Formatting, Abilities, & Colors
Hi there. This is your author Polydeuces.
In Guide to MMO (MMO for short) you’ll see lots of combat scenes with new characers. I’ll often try to make them say their ability out loud to make it more intuitive for you guys, but some of you might not understand how the ability works, or the format of it.
As well as this, all of this formatting stuff will be impossible to simply just sprinkle throughout the chapters, it would make your reading experience a whole lot more confusing. That’s why this Guide is here. Think of it like an info dump or instruction manual that you can always come back to.
This Guide will cover formats, abilities, and colors.
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Starting things off is a Glossary, basically anything that isn’t going to be thoroughly explained about in this chapter besides now.
Everything will be considered either a target or an ally. A target is the receiver of any harmful abilities, and an ally is the receiver of helpful abilities. An easy way to think about them are enemies and friends. You hurt enemies and you help friends.
Anything italicized and capitalized is either a Keyword, a name, or an Ability.
A keyword is basically a word that sums up all of its ‘parts’ in a single word. Say for example, the keyword for this section of the Guide would be Glossary. Keywords are also usually defined if they are in an ability.
A cooldown is an amount of time that passes between after an ability is used and when it is available to use again. This term can only be applied to abilities and the exact cooldowns will probably never be revealed throughout the story. Just know that most abilities have a cooldown that varies.
??? is pretty self explanatory. It either hasn’t been revealed yet or it doesn’t exist.
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Next, let’s look at Reyenal Ato from last chapter.
When she activated her first and second weapon, Flambé and Icicle, an ability description popped up:
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* (Passive) Ability//1: Paragon Talent
* (S) Reyenal’s gains access to an arsenal of 2 spirit weapons, changing them as she wills. She has a main and off-hand weapon that is always active. The off-hand only grants its affinity to the main weapon.
* (T) Flambé — Reyenal equips a bow. Her affinity changes to Fire which occasionally causes her next attack to burn dealing % current health damage.
* (T) Icicle — Reyenal equips a kama. Her affinity changes to Ice which causes every attack to spawn an additional missile, striking the target for a portion of the damage dealt shortly after appearing. Her attacks Frost the target. All instances of damage increase the amount of stacks. At 4 stacks, the target is shortly frozen and takes bonus % max health true damage.
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We’ll get to the colors and rankings soon. When you see a few “==” with content in the middle and another few “==” at the end, that’s probably an ability (or screen). In this case, it’s called:
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* (Passive) Ability//1: Paragon Talent
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The first part, Passive, means that as long as that character exists in the world, that Passive is either:
1. Always active and doing something
2. Always ready to interact with abilities
In some cases, it’s both.
Reyenal’s passive gives her 2 weapons which she can activate at any time, one activated and one in the off-hand. She can only use the activated weapon, but however, the Aspect of an off-hand weapon (in this case, it’s always the other weapon she isn’t using) will lend itself and interact with the active and anything it does.
Next, we have Innate abilities, which will be formatted as:
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* (Innate) Ability//2: Name of Ability
* (Rank) Description of ability
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Innate abilities can be characterized as ALWAYS ACTIVE. It is given to the characters from birth, so even an unawakened kid could have an Innate. You’ll almost never see a Damage type Innate (I promise we’ll get there). Here’s an example.
This here is Jimmy. He is Awakened. Jimmy has a very simple Innate ability.
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* (Innate) Ability//2: Inner Scaredy-Cat
* (C) When Jimmy is under 50% of his max health, he gains movement speed equal to 10% more than the target he is fleeing from.
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Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
See how the color of the name is light yellow? That means it’s a Stat Changer type ability (if you’re impatient just scroll down).
The gist of the ability is that it helps Jimmy run faster than whoever he is running away from, which can vary from target to target. It’s kind of boring and not very applicable to most situations because it only activates at 50%, and it doesn’t specify if the target dashes, in which case Jimmy would surely be screwed. That’s why it’s only a rank C ability.
This is a very thoughtful grading system.
