Vaal Skill Gem Retrospective

Very early on in the ideas phase for Sacrifice of the Vaal, we knew we wanted some kind of big skill type which would be interesting for players. Trigger gems had proven to be very popular, so we wanted to design something that was thematic while also adding supplementary game mechanics.

The very initial seed for the expansion was the Atziri fight. This expanded quickly into the side areas, items and a general sacrifice theme. We didn't have any plans for the gems at this stage, but knew we wanted them to fit with the idea of Sacrifice.

With the question "what does a Sacrifice Gem look like?", we first explored support gems. We looked at various ways to to have support gems that traded one thing for another. A major issue here is that this is the design space that support gems already fill.

We discussed the idea of Sacrifice Gems as active skills and decided that they are most interesting as ultimate versions of existing skills. As the Vaal are the oldest civilisation that players have yet encountered, the Vaal elements could be powerful precursors to the skill gems that players already have (which are from the Eternal Empire). In a similar way, the Vaal Orb is like a precursor to other currency, but more unpredictable and primordial.



We tried a number of variations and implemented an early favourite: the gems gave you stacks of a cumulative penalty when used, and when they hit a certain threshold, they became overpowered in some way. After some initial work, we decided that rather than having a stacked debuff for each gem, they would share the same stack.

We played with various penalties and eventually decided that each cast of a Vaal Skill gives you a Vaal Charge. You lost a percentage of Life and Energy Shield on cast for each Vaal stack you had. As you cast Vaal Skills, the penalty got larger and larger with each cast. However when you cast a Vaal Skill at a specific threshold of these Vaal charges, you consumed them, and instead cast a supercharged version of the skill.

As part of this experimentation, we implemented the penalty and started work on a character effect to represent how many Vaal charges you had.

Testing determined that this was too complicated and too punitive for inexperienced players. We kept the idea of the overpowered skill at a threshold and kept the general idea of stacking charges, but it was changed back to being per gem. We also removed the penalty element. We named the stacks granted by killing monsters "souls" to the sacrifice theme.

By this stage we were bursting with ideas for ultimate gem abilities and quickly put a list together.

At around the same time, the design of the Vaal Orb, the Atziri fight and the Vaal side areas had evolved so that there was a strong additional theme of corruption. While this was initially intended to only be a mechanical shift, the theme turned out to be very sticky from a story side, and started to seep into every element of the expansion.

We now knew the Vaal Gems had to fit the corruption theme, while also being about sacrifice. We decided the gems would always be corrupted and could either be made by the Vaal Orb or found in corrupted side areas.

The final plan (as the Vaal Gems appear in Sacrifice of the Vaal) was both thematically strong and added a mechanic that we had wanted for a while: ultimate skills.

The soul count on the vaal skills is an impactful restriction, as it creates an unreliable cooldown. Just like flasks and unlike a classic timed cooldown, you cannot depend on the skill being available within any set timeframe. Because the player has limited control on when they can use the skill and the soul count is a soft cooldown, Vaal skills let us get away with incredibly powerful effects - things we couldn't do on an ultimate skill with a 60 second cooldown.

The first set of Vaal Gems were created by asking the question "What would the Vaal versions of these skills do?" We saw some successful designs in Vaal Cyclone from its extreme control effect, Vaal Spark from its incredible damage, and Molten Shell from its situational insanity. These shone because they performed extreme effects that couldn't be seen in any other skill in the game. We also ended up with a few skills that sounded interesting but failed to synergize with supports.



The minor patches gave us a bit more time to measure the success of the previous Vaal skills and to use Vaal skills to solve problems that specific builds had. The first and possibly most successful example of this was Vaal Summon Skeletons - The skill filled multiple roles, giving a build without a specialized Vaal Skill access to one and using the skill to give two things that Summoners lacked: bursts of large damage and a chance to escape or recover if your minions are wiped out. It also captured the imagination of many of our developers, which is an important part of development. The "generals" that were summoned with the army were purely a product of the enthusiastic discussions about how the skill would work. This design is an example of the principle of "form follows function", where the skill gained flavour and theme as a result of the intended function.

Vaal skills afterwards followed a similar process - Vaal Storm Call and Flameblast provided specialized "ultimate" skills for builds lacking them, Vaal Reave provided a Reave benefit lasting beyond the use of the skill that incentivised keeping the Reave rampage going.

The Vaal Aura design underwent some discussion. We wanted "support" vaal skills, and it was a toss-up between Curses and Auras getting a Vaal skill. We went with the simpler Aura version, though we're still keen to have some kind of "time bubble" created with Vaal Temporal Chains! Though the Vaal Aura design didn't interact with Mana Reservation at all, it gave us a lot of design space for multiple variations of various auras and had strong early and end-game results.

Erster!

thx

Thanks, Qarl!

erm... neat

sweet

I think vaal skills should function as their normal counterparts until fully charged.

You gave summoners the vaal skeletons gem, I'm quite content with a massive army of skeletons and a unique boss minion.

Awesome!

"

SkyCore wrote:

I think vaal skills should function as their normal counterparts until fully charged.

I actually made a suggestion on Warframe, inspired by the vaal skills, that was supposed to behave exactly like what you suggest. A few people really liked it.