Apeiron Battle Design Primer 2: Avatars — Perks, Boons, and Skills

Hello Apeiron Faithful! In last week’s blog post, we laid out the fundamentals of Apeiron’s unique card-battling system — definitely check it out (HERE) if you haven’t already, since this article will assume that you have some basic knowledge of how it all fits together. Now, for today, we’re zooming in our focus for an in-depth analysis of undoubtedly the most powerful units on the battlefield: the Avatars.

But, as usual, we have a quick reminder for you first: Apeiron’s Got Talent show is going live TOMORROW! We’re going to have a series of exciting performances from our community members, and you can even join in on the voting — and get rewarded for it! Head on down to our Discord for all the deets.

Alright, now let’s move along, and talk about Avatars. Each Avatar has a distribution of 100 elemental points based on its Planet. Specifically, there are 15 different planet types of varying elemental combinations, and 3 classes for each Avatar — giving us a total of 45 different Avatar types!

The elements themselves serve different purposes and each bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the table:

1. Earth
   Earth Element is a natural defender, having skills to boost health and defence, while applying shields to its ally. It also has aggressive skills to disable enemies by stunning and rooting them, with utility spells to spawn forests for some interesting battle dynamics.
   Avatars with predominantly Earth skills might look to complement their innate tankiness and crowd control abilities (CC) by bringing Apostles that need some protection but have high damage potential — the Mage or the Summoner, for example. OR you could go in the other direction and bring some Warriors and Guardians for a team that is just extremely hard to break down.
2. Water
   Water Element excels in magical power. With substantial cooldown reduction and versatile magical skills, it offers both sustainable damage to enemies and support to allies.
   Avatars with predominantly Water skills offer a lot of different deckbuilding possibilities, given that they can either act as supports for an aggressively slanted frontline of Knights, Rogues, and Dragoons, or as the primary damage dealer protected by Guardians, Knights, and Warriors. Conversely, you could utilize the cooldown reduction and bring along some Shamans and Bards to start spamming powerful skills at a higher rate.
3. Fire
   Fire Element is raging and destructive. With a collection of AOE damaging skills, enemies turn into ashes in a glimpse, even if it sometimes means sacrificing allies…
   Avatars with predominantly Fire skills will certainly bring the pain to the opponent, but at what cost? You could offset the friendly-fire AoE damage by bringing Priests and Guardians to heal and survive through the onslaught. On the other hand, you could lean into the danger and bring along some Berserkers, who thrive on low health, for a high risk, high reward strategy!
4. Air
   Air Element pursues speed. Faster movement, faster attack, faster to stampede the enemies. While it is too fast for the opponent to respond, the controller also has to be quick enough to handle all of the game actions.
   Avatars with predominantly Air skills are fast moving but will require good micro and targeting of abilities to have their maximum effect on the battlefield. These skills are more challenging for players to master, but will reward those who spend the time to learn them. Given that players will be spending their time during battle maneuvering their Avatar, they may wish to select easier to use Apostles, such as the Warrior or the Hunter, who can mostly take care of themselves.

Cool, so that gives you an idea of how the Elements will affect your teambuilding strategies, now let’s talk about skills. Specifically, Avatars will come with three different kinds of skills: Boons, Perks, and Skills.

Note: All below Boons, Skills, and Perks should be considered as a work-in-progress, and may not reflect the final form of the ability. We retain the right to change any or all of the following as we continue to develop the game.

Boons are special passives and energized abilities associated with each Avatar type and class that offer powerful effects for you to build around. Each of the passive Boons are linked with a Planet type, while the energized Boons are defined by the Avatar’s class. Here are some examples of passive Boons for different planet types:

• Wasteland — Waste Warrior Glare — Deal increased damage to immobilized targets.
• Delta — River Run — After casting an Avatar Skill, the Avatars next movement within a certain range executes in the form of a Blink.
• Gigas — Titanic Might — Whenever an Apostle, ally or foe, dies within a certain range of the Avatar, the host gains bonus max HP, as well as an increased size, capping at double the Avatar’s original size.

Perks are another set of passives — but rather than being unlocked automatically, these are unlocked by investing elemental points. Elemental points are gained through leveling up your Avatar, and are spent on unlocking and improving different perks — up to 20 elemental points can be spent upgrading the effects of each perk. Perks are divided between the four elemental skill trees of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire.

Note that you will not be able to invest more elemental points than you have elemental distribution. So for example if you have a Planet with only 10% Fire, you would only be able to invest 10 elemental points in the Fire tree. Additionally, certain Perks may have their own prerequisites before they can be unlocked.

There are 8 perks to unlock for each elemental skill tree. Multiple Perks may be used at the same time in battle. Let’s take a look at some of the different perks from the Fire tree:

• Ignited Savagery (Fire Perk Level 2) — The Avatar’s skills ignore a % of enemies’ defense and resistance.
• Burning Fury (Fire Perk Level 4) — The Avatar gains a stack of Burning Fury every 30 seconds, stacking up to 10 times. Each stack grants the Avatar a % of their ATK as a bonus.
• Blazing Pride (Fire Perk Level 6) — Discard actions now cost an amount of the Avatar’s flat HP rather than Mana.

Skills are unlocked in a similar fashion to Perks. Every 20 points a new tier within an elemental tree will unlock, and each tier will come with more Skill cards for the player to choose from to add to their deck. There will be four tiers.

Additionally, Skill cards are linked to both element and class. There will also be special skills unlocked through reaching certain alignment levels (between good and evil), but we’ll have more information on Alignment Skill cards at a later date.

Let’s see some of the Skills that will be available from the first tier of each branch for different classes:

• Windy Rebuke — Air Tier 1 Skill/The Wisdom — Dashes to an allied hero, gaining ghosted (ignores unit collision). While granting 20% bonus movement speed and a shield equivalent to [x](+80%INT) to the target and itself upon arrival for 3 seconds.
• Rising Sun Slash — Fire Tier 1 Skill/The Fury — Slashes the area around the caster, dealing [x] magic damage to enemies within, then jumps to the target location, and deals the same amount of damage to enemies hit on impact and slowing them by 60%.
• Snow Shaping — Water Tier 1 Skill/The Fate — Throws a snowball to the target enemy, dealing [x] physical damage. The snowball then falls near the target after 1 second, where it remains for up to 4 seconds. Upon retrieving the snowball, the Avatar summons a Snow Thrall Apostle, while also granting the Avatar a shield equivalent to 20% of the Avatar’s max HP for 3 seconds. If the snowball kills the target, it bounces back to the top of your deck.
• Unyielding Rock — Earth Tier 1 Skill/The Fury — Creates an immovable rock at the target location for 5 seconds, knocking back all units directly from it to a location 1 unit from its center on-cast, dealing [x](+50%INT) magic damage to all enemies hit, while slowing them by 40%.

Ok! That’s probably enough for now. Plus, I can see the battle design guys looking at me, I don’t think they want me to give out any more spoilers today haha. Anyway! Hope you enjoyed this 2nd edition of the Apeiron Battle Primer. Are you getting excited towards building your team? We hope so! Come and discuss with us all of your grandest plans over on our Discord, or on Telegram, or on Twitter (but really, check out our Discord).

And as always, thanks for reading, Godlings. We’ll see you next time~