Skills Documentation

A post which I wanted to do quite some time back but never properly had the time to sit down to work on until now. Allow me to present to you….Skills Documentation.

In the same vein as the minions abilities documentation list which GL, which you can check out here, do note that this is a documentation list and subjective opinions here are kept minimal at best. Additionally, this list attempts to sieve out whatever useful information one might need in figuring out certain skills.

But before I start, I would like to shout out to Strafez, who previously had made for the non-gear chest free skills, which he so excellently documented within his videos. Moreover, these videos saved me a lot of time in figuring out the specifics of skills which I did not possess. Do check out his channel here.

Credit also goes to Aqve Teig, who spotted all the mistakes in the initial draft of the document and also helped with some of the experimentation of the skills.

Skills Spreadsheet

Done in a google docs fashion and categorised according to elements, below are the different skills with their associated effects, number of charges, base cooldown time (in seconds), unique traits (for those at T6) and where to obtain them. They also include effect range, which can be found in response to this post.

Through the use of google docs, this list can be updated whenever is necessary. This maintains the database (which I will find somewhere more visible to place it) and provides a complete overview of the necessary information.

For those who wish to view the entire list, do check out the full link here.

Certain short form terminologies used are:

• AoE – Area of Effect, referring to affecting enemies in neighbouring vicinity
• DOT – Damage over Time, refers to receiving constant damage as result of certain skills
• Buff – Temporary enhancement of specific trait(s)
• HP – Hit Points
• HP Shield – An active shield skill that has a fixed amount of HP, soaking up received damage until the limit is received
• Knockback/ Knockdown/ Pushback – Incapitation of enemies by knocking them down onto the floor or back a distance (pushback is the official term)

Furthermore, if you would like to check out where to locate some of these free skills in missions and do not want to rely upon the bounty chest, do check out Raizel’s link for a complete list.

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Base Cooldown

One of the aspects for each skill, which I foresee might incur some controversy, would be the cooldown of each skill.

Referring to how long the skill would take to refresh before the skill can be cast again, cooldown effectively decides how spammable the particular skill is. It is indicated by the red bar that fills up and disappears and/or remains there, showing when the skill can be reused again.

Having a short cooldown time (eg. Avalanche, Flame Eruption) or a skill that can be used while it is being recharged (eg. Ray of Darkness, Cyclone), means that you can constantly use it with little to no down time. On the contrary, AoE or persistent zone skills (eg. Static Burst, Ice Stalagmites) take an extremely long while before they can be used again, making sure they are not so rapidly used to avoid OP characters.

Ray of Darkness is immensely spammable from its ability to be used even during its charging phase

In this list above, base cooldown takes into consideration that there are no additional skill cooldown traits that assist in reducing the cooldown of that specific elemental skill. Timing of the skill was done without these gears (eg. certain armors, weapons) and measured when the red cooldown bar commences. All of these were recorded using the computer clock for greater accuracy.

Hence, if you observe that your cooldown does not exactly match the ones written in the list, do check whether you have any of these skill cooldown reduction gears first. Nonetheless, do let me know if the values are way out from what you have recorded for yourself.

The general trend of skill cooldowns can be observed as such, in descending order:

• AoE & Persistent Zone – 20 secs
• Defensive shields – 15 secs
• Dash (action) – 12 secs
• Projectiles – 8 secs
• Spray – 6 secs
• Ray – charging

As a side note, using another charge of the skill when it is still recharging causes the cooldown bar to pause momentarily until the skill has been performed. This effectively hampers the cooldown time, which might be worth considering otherwise during actual combat.

TL;DR: Cooldown is measured without skill cooldown reduction traits. AoE skills have the longest cooldown while ray skills have the shortest.

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Active Skill Effects

Another topic to be addressed would be active skill effects.

Listed as the ‘effect‘ of the skill, this refers to the active effect triggered against both monsters and the user/allies. While this issue is not prevalent for self-buffs or defensive skills, the problem comes when these active effects are applied directly onto hostile monsters.

When I approached the devs about this previously, they forewarned that putting a numerical percentage for the effect is rather tricky and might be misleading. They explained that this is because certain monsters possess innate resistance towards certain crowd control effects (eg. knockback, stun, fear etc.), they might be more or less susceptible to the listed effects.

To sieve out which monsters affected by which effects however, would be tedious and might not be worthwhile the time and effort in individually experimenting all of the different minions. Fortunately, what we do know is that champion types have the greatest resistance, but are still vulnerable to fear (and reportedly stun as well). However, not all possess the same level of resistance as certain ones get feared more easily than others.

