables for the designing and re-designing of class skills in UmbraMS. But class identity is not just a matter of visual appearance, but also how the class plays differently than others. My personal belief and philosophy is that class identity is what creates a healthy diversity of class pick-rates in a game. If every class had 1 skill that does single-target damage, 1 skill that hits 8 mobs in a rectangular hitbox, 1 full-map attack, 1 flash-jump, 1 healing skill... then every class is essentially the same class, just with a different design wrapper. And since every class has the same everything, everyone's just gonna play the class that relatively outperforms the rest. Which is kind of what happened to the state of the meta in our Beta phase.

If every class had a unique playstyle, however, it would also have a unique way to approach different aspects of gameplay. My biggest goal is to compel players to play the class that they are drawn to because of how it uniquely plays, without worrying about things like damage and such (which is the goal of class balancing anyway). So for Marksman, we decided to call our own shot, and redesign how the Marksman can solve the issue of single-target DPS without a dedicated yet generic single-target skill. Our approach is a passive skill: Empowered Arrows.

Empowered Arrows 4th Job

Okay sorry, I ripped off that badass image from GMS gameplay because I don't have a working tooltip to show in my recording environment. It might not look that flashy in our server. But here's the description of Empowered Arrows:

Empowers Marksman's 4th Job attacking skills, namely Piercing Arrow and Snipe. When Piercing Arrow or Snipe is cast and landed a total of 3 times, it will gain the Empowered state. All Empowered attacks gain increased Damage%, and Empowered Piercing Arrow gains an extra +2 mob hit count as well.

We believe the Empowered Arrows system will not only compensate for the single-target damage gap left behind by the removal of Ultimate Strafe, but also bring even greater dynamics to Marksman gameplay, making for a very engaging and rewarding playstyle.

The class fantasy

And that sums up our key changes to Marksman. Our goal was to create a pair of Explorer Archers that have both comforting similarities and intrinsic differences that will cater to different player preferences. If Bow Master is the relentless arrow blaster, then Marksman would be this:

The mantra of slow and steady is incomplete; the Marksman demonstrates that slow is deadly as well. The Marksman doesn't believe in haste, but in patience and preparedness, utilising every strategic and positional advantage he has, allowing him to take his time to calculate and land the deadliest blow ever on his opponents.

What are we going to be revealing next? Stay tuned to Class Design Diary and you'll find out!