Ability Gems, New spells, and more on Area 52

Heroes,

There’s a lot of confusion and rumors circulating about the ability gem system, masteries, and the changes arriving on Area 52. This article gives a detailed overview of all the updates and why they are happening:

Here are the updates coming:

• The Ability Gem System: A system where all abilities in the game are categorized into different rarities. This is the foundation of all the other updates, and the mechanism that brings them together and synthesizes them. Here are the categories:
  • Core: Core abilities are the foundational skills with which you build your Hero: baseline damage, healing, and threat abilities that form the ‘core’ of your cross-class champion. These abilities do not have a maximum, so you can mix and match as many as you want.
  • Uncommon skills are the utility you bring to your party: group buffs, auras, and cleansing abilities. They let you aid your party in battle!
  • Rare skills are personal buffs, utility, mana recovery, and powerful damaging spells. They strengthen your core build and let you empower yourself, gaining additional attack, defense, or sustain.
  • Epic skills can turn the tide of battle, massively increasing your damage output, helping you escape from certain death, or instantly controlling the fight through essential crowd control skills.
  • Legendary skills are the strongest spells in the game, often fulfilling multiple roles at once. These godlike-skills can augment your Hero in new directions, defining your strengths and weaknesses and granting massive power boosts.

• Reworked Ability Essence Costs
  • With the Ability Gem system, skills no longer need to rely on variable AE to denote their power. 
    • This allows most abilities to return to their original 2AE cost, allowing you to pick up more total abilities.
      • This ability to pick up more total abilities and more abilities to choose from is complimented by a total number you can spend in each category.

• Masteries
  • Masteries unlock ‘buckets’ or categories of spells for a single Rarity cost
    • This allows Heroes the freedom to pick up multiple spells in the same category (i.e. Seals, Hunter Aspects, or Auras).
  • Masteries allow Heroes to have multiple different skills for multiple different situations to adapt on the fly
    • This never happened before because picking things like Seals (which you could only have one of active at once) impinged on your ability to pick up necessary toolkit spells
      • And often cost more than 2AE each, so you’d never spend 10AE getting situational abilities

• Talent Points on Talented Abilities are removed
  • With the addition to ability gems, talent abilities can be balanced without the requirement for talent points and are having their talent points removed.
  • This frees up talent points for more build variety and flexibility

• 37 New Abilities
  • 37 new spells arrive with the Ability Gem System
  • These spells can now safely arrive on Area 52 without invalidating PvE boss encounters or overloading PvP toolkits.
    • When everyone can pick up Iceblock, Blink, Divine Shield, Disengage, Demonic Leap, etc, then PvE encounters have to be designed assuming Heroes will have and use all these skills, which makes it a non-choice expectation. 
      • That’s not freedom of choice or meaningful choice: it removes the option for any build that can’t pick up all those spells to be used in a competitive setting.
  • Here is the full list of abilities:

1. Air Ascendance
2. Alter Time 
3. Arcane Orb 
4. Arcane Ward 
5. Avatar 
6. Bind Elemental 
7. Blinding Light 
8. Blood Horror 
9. Bloodbath 
10. Brilliance Aura 
11. Burning Rush 
12. Capacitor Totem 
13. Combat Readiness
14. Demonic Leap 
15. Demoralizing Banner 
16. Earthquake 
17. Execution Sentence
18. Halo 
19. Healing Rain 
20. Heroic Leap
21. Hypnosis (was an RE,now a baseline ability). 
22. Leap of Faith 
23. Light's Hammer 
24. Mass Entanglement
25. Petrification Totem (was an RE, now a baseline ability). 
26. Ring of Frost 
27. Siegebreaker 
28. Skull Banner 
29. Smoke Bomb 
30. Solar Beam 
31. Soul Harvest 
32. Soul Swap 
33. Stampeding Roar
34. Unending Resolve 
35. Ursol's Vortex
36. Void Shift 
37. Windwalk Totem 

Ability Gems shift the restrictions on Area 52 to allow for more stuff to be added to the game. With the Rarity System, Area 52 gets:

• The ability to continually update with new spells and abilities from future expansions
• 37 New Abilities immediately out the gate
• More talent points and more flexibility with removing Talent Essences from Talent Abilities
• More freedom with mixing and matching Cross-class damage spell combinations
  • More build diversity
    • As taking multiple damaging spells is no longer coming at great cost
• More meaningful and challenging dungeon and raid mechanics
  • Without needing to ‘cheese’ them to be competitive
• Better balance across all facets of PvE and PvP 

With Ability Gems, Area 52 loses:

• The ability to freely pick up EVERY SINGLE ONE of the most powerful toolkit spells from all classes. 
  • A feature that came with a lot of issues:
    • Creating an environment where everyone had to do this to most easily counter high-end PvE Mechanics
    • Creating endless stunlock CC in PvP
    • Limiting the success of cross-class builds that required multiple damaging spells
    • Forcing the allocation of talent points of balance talented abilities

The Nitty Gritty

Doesn’t the Ability Gem system Contrast with the Spirit of Free-Pick? I don’t want to be restricted

• Understood, but the truth is there was always a restriction in one form or another on Area 52. This update trades that bad restriction for a much more flexible one:

Currently, the variable AE system comes with a lot of limitations: they manifest in the form of requiring the maximum number of toolkit spells, limiting abilities within a particular bucket (Like Seals), and limiting the total number of damaging abilities your build can have. 