To increase the complexity of the situation, skills themselves have different activation chances of these skill effects. For example, Immortal Justice has an extremely high stun rate compared to the weaker Lightning Blast, resulting in a higher possibility of activation when used in combat.

Yet another layer of ‘icing to the cake‘ would be that passive crowd-control traits from other equipment are also applied to these skills when they are cast. If you have fear chance on your other gears, firing the multi-hit Darkness Spread might result in you inducing fear upon your opponents. This makes a potential strategy as having a specific passive trait of a high value is useful in enhancing your existing skill build setup (eg. HP/Hit build improves Ray of Darkness‘ relatively significant HP/Hit value).

Passive effects, like Bloodrage, work hand-in-hand with skills. In this case, it is triggered by a monster’s death from predatory strike, which further boosts existing skill damage by tenfold.

Last but not least, a critical hit (from either a skill or weapon) might in fact be responsible for knocking-down or staggering a hostile monster. Such was demonstrated in the later stages of SH v1.0, where an experiment against my stronghold resulted in my character getting knockdown-ed by my keeper gear upon a critical hit from his lightning shield’s bolt.

Hence, do let me know if I’ve not captured any of these skill effects within the list in the comments below. I’ll update them when I find the time to. 🙂

TL;DR: Active skill crowd control effects have different activation rates and are also affected by the monster’s innate resistance. Fortunately, these effects can also be enhanced or added by existing passive traits.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are some of the frequently asked skill-related questions:

Q: Any useful and/or interesting observations from the list?

A: Yep definitely.

• Avalanche boosts itself from having Skill damage bonus
• Master Kick and Burning Phantasm are the only skills which boost attack speed
• Earthen Wrath is the only skill with HP/Hit at T6 with the only unique skill with variable skill effects
• AoE skills take way too long to cooldown, followed by defensive shield skills
• By elemental skill active/passive traits:
  • Fire – Burn, Crit Hit Chance/Damage
  • Water – Slow, Dodge
  • Dark – Fear, Crit Hit Chance, Damage to Attacker
  • Light – Stun, Dodge, HP bonus
  • Nature – Slow, HP bonus

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Q: How do I get event-specific skills now?

A: Unfortunately, event-specific skills (eg. Snowball and Master Kick) were only available during their respective events themselves, Xmas and EuroCup respectively. Hence, it is necessary to wait till the event happens again to obtain them.

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Q: Why is my casting animation reduced?

A: This has been observed between Android and iOS devices where certain key heavier casting animation scenes have been cut out (eg. Entangling Vines, Nightmare Burst). Although this does not affect the overall damage being dealt, it does not show the skill in its full glory.

This was reported some time back to the devs about the animation and is most likely a porting issues, since the game was made for iOS. Hopefully, they’ll get down to fixing it.

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Q: Is skill cooldown affected by tier?

A: While I don’t have a guaranteed answer for this, asking my friends and doing some self-experimentation does not yield to any positive results to that query. In short, no, evolving skills does not reduce cooldown, only skill cooldown trait is able to do it.

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Q: Why are certain skills (eg. Ice Burst, Fire Cone) extremely rare now?

A: I don’t have any official answer to this, but if I were to speculate, these skills at T6 are making certain combat challenges much easier. Thus, the drop rates on chest pulls were reduced to ensure that they are much less obtainable.

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Q: In your Seashore post, you mentioned that a new trident lands every 12 seconds from the destruction of the first one. However, my ice stalagmites seems to be in-sync with that timing even though you wrote 20 seconds. How is that possible?

A: This could be due to multiple reasons:
(a) Skill cooldown from gear reduces the skill itself to about 17 seconds
(b) There is a 1-2 secs delay between when the trident lands till silence activates
(c) The cooldown for Ice Stalagmites starts as soon as you cast it, hence, there is some additional time from when the first trident gets destroyed and the next one lands.

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Q: When are the free skills going to be evolve-able to T6?

A: This, I am unsure of the answer and I guess only the devs know of how to reply to this question.

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Q: Are there going to be another Legendary Skill type besides belts?

A: Again, no official answer from my side. However, if I were to make a guess, another legendary skill type might be due as there has been an increase in level cap and thus, an increase in weight cap. This means that a character at level 130 can carry up to 4 legendary items, opening up the possibility of using another skill item.

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Hopefully, this answered your queries and would help you in selecting the right skill for you.