Gear sets

Alpha-1 Base leather armor set concept art.

Gear sets (also known as tier sets) are a part of Ashes of Creation.

• Players gain bonuses depending on the number of pieces of the set they have equipped.
• There are passive abilities that can be chosen to become more adept with certain set types.
• There may be set bonuses that members of certain communities will obtain based on gear set type.
• There are tiers of gear that players can access based on their level.
• There will be viable non-set builds.
• Certain set bonuses may trade off core gear stats.
• Racial appearance of gear sets is tied to the character model of that race.

Modular armor

Kaelar base level Alpha-1 robe set.

You can kind of start to see like some of the components that we put together that we can mix and match and kind of make new armors from. This is kind of like the base chassis for all of that. – Jeffrey Bard

This is what we call our t-shirt and pants. So this gives you a perfect example of just how the most basic you'll ever look in alpha. So even our most basic look, we're really trying to bring it and put a lot of detail in it. – Mat Broome

Empyrean level 20 (tier 3) plate armor.

Kaelar level 20 (tier 3) plate armor.

Your base look for the character can be pretty boring, but what Steven gave us a challenge with from day one was to make sure even the base look, the t-shirt and pants, looked amazing... This is your zero character, if you will... Then you can go in and customize everything from the shoulder pads to the elbow pads, the belt that goes around them; do you want duel belts, you want to harness the clothes in the front. So every piece you see on here you can actually customize that at the front end. So what we do is we scale that up from zero, ten and twenty... We scale it up and we customize it; and then I want to really stress that each one of those looks as you progress is different. We're not just repurposing the same armor pieces. We're making unique sets that complement each other as you progress. – Mat Broome

Alpha-1 will have three different armor themes: Plate, leather and robe.

You can actually have three different types of themes: You have plate, you'll have leather and you'll have robe. So for every armor set that we're showing at each one of those tiers, you're actually gonna have nine unique looks to pick from. – Mat Broome

Gear appearance

Gear will have appearance slots (Transmutation/Transmog/cosmetic slots) that are used to copy the appearance of an item (in some cases).

• Armor will take on a racial appearance.

• Cosmetic slots can be toggled on or off.

• Gear is intended to be realistic in appearance.
  • There will not be "oversized" weapons.

• Players can change gear colors using dyes.

• Helmet display can be toggled on and off.

• Particle effects are used to denote the importance and rarity of some weapons.

• Weapons are able to be sheathed.

I'm more of the mind that it wouldn't really serve a purpose to have bikini plate armor, just in like reality, if you're going to have armor, it should be protective. I think from a fashion statement is enjoyable for some people, but it's a kind of an immersive issue. – Steven Sharif

We're going for kind of a more realistic look; not necessarily realistic setting, but we want our characters to have weight and kind of feel like they're there. – Jeffrey Bard

Racial weapons and armor

Kaelar and Empyrean racially styled weapon concept art.

Weapons and armor are not race locked, but armor will take on a racial appearance.

• Racial appearance of gear is focused on Armor, not Weapons.

The customization of equipment per race is really focused on Armor sets not Weapon props. Weapon props will, from a model standpoint, will translate pretty one-to-one across the races. – Steven Sharif

Let's say for example you have the Eagle set or something, right: The Eagle set has in art, it has a thematic design that's going to include certain attachments to the armor. It's going to include color palette and theme. It's going to have some aspects to it that define it as the Eagle set, right. When a Elf wears the Eagle set or when an Orc wears the Eagle set, you obviously have two different cultures there; and you don't want to stomp out that culture by assigning a de facto 'This is the Eagle set and this is how it looks on everybody.' What we want to have is cultural influences play a role in showing how that set looks. – Steven Sharif

• Racial appearance of gear sets is tied to the character model of that race.

When you say, what if I'm an Orc but want to look like an Elf and I want my Eagle set to be the Elf representation? Well the issue becomes there that you know Orcs have a different organic model. You know, their body is different than that of the Elf. So, from a scope-creep standpoint, it's one thing to add different influences that represent the cultures that are donning the armor; it's another thing to adapt each influence as a matrix that can be worn pretty much by everything. From a scope perspective, that's a very difficult task for the character artists to kind of tackle. So instead what we've done is, in order to facilitate a variety of cultural representation between the races but allow for the sharing of assets like different armor sets, we give different representations of those armor sets to each race. – Steven Sharif

See also

• Gear
• Armor
• Weapons
• Crafting
• Cosmetics