Call of Thrones (Part Two)

Skills

Skill learning in Call of Thrones differ from regular MMOs. It does not give players a fixed amount of skill points upon leveling. Instead, one skill point is awarded to the relevant skill tree every time the player uses a skill or does something which requires a skill.

If you use a dual-wield skill to attack a foe during battle, one skill point will be awarded to the dual-wield skill tree. If you mined a resource or disassembled an item, you will be awarded one skill point to the trade skill tree.

If at this point your thinking that it will be easy to level skills in this game, perish that thought because it ain't so. Regardless of the rank of the skill you use, you will only get one skill point per usage, however ranking up a skill will require progressively more and more skill points (about hundreds to thousands or more of skill points per jump).

And considering the fact that I'm only referring to one skill in the skill tree, can you imagine the amount of time and hard work you will need to finish leveling all the skills in the skill tree? (Multiply it by four if you plan on completing all four skill trees that you have.)

If you happen to misallocate your skill points, you can always hit the reset button (at the bottom of skill window) and pay 50,000 coins to reallocate them. Additionally, if at any point you start to dislike a skill tree, you can click the forget button to remove the skill tree. Just make sure that you've thought about it carefully and have selected the correct skill tree to remove.

Combat

Combat in Call of Thrones is active turn-based. If you look at the bottom of your interface (around the middle), you can see a cyan colour bar that increases with time during combat. This is the "action bar" which determines when you perform an action.

The action bar is divided evenly into ten portions. How fast the action bar fills will depend upon your speed and the moment all ten portions are filled, you can perform an action. An action can be either a simple attack, using a skill or a potion. Each of these actions when performed will consume a certain amount of the action bar.

For example, a normal attack consumes 5 action slots. This means that when you do a normal attack on an enemy, half of the action bar will be consumed to perform the attack. After which your action bar will start filling up again, but this time from the halfway point since you only used half of the bar and still had half. Upon filling the bar once more, you can then perform your next action.

Do note that your character will not perform any actions whatsoever if you do not order it to do anything even when your action bar is filled. Time will not stop. Your character will just stand there like a block of wood while the enemy continues to unleash attacks on you.

Next, let's touch on the five buttons that you see below the action bar. These buttons are probably useless if you like to fight battles personally, however it would still be good to know about them.

They are actually a simple auto-combat system that's provided by the game for our convenience. Once you've turned it on, an AI system will take control of your character to fight battles. Just click on the "Manual/Auto-combat" toggle button to turn the AI on or off.

There are four stances which the AI can take, offensive, balanced, defensive and support. Each stance have its own list of actions which takes priority. For example, taking an offensive stance will result in the AI prioritizing attack related actions first. It will only heal or pot when its HP or EP is below 20%.

Since we mentioned about HP and EP, perhaps you ought to know that HP and EP only regenerates during combat (about ten seconds per tick). The amount of HP and EP recovered per tick depends on your HP and EP recovery stats. For every 1 HP recovery and 1 EP recovery that your character has, it will regenerate 20 HP and 5 EP per tick respectively.

Furthermore, if your character's HP and EP drain stats are not zero, every hit that your character or pet performs on the enemy will steal you some HP and EP. For every 1 HP drain and 1 EP drain that your character has, every hit will steal you 10 HP and 1 EP respectively.

Equipments

There are five grades of equipment in this game, white, green, blue, orange and purple(most common to rarest). And as far as I know, white, green and blue equipment are mostly obtained from instances. Orange equipment can be obtained when you level up to multiples of 10 and when you rank your title up, like from private to corporal.

As for purple equipment, you will need to exchange for them from the NPC in the shop district of major cities, like waymarsh. The NPC will demand that you hand over some amount of artifact shards for each piece of purple equipment. These artifact shards are in turn exchanged from tokens that you get from doing instances at heroic or legendary level.

Instances

The very first instance you will encounter in Call of Thrones is Rockshore at level 15. From there onwards, you will gain access to one or two more instances for every 5 levels that you get.

From what I've gathered so far, instances form a major part of playing Call of Thrones. You will regularly visit them for leveling purposes, getting of merits to rank up your title, farming of equipments, items and tokens.

There are three difficulty settings for instances, normal, heroic and legendary. The more difficult the setting, the better the loot and rewards you get upon completion. Instances created at normal difficulty costs nothing, however creating heroic and legendary instances will cost 15 SP(spirit points) and 30 SP respectively. The only ways to replenish used spirit points is by using spirit potions (bought from the cash shop or obtained from some quests) or wait for it to reset once per day.

Previous: Call of Thrones (Part One)

Next: Call of Thrones (Part Three)

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