Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen July 2018 Newsletter, Healer Class Reveals

Staying true to their earlier promise, the team at Visionary Realms has revealed the three healer classes of their upcoming MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. You can read all about the Cleric, Druid, and Shaman on the game’s website. You can also check out this month’s newsletter that brings us a Q&A with VR’s senior programmer, Jason Weimann, a detailed overview of the game’s Giants, and a behind the scenes look at Pantheon’s ongoing development. Here’s an excerpt from the latter:

HEALERS ARE HERE!

By the time you read this you will have seen the next round of Class reveals showcasing our Healers: the Cleric, the Druid and the Shaman. With 9 out of the 12 Classes more fully revealed, the path to deciding your identity in Pantheon should be taking some much-anticipated shape!

These Healers were a fun and rewarding challenge to design – exactly what it should feel like to play them. And as I mentioned during my interview with BazgrimTV at PAX East – the goal is that each of these Healers will have the tools they need to stand alone as capable healers in both Group and Raid content, but they will do it in very different ways according to their individual “fortes”. We’re hoping for some lively discussions in the community as you pick apart what these Healers are capable of. Just remember that these reveals do not show the complete Class ability arsenal – there are several unique abilities, or more powerful evolutions of the ones listed that you will have to discover for yourself! We’ve been careful to hint at a few of those types of ability evolutions in most of the Class reveals, so keep your Perception skill up as you read…

It’s hard to believe, but next month we will be wrapping up our summer Class reveal schedule with the Wizard, the Enchanter and the Summoner! (We’ll have more info on the Bard and the Necromancer as we get a little further into development).

And I’ll say this: it’s a good time to be a Pre-Alpha tester. Why? Because with PA3 we are not only introducing the Ranger for testing, but we are bringing the Paladin and Dire Lord online for the first time as well. We can’t wait to see our Pre-Alpha testers taking these new Classes on their inaugural run during Pre-Alpha 3!

FROM DRAW-OVERS TO TEST-READY

In last month’s newsletter, many of you saw the in-game images with the red markings all over them. We refer to these as “draw-overs” – these draw-overs guide the finalization of our World Building process.

The process is rather simple: we meet internally to discuss the overall vision for a zone – what NPCs will you encounter here? What are the points of interest? How should this zone feel to the player – what kind of mood? What do we want the player’s experience to be like as they explore this zone? We work through all of these design and philosophical paradigms together.

Then, with all of this in mind our Lead Concept Artist, Jared Pullen, takes a screenshot of an area in the zone and literally draws over it to suggest the placement of everything from trees, rocks, buildings, terrain adjustments and more with an eye on getting the artistic composition right.

We then review the draw-overs, tweak anything that needs to be tweaked and then move right into building. By doing it this way, we ensure that game design and aesthetics are working in harmony with each other to reach a polished end result that fits with the intended gameplay of the area. As you can see with the North Tusk Orcs of Hanggore – the process works very well!