Next is an Active ability. Anything is fair game when it comes to Actives. Does it heal? Cool. Shield? Nice. Obliterate health bars? Very nice. Teleport the user across the globe instantaneously? It better have a long cooldown. The point is, anything is fair game with an Active ability.
Let’s bring Jimmy the scaredy-cat back for this. Actually, that’s his Title, The Scaredy-Cat of the Format Chap. Here’s what we have so far, and an example of what a character would look like in full. I’ll even give him 3 Actives and a Passive for a complete character.
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Jimmy Bobbykins
Class//Talent: ???
Tendency//Title(s): The Scaredy-Cat of the Format Chap
Weapon//Choice: ???
* (Passive) Ability//1: American Spirit
* (T) Jimmy manifests a spirit gun which can only be fired with Bullets. Every 5 seconds, Jimmy automatically reloads a Bullet for a maximum of 10 Bullets.
* (Innate) Ability//2: Innate Scaredy-Cat
* (C) When Jimmy is under 50% of his max health, he gains movement speed equal to 10% more than the target he is fleeing from.
* (Active) Ability//3: Manifest Destiny
* (B+) Jimmy fires all of his Bullets in 1 second. Time is slowed during the 1 second until Jimmy fires all of the Bullets, dealing high damage.
* (Active) Ability//4: Get Off My Lawn!
* (A) Jimmy creates a small zone around him that pushes back all targets for 5 seconds, dealing medium damage.
* (Active) Ability//5: French Fry Connoisseur
* (D) Jimmy eats a french fry, healing him a little bit.
* (Ultimate) Ability//6: ???
* ???
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Let’s start dissecting.
Every character is given a Class//Talent. That’s just the class the character gets. In this case, Jimmy would be a Hunter or a Marksman, or probably both (this is a formatting chapter, classes won’t be explained).
Tendency//Title is the title of the character, given by the general system that only the Awakened can see, and is the only piece of information other people can see when they use their system to directly look him up. Any Awakened who looks at Jimmy would know that he is The Scaredy-Cat of the Format Chap. Poor Jimmy.
Next is Weapon//Choice, weapon of choice. Jimmy has a spirit gun, but he can only shoot it once in a while. That’s not very good for DPS (damage per second). He needs a proper weapon that he can keep attacking his targets with, so he gets a gun. This means that his weapon of choice is dual guns, a spirit gun and a regular one.
All of his abililties are quite self explanatory. This is where I get into the ranks. Colors can wait.
Here is a Guide you can use to decipher what each rank means:
T Fundamental of a kit
F It’s actually worse to have these abilities
D- Harmful to the user or allies
D It’s absolute crap.
D+ Too situational.
C- Unreliable but can be useful
C Slightly useful but one dimensional ability
C+ Reaching into interesting but unreliable utility or damage
B- Good for utility, not damage
B Good, reliable, consistent
B+ Great utility or damage but lacking the other
A- Very Well Balanced
A Accels at what it’s supposed to do
A+ Bread and Butter
S- Unfair to go against
S Amazing damage, utility, and synergy
S+ Downright busted
Infinite Value Everyone equally benefits or suffers
The last part of the abilities section is Ultimates.
Don’t get excited.
Ultimate means that the ability can only be used once in a blue moon unless it’s specified. Usually it’s about 1-5 days depending on the intensity of the ultimate. This doesn’t mean that all ultimates have a long cooldown though.
As well as this, ultimates don’t define a set of abilities and can sometimes straight up suck. Of course, on the flip side there are overpowered ones or just average ones. It all varies.
For Jimmy, he is all about America, property, and guns. A good ultimate to round out his kit wouldn’t be a world ending apocalypse bringing ability, but instead more like summoning a phantom military for a bit, or raising a flag to raise ally morale, or giving him a tank and anti-airship missiles.
Anything is fair game.
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Lastly are the colors. I’ll give you the colors right here:
Damage = Red
Stat Change = Gold
Regeneration = Green
Shield = Blue
Utility = Purple
Movement = Pink
Multiple Different Effects = Grey
You will only ever see the colors applied to the ability names. It’s really only there as an indicator to what the ability is going to do.
That’s all there is to this chapter. More Guides will be released as the story goes on, if needed.