Attributes

Character attributes describe a character's capabilities, such as attack power, movement speed, health capacity, attack speed, etc. Attributes are grouped together into higher attributes, e.g. physical and magical damage resilience are grouped into toughness. Higher attributes are also grouped together again and again, and all attributes are unified in the root attribute.

The attributes are grouped as follows (these all make up the root attribute (1.25/3 ~ 0.416)):

• Physique (1.25/3 ~ 0.416): bodily foundation for all physical activity.
  • Vitality (1.25/2 ~ 0.625): bodily regeneration
    • Health regeneration: natural healing speed.
    • Mass: how much pure damage points you can take, how much you weigh (resistance against push-back). Mass increases stamina consumption of movements, reduces carry capacity.
  • Toughness (1.25/2 = 0.625): general resilience of the body against attacks.
    • Physical damage resilience: damage/effect reduction of all physical harm.
    • Magical damage resilience: damage/effect reduction of all magical harm.
  • Muscle (1.25/3 ~ 0.416):
    • Stamina regeneration: recovery speed from physical exhaustion.
    • Stamina capacity: character's stamina reserve size (hard cap).
    • Strength: how much stamina can be exerted at once, also the maximum force that can be exerted (hard cap). Together, strength and stamina regeneration provide a hard cap on how much equipment a character can carry: strength limits the maximum possible weight, and stamina regeneration limits the maximum carried weight that does not drain any stamina to maintain.
• Magic (1.25/2 = 0.625): all magical attributes.
  • Magic constitution (1.25/3 ~ 0.416): bodily foundation for spellcraft.
    • Magic regeneration: how quickly magic power regenerates.
    • Magic capacity: how much magic power the caster can store passively (hard cap).
    • Magic pathways: how quickly magic power can be absorbed or emitted (hard cap).
  • Spellcraft (1.25/3 ~ 0.416): aptitude/skill in casting spells.
    • Spell control: accuracy and success rate of spells containing a certain amount of magic power.
    • Mana efficiency: reduction of mana dissipation (while constructing/maintaining a spell).
    • Cast speed: spell stability and success at a given cast rate (limited by pathways and spell power).
• Agility (1.25/3 ~ 0.416): skill in physical activity.
  • Speed (1.25/2 = 0.625): speed of bodily movements.
    • Attack speed: maximum speed of physical attacks and physical skills (hard cap).
    • Movement speed: maximum walking speed (hard cap). Effective movement speed is also hard-capped by strength and mass.
  • Dexterity (1.25/2 = 0.625): bodily control and accuracy of movement.
    • Attack accuracy: likelihood of successful attacks.
    • Craftsmanship: the ability to perform detailed work.
  • Reflexes (1.25/2 = 0.625): reactions to attacks etc.
    • Evasion
    • Parrying

Attribute points

Attribute points are gained by leveling up, and can be spent on an attribute to improve it. If an attribute point is spent on a higher attribute, all its sub-attributes receive points equally. However, spending a point on a higher attribute will give less points per sub-attribute than investing in a sub-attribute directly, but the overall number of points gained is higher by 25%. It follows that each sub-attribute gains 1.25/n points, where n is the number of sub-attributes in a higher attribute. This means that improving higher attributes is more efficient than improving their lower attributes individually. However, while having less overall attribute points, a specialised build will gain maximum stat points faster than a generic build.

If a higher attribute has 3 sub-attributes, then selecting 2 attributes will gain 1 point in each instead of 0.833 each, and is thus 20% more efficient, if only those 2 attributes are regarded. For 1 out of 3 attributes, the effect is even greater: 1 point instead of 0.416 points, which is 140% more effective. Thus, a highly specialised build can achieve more than twice the points in a single attribute than a more generic build. As attributes are nested more than once, this effect is even more exaggerated.

Skilling physique will gain 0.416 in each of its sub-attributes, resulting in 0.26 in each of vitality's and toughness' sub-attributes, and 0.13 for all muscle sub-attributes. This would make for an up to 6.68-fold efficiency gain in stat growth for a build focusing on only a single sub-attribute of muscle. It is thus possible to build extremely unbalanced characters that can have overwhelming strengths at the cost of fatal weaknesses. A strength-only build would have 7.68 times the attack power of a balanced build, but little health and defenses.

Compared to that, an all-rounder build only skilling the root attribute would only have 0.416 times the attributes of a physique-only build, resulting in 0.05425 muscle sub-attributes and 0.1085 vitality and toughness sub-attributes. That would be 8.216 times less efficient for single-attribute builds of vitality or toughness sub-attributes, and 17.432 times less efficient for a muscle single-sub-attribute build.

With this, there is a huge range of choices when building a character. Characters suited to very specific roles can be built, and while extremely powerful characters can be made using unbalanced attribute distributions, the more unbalanced they are, the more it is necessary to play as a party to make up for weaknesses.

Affinities

Depending on the character's race/species (and potentially some randomness decided upon character creation), a character has differing affinity with different attributes. A character's attribute affinity decides how effective one attribute point spent in an attribute is. For example, for a purely physically-oriented race, magical affinity would be low or 0, which would severely limit the use of spending attribute points on magic-related attributes. This (dis-)incentivises certain builds for certain characters, making them more predictable based on their race, although well-balanced races can still exhibit a wide range of builds.