Game Mechanics Reimagining Flow State and Parry's Designs

hello chat I am BACK

This post is made in collaboration with @Elysium_! He cares about acrobat a lot, and has quite the taste when it comes to making the acrobat experience more satisfying. We designed these custom abilities to demonstrate acrobat's potential!


According to Xavier in his interview, Flow State is designed as the culmination of acrobat's death-by-a-thousand-cuts playstyle. Elysium and I support this design philosophy as it gives players an objective to achieve during combat. However while Flow State is practically effective at rewarding constant hits, it's not satisfying to trigger or use, which we believe is just as important to gameplay as a form of intrinsic reward.

We took inspiration from how different games reward quick successive hits and reimagined Flow State's design into something that gives a more tangible version of increased damage.


(heavily inspired by SKP's Exsanguination but like for 30 hits)

Spoiler: Replaced Node:

Why is it designed this way?
Both current Flow State and Bladestorm rewards consistent hits with increased damage output. However the two abilities have key differences in their designs:

• Flow State is a damage buff, while Bladestorm is a damage bonus.
  As opposed to Flow State's damage buff, Bladestorm directly deals additional damage to the target, which is a great opportunity to integrate VFX and SFX to the ability! While this does not have any extrinsic value like increased damage or added utility, adding powerful visual/sound effects to abilities adds to the experience of feeling powerful, which helps engage the players and is especially important for role-playing games.

• Flow State has a cooldown, while Bladestorm does not.
  Bladestorm doesn’t have a cooldown, allowing acrobats to trigger it as often as they want. We believe that Flow State's long cooldown is a critical flaw to its design since it delays the reward for consistent hits for too long. While Flow State effectively grants acrobats more damage, its long cooldown removes the player engagement that comes from being rewarded for consistently hitting enemies. Bladestorm's lack of a cooldown provides players a challenge that they must always meet, inviting players to always utilize their whole arsenal to strike enemies as often as possible.

• Bladestorm requires you to be airborne, while Flow State does not.
  Unlike with current Flow State, you must be airborne for your hits to count towards Bladestorm. We added this feature for two reasons: 1) to make the ability more acrobat-leaning, and 2) to introduce the aerial playstyle of the whole acrobat archetype. We noticed that Flow State is equally beneficial to both acrobat and trickster. While this isn't inherently bad, we want to honor Bladestorm's status as a playstyle-defining red node for acrobat; current Flow State's trigger condition isn't enough to uniquely define acrobat's playstyle, especially since trickster can use the ability just as well. If tricksters were to take an acrobat-affiliated red node, its playstyle must be significantly affected. Weightless currently fills this role by providing mana sustain from consistently being airborne, so we decided to extend this mechanic to Bladestorm as well: both abilities would require you to be airborne, meaning Weightless hits that would grant mana would also count towards Bladestorm for enemies, affirming acrobat's aerial playstyle and necessitating it for trickrobat as a source of damage and not just for mana sustain.

• Bladestorm interacts with Righting Reflex, while Flow State doesn't interact with any other abilities.
  One of our main concerns was Bladestorm potentially being too difficult to trigger at-level, so we added two mechanics meant to give players more breathing room especially during the early game: 1) Bladestorm refreshes Righting Reflex's duration, allowing players to stay airborne for longer even without abilities like Pirouette or Wall Jump; and 2) all hits will refresh the duration of the Bladestorm counter on enemies regardless of whether you're airborne or not, providing players more room for breaks or small mistakes without significantly affecting their progress. These features aren't really made to address any of Flow State's flaws. Instead, they are to ensure that Bladestorm would be a smooth introduction to acrobat's aerial playstyle without making it too mechanically straining to perform. We decided to take this opportunity to make Bladestorm require Righting Reflex to make it a bit harder for tricksters to acquire.

linebreaklinebreaklinebreaklinebreaklinebreaklinebreaklinebreak​

In addition to Bladestorm, we also designed a new purple node that would act as an acrobat-exclusive upgrade to Bladestorm. We worked with Parry's design and made a new ability that would reward proper execution of acrobat abilities, enticing acrobats to invest more into their own tree in order to maximize the archetype's potential as the airborne assassin.


(if you think about it this is actually how flow states work)

Spoiler: Replaced Node:

Why is it designed this way?
Similar to Parry, this new Flow State provides both cheaper spells and a strong damage bonus, which are more extrinsic rewards. However, these two abilities have major differences:

• Instead of being triggered with Agility, the new Flow State is triggered with Bladestorm. This expands the niche of the ability by removing its direct interaction with a skill point, allowing more acrobats with different builds to choose it over other non-acrobat nodes.
• The buffs can now last indefinitely, with Parry's free spell replaced with a mana cost reduction to all spells. However, you must remain airborne and consistently trigger Bladestorm in order to keep the buff. This is done for two reasons: 1) to prevent tricksters from poaching the ability, especially when combined with the increased acrobat nodes requirement; and 2) to allow us to give more powerful rewards to highly-skilled players who can maximize both damage and air time.