1. Because a Hero COULD have Ice Block, Divine Shield, Deterrence, Dispersion, etc. encounters had to be designed to still provide a challenge even if you had all of that.
2. Because encounters have to be designed that way, they become frustratingly difficult for Heroes who choose not to have all those toolkit spells.
3. Because no one likes to be frustrated (especially not when doing something that’s supposed to be fun), Heroes opted to get all the toolkit spells to more easily overcome mechanics.
4. Because everyone is getting those toolkit spells, future content is designed around everyone having everything
5. Finally, because that’s the case, any build that doesn’t allow you to get all the toolkit spells you need isn’t viable.
6. This problem grows worse as Ascension adds new abilities to the game, and so Area 52 was limited in the ways it could receive the new spells
7. Finally, since you’re spending all of your AE on these toolkit spells, you’re now directly limited in how many damaging abilities you can have, because each damaging ability is coming at the cost of utility forcing mono-class 1-2 button builds–which with the addition of each new ability would grow more exaggerated.
   
    

In order to play at the highest levels of both PvE and PvP, there are things you must pick: there are spells you must have. And because those spells cost a lot of ability essences, you’re relegated to builds that can perform well after that tax is applied. As an example, if all the toolkit spells you need take up 40 of your 70 AE, you’re no longer free to play builds that require anything over 30 AE: anything beyond that will not work. If every fight has to be designed assuming you’re going to cheese it with Divine Shield, Ice Block, Deterrence, Dispersion and more that isn't a real choice. Worse, that means anything Ascension creates (e.g. new Mystic Enchantments) that don’t conform to that very specific environment could never be used.

That’s a hell of a restriction, but there is an alternative:

With Ability Gems, heroes will only be able to have meaningful choice between Toolkit spells. This allows encounters to be redesigned with that limitation in mind. In turn, that removes the restriction of needing to allocate AE to all those spells at once, which in turn increases the amount of builds able to function at a higher level.

Ability Gems begin to untangle this cycle.

Okay, but will the Rarity System destroy my ability to be Flexible and adapt on the fly?

• No, you’ll still be able to learn and unlearn skills any time
• In addition, Masteries will allow for even more flexibility inside your kit, and around what you choose to use and when

There were rumors floating around that you would have to prestige, or jump through other hoops, in order to change skills. This is not the case. You will still be able to learn and unlearn skills as normal. The only change will be how many of certain rare spells you can have at once.

This allows encounters to not have to be structured around immunities, which creates space to make mechanics interesting and fun, rather than “quick use Divine Shield to skip this mechanic”.

Heroes and end-game raiders will still have the flexibility to adapt to challenges on the fly, learning and unlearning skills when necessary.

Will there be enough Rare or Uncommon Gems to make wild and crazy cross-class builds?

• The entire function of the Ability Gem system is to move what it means to be ‘classless’ from having a classless toolkit in my smite built, to being able to mix and match any combination of damaging abilities, passive power increased, cooldown spells, and powerful utility  into a single viable build. Ascension is about making your wild build. With these changes, there are even more options for builds you can play.

Will the new updates break current Raid mechanics? 

• The currently available raids beyond Zul’Aman have all been completed with Draft heroes with comparable builds without the flexibility to easily swap abilities on the fly to adapt to situations, so heroes on Area 52 should be able to rise to the occasion! That said, mechanics can definitely change to accommodate the system if necessary.

Will Ability Gems limit diversity?

• Ability gems significantly increased build diversity and ability diversity in realms that have had it. The most notable instance of this was League 3’s Mal’ganis, which had the some of the highest variety ever seen on Ascension with several dozen builds being represented in Ascended level content. With the addition of masteries and many tweaks to ability gems and cost since this, then should only be improved even further.

Right now, Free-Pick isn’t free: some spells like Dispersion and Divine Shield are just super powerful and you have to have them. And since they’re powerful, they have to cost a lot of AE. And since they have to cost a lot of AE, and you have to get them because they’re super powerful, you’re limited in how much AE you have left to spend on your actual build. This encourages builds that can be powerful with the smallest investment: i.e. 1 button smite builds. 

With Ability Gems, because you aren’t required to take every Invulnerability or other toolkit spell you’re able to pick, you are now FREE to choose crazy combinations of damaging abilities, passive power, cooldown spells, and invulnerabilities and include more dynamic options to use in circumstantial situations

This is closer to the spirit of Free-Pick: mixing and matching classes to create your own unique hero. When you think of an archetype like an Arcane Archer, a flame paladin, or a frost lich with shadow dots–those are all archetypes constructed through damaging spells. By limiting the number of toolkit spells you’re able to take, you’re now free to take a wider array of different skills you want.

Of course measures will be taken to encourage cross-class healing and tanking as well. The function of Ability Gems isn’t to limit diversity–it’s literally exactly the opposite.

Plus, if at any point build diversity starts becoming too limited, rarities can be adjusted. This is so much easier than having to create entire new RE’s to open up new builds.

The introduction of Ability Gems is the single biggest shift that Free Pick has ever experienced. This shift will truly open up more diversity, creativity, and theorycrafting potential on Free Pick as well as a HOST of other benefits. Additionally, any problems that it brings to the table will be delt with as Ascension continues to move forward.

With the Ability Gem system, Heroes can expect better parity between core realms and future Seasonal realms. This makes it so much easier to get things like new abilities, updates, and changes to both realms, meaning more consistent and meaningful updates to Area 52. In addition, the system brings big improvements to the game and to your freedom to forge classes right now, including:

• 37 new abilities
  • With many more to come
• Removal of talent essences from talent abilities
  • Opening up more talents for you to customize your Hero
• Masteries 
  • allowing you to learn multiple seals, auras, judgements, totems, and more to open up the flexibility to adapt to any situation on the fly without compromising your build
• Lowered AE cost across the board 
  • Allowing you to learn more abilities total

Not only that, but foundationally, the introduction of Ability Gems sets the foundation for true cross-class and multiclass freedom on Ascension. Moving forward Ascension will continue, beyond all else, to be a place where you can mix and match classes in a meaningful way to forge your ultimate classless Hero.