Project Update - Companion Progression (Patreon)

One of the most requested additions by our Early Access players has been Companion progression for a while now, and it's no surprise. Being a party-based RPG at its heart, Vagrus has a roster of unique Companions that are your most trusty lieutenants with their own backstories, skills, and personalities. It is only natural that they can become stronger with time and effort - and we have naturally planned this progression system from the beginning, we just held off on adding it because there were a lot of specifics to work out and the EA experience worked fairly well without it.

Now, however, the time has come to introduce the progression system to see what our players and fellow vagri think about it.

Prowess and Insight

Character levels (exclusive to Companions) in Vagrus are called Prowess. You unlock new levels of Prowess by spending Insight - the same Insight you can spend on your vagrus. Once you gain a level, you can spend Proficiency points on your Attributes, Professions, Combat Traits... and now the all-new Traits and revised Combat Skills, too. These round out progression with the ability to make your Companions much stronger in combat.

The Prowess cap will be 5 for the time being, as we are still testing higher-end progression, but it is more than enough for a significant rise in power.

Combat Skills

You have seen them already but the Combat Skills now have fully developed second and third (maximum) levels. These levelups potentially change the Damage, Accuracy, Critical Chance, and effects of the Skills, often quite radically. A good example is Garrik's Gas Bomb that covers more and more ground with levelups.

Additionally, several of the Companion Skills were revised to be more desirable in certain situations. A ton of enemy Combat Skills are also now working as intended, but more on that in another post.

Companion Traits

Each Companion now has a set of unique Traits that raise several baseline stats like Vitality, Armor, Resistances, base Accuracy, Power, and more. This is the only way to change these stats apart from Gear, so you will have to think hard what to pick. Especially because most of the Trait levels - as well as Skill levels - have requirements.

Requirements

We've planned to include Attributes (Mighty, Savvy, Tough, etc.) one way or the other in the progression from the beginning but we did not want to assign incremental stat increases to them directly. The way it works now, most Combat Skill levels and all Companion Traits have Attribute requirements before you can purchase them. This means that with each Prowess level, you need to consider what build you are going for, what your desired Trait is, and plan accordingly when it comes to purchasing Attributes.

This also means that no Companion will be able to unlock all their Traits and Skills by reaching Prowess 9, so you'll have to plan builds.

As ever, we are very excited to see how the community reacts to the progression system. We hope that we can build on this system from now on and we'll be able to round out Companions fully in the future based on this. Even now, though, the system's depth is intriguing, and every Companion can focus on certain things ahead of others to specialize according to your needs.

Let us know what you think once the build becomes public!

The Lost Pilgrims Team