Greetings and Salutations, friends! We're back this week with some brand new Ward techniques. Ward's earth elemental techniques are now completed. Their highly defensive earth techniques allow you to change the tides of battle, protecting you and your allies from the potential bullet hell that is "Wards".

Earth

Earth Wall
Create a protective wall of Earth in front of the caster. The wall can be destroyed with sufficient forces. If the wall is created underneath or near a unit, that unit will be displaced up and out of the wall. You can spawn the wall in any direction on yourself by pressing the Self Cast key (Alt).



Earth Dome Prison
Create a barrier of earth around a designated area. The dome blocks outside forces.


Siphoning Mud Trap
Creates an area of mud that deals damage over time. The zone will apply several stacks of slow (up to 70%) over time.


Stone Golem
Creates an allied unit to fight for you. Very slow, pretty durable and hits like a truck.


There's a couple polish that needs to happen. As you can see the player doesn't play any animations yet when using the abilities.

Wards

Wards have a total of 17 Abilities.
4 Neutral Techniques
4 Fire Techniques
4 Lightning Techniques
4 Earth Techniques
and Body Flicker
Each ability is unique in their own right. Not just in how they deal damage, but in how they're deployed, the way some behave on hit, and of course some very cool crowd control.

Body Flicker is tied to your right mouse click button as an access at all times ability, enabling Wards to efficiently kite their opponents while still being able to send a flurry of techniques their way.

As Wards continue to be polished and balanced, bare in mind they are what we've always made them out to be: Mages. They are the spell casters of the LoF universe and a lot of what we do to them will revolve around that.

Next Step

So what next? With the class's abilities implemented, it's time to move on to Rogues. As unique as Wards are, we want Rogues to receive just as good a treatment, and really make their gameplay stand out as what they're meant to be. However what they're meant to be isn't truly set in stone yet, but it will be. While we will be working on Rogues this week, there's still some polish that Wards will be going through to help ensure smoother gameplay, comfort, balance, as well as a lot of efficiency changes to make sure the server can really handle all that spam. We also have to go back and make sure all spell animations are playing, chakra is being consumed, and add cooldowns to abilities. If all goes well, you can expect to see some PvP gameplay next week showing off Wards using their elemental powers against each other.

That's all for this week! Feel free to ask questions, share thoughts, suggestions, ideas, what have you!