Augments

Ashes of Creation hosts a wide array of progression paths that offer augments to a character's primary skills.

• Secondary archetypes.
• Social organization progression.
• Religious progression.
• Racial augments.

Augments are applied individually to active skills from a character's primary archetype.

• A character can have one active augment on an ability at any given time.
• Augments do not cost skill points.
  • It was previously stated that certain augments will have more expense required on the skill point side.
• Secondary class augments may be applied to any skill, but it is possible that some specific augments (such as racial or religious) may be locked to specific abilities.
• The progression system for augments is very similar to the class progression system.

Augments can affect a multitude of things and can (in some cases) create entirely new skills.

• Drastically change the ability itself.
• Change the damage type and value.
• Change the cooldown period.
• Change the distance (of the skill).
• Change the effect from a ranged to melee ability.

Augments can affect a multitude of things. It can drastically change the ability itself. It can change the damage type. It can change the cooldown period. It can change the damage values. It can change the distance. It can dramatically change it from a ranged effect to a melee effect. Augments are essentially can create- they are creating entirely new skills, but they're going to keep obviously some identity with what that primary active ability was. – Steven Sharif

Class augments

Alpha-1 preview primary skills.

If from the eight archetypes whatever you choose as your secondary, you're going to receive a choice of augments that relate to some core ideal of that class. You know like a tank is about controlling the battlefield, is about surviving. The mage is about dealing damage and elements and ability in AoEs. The rogue is going to be about stealth and critical damage. So those augments are going to to play towards those identities. – Steven Sharif

The idea behind the system is that you're kind of skirting the line through these augmentations of your role, right. We have the traditional holy trinity that's present in class designs for MMOs and it's often that those either are not deviated at all or completely deviated from entirely. The augment is to kind of offer a balance between that where you still maintain the semblance of that trinity system while offering the opportunity to customize your play experience towards one of the other angles in the triangle. – Steven Sharif

Primary skills (class abilities) are based on a player's archetype. Players can personalize their primary skills with augmentation from a secondary archetype.

The design behind augments is to not just change the flavor so that it reflects the secondary archetype, but it also fundamentally changes the core components of a skill. – Steven Sharif

• Each secondary archetype offers four different schools of augmentation. Each augment school affects a primary archetype's skills in different ways.
  • For example: A Mage offers Teleportation and elemental schools of augments. These augments will affect a Fighter's primary skills differently than a Cleric's.
  • Each augmentation has a level requirement.
    • Augments do not cost skill points. It was previously stated that certain augments will have more expense required on the skill point side.

There's going to be a certain threshold at which you can no longer augment your active abilities based on the decisions you've augmented previous abilities, so you'll have to pick and choose which ones you want to apply the augments towards. – Steven Sharif

• Choosing the same primary and secondary archetype increases focus on that archetype.

• Augments to primary skills will fundamentally change the way the ability works: Adapting what the ability once did to incorporate the identity of the secondary archetype.
  • The progression system for augments is very similar to the class progression system.

• Changing the augmentations on your skills will require you to go to a NPC in a Village node or higher.
• Some spell colors and general FX change based on augments.
  • Active skills could look totally different after an augment gets applied.

• Outside of class-specific skills there may be a subset of universal skills, such as active block and dodge.
• Class skills are not affected by the type of weapon that is equipped.

Primary skills in Alpha-2 are expected to be very different to those in Alpha-1.

The ability list in Alpha One is nowhere near what the ability list will be, especially from like a level/progression standpoint. So you can expect it to be incredibly different. – Steven Sharif

Bard augments

This section will be updated as soon as information is made available by the developers.

Cleric augments

Classes with Cleric as a secondary archetype are able to choose between life or death augments.

• Choosing life augments will provide self-healing benefits as well as limited life-giving benefits to other players.
• Some cleric augments applied to certain skills will indirectly provide the ability to heal others. These will not replace the need for a cleric archetype.
• Cleric augments will radically change the type of summons available from the summoner primary archetype.
  • Skeletons, zombies and other undead summons will be possible with death based augments.

Any class that's going to choose Cleric as a secondary class will have the ability to pick from those augments to influence their skills to affect the life of others around you. – Steven Sharif

Fighter augments

This section will be updated as soon as information is made available by the developers.

Mage augments

Mages will offer four Elemental schools of augmentation, such as Teleportation, Fire, Frost and Lightning (electrical).