This new Flow State is intended to replace Parry in the tree with an ability that isn't build-restrictive and instead interacts with acrobat's distinctive features. The goal is to instead make the ability more exclusive by working with what is unique to the archetype.

linebreaklinebreaklinebreaklinebreaklinebreaklinebreaklinebreak​

Bladestorm is designed to constantly provide players a goal they must achieve and rewards them with a tangible rush of power; while the new Flow State is a new ability that significantly defines acrobat's gameplay, not by requiring specific builds, but by rewarding skill. Overall, both of these abilities aim to address the major flaws of two of acrobat's current abilities to make the archetype more fun and engaging to play.


Thank you so much for reading! Remember to like the post and vote in the poll, and feel free to leave feedback in the replies! If you want to read more epic ability reworks, then check out my signature!

 

hell yeah new flow state

 

HELL yeah

 

Wait, a melee hit airborne? or just any hit >.<
I'm already confused reading the node .-.

 

Any hit would work lol, it would be so annoying if it was 30 melee hits haha

 

OOOOHHHH JASMINE BLOOM+BLADESTORM :D
Hold up, glass cata 1 phase greg returns?

 

oh crap sorry idk how I should've worded it

Yeah like Elysium said, it's for all hits. How should I have worded it instead?

 

yeah it’s intended to make use of all of your abilities, so casting spells quickly will grant more damage, especially with the new flow state

 

YEAHHHHHHH

well hopefully it's not that strong

 

Am I missing something or is your version of Flow State (Parry replacement node) incredibly busted?

 

Woah really? I didn't really math anything out so it was hard to tell what a balanced amount would be.

Spoiler: Let's say I mathed it all out...

Ok with 100 agi you get roughly a 60% chance to gain +30% damage bonus for 1.5s as well as making your next spell free, but with both effects having a 3s cooldown which I think starts after the 1.5s.

Ok so with say 7-8cps you cast roughly 2.5 spells every second, which is 11.25 spells in the span of 4.5s. Let's say with 100 int, acrobat spells roughly costs 16 mana on average, so that's a total of about 180 mana spent in 4.5s. With a 60% chance to make one spell free, that's around 10 less mana which means your spell costs are reduced by uh... about 6%!

Meanwhile you get a 60% chance to gain +30% damage bonus, so that's roughly equal to a consistent 18% damage boost. That lasts for 1.5s but you wouldn't be able to trigger the ability again for 3 more seconds after that 1.5s so you get that 18% damage boost for 4.5s which is... a 4% dps increase!

So the numbers aren't looking good already. We can factor in new Flow State's 1s cooldown, Bladestorm only being able to be triggered while you're airborne, and touching the ground making you lose all stacks, so we bump up the numbers a bit to something divisible by three. So uhhh let's say -9% spell costs and +6% more damage at three stacks, which means converting Parry to a permanent buff that stacks up to three times should make each stack give: -3% mana costs and +2% damage!!!

Ok yeah it's incredibly busted. in my defense, an ability that requires you to stay airborne forever while hitting enemies with carefully-timed spells only to make your spells deal 6% more damage and your spells cost -9% less mana sounds underwhelming

Honestly I was just basing off of the usual numbers other abilities use, which is like usually -30% spell costs and +20% damage, with the latter I bumped up a little because of new Flow State's "no ground touching" condition. I always think that the numbers can always be adjusted so I focus more on how it works more than the number specifics, but I do understand where these concerns are coming from. I'll give it more thought next time!

 

excellent idea, as an added bonus it nerfs trickacro

 

YEAHHHHHHH!! Thanks for the support, man!

 

So.. what counts as the ground asking for a friend ;d

Hitting instead of strike maybe? but that still sounds like a melee move. uhhh what about damaging a target 30 times since you said any hit counts

 

I agree, damaging would sound much clearer I think.

 

There's already abilities that work with "touching the ground" conditions like archer's Fierce Stomp, assassin's upwards Dash reset and Righting Reflex duration reset, Totemic Shatter, well, shattering, etc. It would work similarly with these abilities, however they're coded.

hmmm perchance

 

The goat returns

 

thank you fellow king

 

NEW RELATED POST https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/flow-state-parry-rework-alt-version.316238/
go check it out yes

 

this is awesome post