Allods Online has a unique specialization system. By specialization or spec I mean the customization of your character’s abilities. Spec in this game is based into stats and talents. Talents are split into abilities and rubies.
Stats
There are 14 stats in this game total
Allods Online gives you a decent idea of what stats you should invest in. This is the stat placement for a tank. As you can see stamina, a valued stat by tanks in all other games is not highly valued in this game. Keep in mind end game tanks are still stamina stacking. These trees merely tell you what you are going to need to maximize your damage per second. Every level you are going to gain a certain number of stats with the ability to place another talent yourself. When you neglect some talents those ones will actually go down. Of course most stats that go down you won’t care about anyway.
Strength
Strength much like in other games increases your physical damage. Unlike in most games however there are no pure physical damage dealers in this guild so strength ends up being a very poor stat for damage dealing optimization until you can cap out other stats.
Finesse
In World of Warcraft this stat is called armor penetration. This is a percentage based increase for physical damage dealing. It will scale up your damage more for the higher their armor type is. This stat is going to be very poor at early levels but as you get higher in level is going to be extremely valuable. If you however over the tool tip it will tell you how much armor penetration you will be gaining based on every point you put in.
Expertise
In World of Warcraft this stat is called hit rating. This stat increases your chance to hit with attacks. This is the most important stat you will have at end game and for leveling. This is a very cheap and effective stat to gain. Getting hit capped is very easy and can be done almost entirely from leveling stats. Similar to finesse it s going to tell you how much more hit rating you need to cap.
Agility
This stat will increase your chance to dodge. This is entirely a tanking stat based around avoidance. Because avoidance is generally a bad thing in these sorts of games it is not exactly a stat you are going to want to stack. It is something that if you get on gear it is fine but otherwise ignore it in any gearing decisions.
Luck
This stat increases your chance to get critical strikes and and decreasing your chance to receive a glancing blow. Critical strikes are player based. Glancing blows are are non-player based critical strikes. A critical strike in this game is triple damage so this is going to look very attractive. However critical strike does not go up as fast as any other stats and is entirely based on *cough* getting lucky. For this reason this stat is not something you’ll want to invest in for nearly any spec.
Endurance
This is the primary tanking stat. In World of Warcraft this stat is called defense and resilience. This stat decreases your chance to receive critical strikes and decreases your chance to receive glancing blows. This means for a tank this is going to be a stat you are going to want to invest a tone of stats into until it is capped. Nothing like pulling a trash pack and watching your tank get one-shot because he got destroyed by 3 mobs right?
Stamina
This stat simply increases your health, only really worth it for a tank. Other classes need little bits of it to survive area of effect spells but nothing severe.
Intelligence
This spell increases your spell damage. This is going to be the second most important stat for a caster. Every point of intelligence is going to give you one point of damage on your spells.
Perception
This stat increases your chance to hit with spells. This acts as the caster version of expertise. You start off with something lude like 30% chance to miss with spells and as you invest points it goes down fast. This like expertise is a very easy stat to cap out and is well worth the investment. It is the cheapest and easiest way to get high DPS.
Conviction
This stat is unique and does not appear in any other game. For this reason it’s value is hard to determine. Conviction increases the duration of crowd control effects and reduces resistance of them. This stat sounds extremely overpowered in a player-vs-player scenarion, imagine something like a 20-second sheep.
Willpower
This is the stat that opposes Conviction. Just like conviction it is rather unique and it is impossible to determine it’s value. Willpower decreases your chance to be crowd controlled and decreases the length of crowd control effects. Once again it’s impossible to determine how valuable this stat is going to be. It will all depend on whether people with crowd control are investing into conviction. At that point you get it entirely for a crowd control arms race scenario.
Rage
This stat increases the ‘wound complexity’ of your attacks. Think of rage like everyone having mortal strike. Wound complexity makes it so that you are less likely to be healed for full amounts. This is entirely a PvP stat but is a must for any damage dealers.
Faith
This stat opposes rage. This stat allows for your heals to ignore ‘wound complexity’ aka rage. This is essentially another arms race type stat where you get it if everyone else is getting rage. If people are generally not stacking rage then this stat gets wasted.
Wisdom
This is the mana regen stat in the game. It also increases the points of mana you have. This becomes the ultimate healer stat. DPS do not generally touch this stat as they can just regen their mana in other ways.
Talents
Your talents are also very different in this game. As you level you get one talent point. Your talent tree will look something like this:
Pretty basic talent tree
Each talent is going to start off costing 1 talent point. If you want to optimize this talent further you will be required to invest multiple talent points into it. Your talents do not transform abilities you purchase in game like most MMORPGs. Instead your talents are your abilities and by optimizing them you are buying the ranks of them.
Each rank moves up ever so slightly. As an example a spell may go up by 100 damage but increases in casting time by 0.5 seconds. So in this you are gaining higher DPS but because of te increase in cast time only a little bit. Others may slightly increase the resource you gain from the spell.
Not all talents are necessary and you generally talent towards whatever you want to do. If you are a healer you only want healing talents, tanks tanking talents and DPS damaging talents. My favorite by far is a dot increases only the duration of the dot so you apply it less, not the actual damage component.
Rubies
Rubies are another unique talent system in the game. This is what you would call a specialization tree in any other MMORPG. Rubies cost more and more gold per ruby you buy so it is possible to get every single ruby slot filled. The first one costs 1 gold, second 5 gold and continues to scale up. Ruby slots are actually going to modify the moves.
The ruby slots come in the form of a talent grid. You need to have a talent adjacent to the one you want. So when you’re looking at investing in here you are going to look to what general path you want your character to take.
There are three paths total you can start at, based around your three starter moves. Each is a separate grid that will require you to move deeper and deeper into. Each has it’s own benefits that sometimes but not always focus around that one move.
Remind anyone of Final Fantasy XI?
Make sure you put a lot of thought into where you invest points because re-speccing takes time and money. The fast way was to spend money, the hard way is to collect the proper tokens.