Say for instance, I am a Ranger that has a Charge bolt ability as my primary active skill and I've chosen Mage as my secondary and applied the elemental to it. I now have a Frost charge bolt, and if I fire that frostbolt and hit a target, they may be freezing for a period of time as a debuff and that might slow their speed. If a wizard applies a nuke on a target and that nuke is a frost-based nuke, those two stacking elements might then either further snare (slow the target) or paralyze and freeze the target. So, there are combination out effects that build up: A primary, secondary and some ancillary effect occurs when those are combined. – Steven Sharif

There's going to be four schools of augmentation for each archetype. One of the schools for the mage is the teleport school. You can take that teleport augment, apply it to your charge skill: now instead of charging x distance over time you're going to immediately teleport to the target dealing x damage and a condition modifier. If you were to apply the elemental school to your class ability you would then instead you would charge x distance; upon reaching target you would set the target ablaze if it's fire or you would electrocute them and deal with damage over time. – Steven Sharif

Ranger augments

This section will be updated as soon as information is made available by the developers.

Summoner augments

• Classes with a Summoner secondary may grant augmented skills that summon weapons. These summoned weapons are not able to be equipped.
  • The word "equip" only applies to items. There are currently no plans to include summoning items into a player's inventory or character slots. It may however be possible to change the appearance and damage type/data of a weapon through the use of a spell.
  • There are summoned weapons that appear as a spell VFX to damage opponents for a period of time. These will not be able to be wielded, since weilding implies an item in a character equipment slot.

Rogue augments

Stealth augments from the Rogue secondary archetype will incorporate stealth modifiers into a class' primary skills.

• True stealth resides within the realm of the Rogue (primary) archetype.

There will be counter-stealth mechanics for sure. That's just a natural balancing act of stealth. But additionally with regards to you know secondary classes, one of those aspects is augments represent the secondary class and some of the- one of the most fundamental aspects of a rogue is stealth whether it be actual invisibility or the ability to sneak around in the shadows or something. So you can almost certainly count on the fact that should you go a secondary class of rogue that there will be the ability to influence your action items from your primary class with the stealth modifier. – Steven Sharif

Tank augments

This section will be updated as soon as information is made available by the developers.

Racial augments

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

Racial augments are based on a character's race and are available to each class.

• These apply to abilities on a character's primary archetype.
• They affect how the ability works and can also apply cosmetic effects.

In keeping with our theme of Consequence, and unlike other games, race won’t just be a matter of look, with relatively inconsequential abilities tacked on. Instead they integrate deeply into our class system, augmenting and changing the basic chassis provided by our eight core archetypes. Our goal here is to create a system where an elven fighter feels different, but serves the same role as a dwarven fighter.

Religious augments

Strong religions provide unique augments that can be applied to a player's primary skills.

• Religious augments are considered top-tier achievements within a religion.
• These augments can be stacked on top of class augments. They will have a give-and-take system based on the choices a player makes.

You're going to have advancement within the religion and within the church that you're a part of. And those advancements are going to be both reflective of the community's development of that religion out in the world: Building temples, building infrastructure for that, completing certain quests for it; and then you will benefit from the community's development of that specific religion via having certain augment abilities that you'll gain access to be able to apply on top of your secondary class augments to skills; and it's going to reflect what the nature of that religion is. – Steven Sharif

Social organization augments

A player progresses through a social organization by accomplishing tasks or quests. There are hierarchical paths pertaining to specific questlines for the organization's thematic. These quests will either be cooperative with or adversarial against other nodes based on their mutual war status.

• Sabotage.
• Espionage.
• Intrigue.

- For example, a Thieves' guild may have objectives and quests toward securing a particular item to enable players to advance within the organization.

Social organizations are going to have questlines that players participate in which some will include sabotage, espionage, intrigue... While it's not necessarily player versus player in the combat sense, it is player versus player in pitting communities in those organizations kind of against each other in a competitive atmosphere, where only some things can be accomplished by certain communities; and not everybody can succeed at a particular task. So, I think that that's a unique way to involve meaningful conflict that doesn't necessarily have to relate to PvP, because obviously we have a lot of PvP systems in the game and and there are many ways for players to participate in player versus player combat; but we also want to make sure that from a progression standpoint, from a system standpoint there are going to be abilities of individuals to follow these questlines, these tasks that will pit organizations against each other, specifically from an organizational standpoint. – Steven Sharif

• Social organizations unlock augments.

You're gonna see augments being used a lot throughout a lot of our systems. When we're talking about the guild system, when we're talking about social organizations, when we're talking about religions. A lot of those things are going to affect how and what you have available to augment your skills with. – Jeffrey Bard

Skill transfer

Players will not be able to transfer their skills to other players.

See also

• Schools of magic
• Races
• Classes
• Religions
• Combat