Hey everyone! Team Stonehearth continues to work hard at advanced combat for Alpha 16. The goal of advanced combat is to give you opportunities to make tactical decisions before and within combat. This week, let’s take a closer look at Yang’s second class, The Cleric, and how the cleric dramatically enhances the functionality of the existing combat triangle.
The Cleric
Recap from the video:
- Cleric is a healer with some combat abilities
- They support the ranged/tank/DPS triangle by making each sturdier and more effective at their job
- With a cleric, your hearthings should stay alive long enough for you the player to make deeper strategic decisions about who and how you want to engage in combat
- Create a cleric by upgrading your herbalist with a book of healing lore crafted by the herbalist
- Clerics lose the ability to craft potions and tend to sick hearthlings with bandages, but they can still heal injured townsfolk by standing near them: clerics emit a constant healing aura, and can cast directed healing spells at nearby injured allies
- The auras increase in power, type, and range as the cleric levels up. The directed healing spell gets stronger too!
- Clerics are combat units, and join parties with footmen, knights, and archers.
- In combat the cleric joins the footman and the knight in the front row, so that all your melee characters can benefit from their healing aura. They will also automatically direct their cooldown-monitored healing spell at appropriately injured allies.
- Current tests show that two footmen do fairly poorly against four marauders, but two footman and a cleric fare much better. Clerics and tanks work very well together also, as the cleric’s healing aura and the tank’s aggro-drawing and damage reduction allow for long, epic combats.
- Add a cleric to a group of townsfolk in town defense mode, and see their chances of surviving dramatically increase!
As you can tell, Team Stonehearth is very excited about this class! We think it adds a lot of depth and decision-making to small party combat. Right now, A16 is still baking–all your new classes need some stronger enemies to fight, after all–but we can’t wait to get it into your hands as soon as we feel we have something robust enough for you to all try out.
Other Announcements:
- Tuesday’s stream will start early, around 5:00pm PST
- Wednesday’s stream will happen at the usual time
- Thursday’s stream will be SUPER early, at NOON, ie, 12:00pm PST. A number of hardware upgrades are happening around the office later in the afternoon, so the internet will be wonky; right now we think the best way to guarantee that we see you at all is to see you before it all starts!