Skills

It is the skills you use which dictate how you play the game, not those selected during character creation

At its core, Chronicles of Elyria is about experience. We've stripped away class restrictions so that you can tailor your experience to your fantasies, creating almost any character type you can imagine. But, tearing down the walls between classes is just one step in the process, it has to be combined with smooth, immersive action-RPG combat and a broad variety of deep skills for your characters to practice. Only then can you truly explore an evolving online world as the character you've always wanted.

Skill Types

Every character is made up of a combination of skills that span six top-level categories in a skill tree.

Combat: A character's ability to fight. This includes fighting unarmed, with 1-handed and 2-handed weapons, with thrown and ranged weapons, and utilizing additional tactics such as dual wielding and sneak attacks.
Survival: A character's ability to survive in the wilds. This category is about finding food and water, tracking prey, bandaging wounds, and navigating your way through the wilds.
Crafting: A character's ability to produce goods. These can range from consumables such as food and drinks, armors and weapons, furniture, and fine jewelry.
Gathering: A person's ability to gather and process raw materials. This includes skills involving the identification and handling of organic materials such as plant and animal byproducts, as well as inorganic materials such as metals and gems.
Deviant: Those less savory skills that may aid in surviving more urban areas, if you don't mind the steep risk associated with pickpocketing, purse cutting, crafting false identities, and forging documents.
Bardic: The skills of the academic and the performer. Whether it's performing music to embolden allies, reading ancient languages, performing forensic analysis to track down a murder, or creating finely detailed maps, the bardic tree is about information and discovery.

Combat Skills

Combat in Chronicles of Elyria deviates wildly from the typical MMORPG style "Hotbar" combat. Ability cooldowns and rotations are replaced with non-linear combat techniques that combine the precise timing of a fast-flowing action-RPG with the need for strategy and battlefield awareness. True experts of combat in Elyria will need to master the timing and flow of combat, develop an eye for aiming their strikes, and learn the theory of combat to understand which stances and techniques they can use to counter the stances and techniques of their opponents.

Crafting Skills

Virtually every object that can be bought and sold can also be created by skilled tradespeople in the world of Elyria. From simple foods to steel armaments, traps, and even structures such as houses or castles; behind every object in the game is the crafter or crafters that built it from basic resources gathered from the world. Elyria's economy is built with the strong hands and keen eye, not of adventurers and kings, but of its myriad tradesfolk such as masons, blacksmiths, alchemists, bakers, and cooks.

Each of the crafting experiences in Chronicles of Elyria is inspired by its real-world counterpart in order to capture the feeling, and important skills, of that trade. Player skill and knowledge will supplement your character's skill and knowledge each time you step up to the forge, approach the stove, or assemble the arcane tools of alchemy. Each of the crafting arts and their related skills opens the door to a vast collection of recipes and experimentation you can use to develop unique and custom creations of your own devising. The game provides tools for user-generated content that will be valuable to other players. No micro-transaction item store will pop up to undermine the in-game economy.

Survival Skills

Adventure, exploration, war, and the promise of grand rewards; these are the things that lure the young and courageous from the safety of their homes and settlements out into the untamed wilds of Elyria. But the wild lands of the world are dangerous, brimming with deadly creatures, hazards, and weather events that can spell the doom of anyone who ventures out unprepared. Even simply miscalculating how much protection from the hot or cold one needs can mean the difference between life or death.

Chronicles of Elyria offers an unprecedented level of challenge from the environment, with game mechanics specifically designed to make the survival experience dramatic and rewarding. Quickly bind your wounds or treat the venomous bites of wildlife with first aid. Build a campfire and pitch a tent to wait out the freezing rain. Take charcoal and quill to paper and map the route of your travels to share with your fellows or sell to the highest bidder. Learn the lore of the forests, deserts and swamps of Elyria to better identify friends, foes, edible plants and dangerous wildlife. Survival in Elyria is about skill and preparedness. Those who brave the wilds will find no end to adventure and opportunity!

Deviant Skills

The cities of Elyria can be as dangerous as the untamed wilds. While fewer wild animals may roam within the city limits, they harbor monsters of their own: thieves, pickpockets, forgers, and other scoundrels. In Chronicles of Elyria, there are skills and mechanics that allow unsavory behavior. With so many people in one place, there are endless opportunities to fall into criminality with the promise of easy gains.

Those who enjoy the gray areas between good and evil will find avenues of progress in all sorts of criminal activities, from simple theft and disguise making up to complicated forgery and subterfuge. NPCs and players alike can pursue the criminal arts but, beware, there are also game mechanics for upholding laws and doling out punishment if found guilty of a crime. Evidence can be collected to bring a perpetrator to justice - if they are caught!

Bardic Skills

Chronicles of Elyria is a game where information itself is a commodity. Learning is a key game mechanic not limited to combat and crafting. One can learn new techniques, languages, cultures, geography, gossip, clues, entertainment, and other knowledge about the world and its people. There is an economy for this information, so there must be peddlers of such things as well! The Bardic arts are more than telling stories or entertaining in a tavern. It is the category of skills that deal heavily in social interactions, from crime investigation to the performing arts.

Whether you seek to write the next great novel, compile a martial codex documenting the lost techniques of yore, or earn your way as a traveling minstrel, the bardic arts are for you. Skills in the bardic tree literally cover everything from performance and musicianship to scribing, cartography and the study of the stars. Masters of the bardic arts will be the visionaries that bring Elyria into the future.

No Progress Bars, No Auto-attacks, and No Click & Wait Crafting

Every element of Chronicles of Elyria is built to be interactive, incorporating player skill as an element of success. This is no less true for skills, including crafting and combat. Each crafting skill supports the physical process of crafting in a real-time crafting experience that goes far beyond simply clicking "craft" and waiting for a bar to fill. The blade you forge attains its shape because you chose when and where to strike the hammer while the iron was hot.

The same is true of combat, there is no auto-attack command and no bar of combat moves awaiting cool down before they can be used again. A sword strike hits because you chose the right moment to strike. Similarly, dodging or parrying will involve the right timing and technique to avoid the attack.

The era of Clicking & Waiting is over!

Learn a New Skill

There are no automatic level ups in Chronicles of Elyria, no "dings" to automatically grant you your next great combat move or crafting skill. Instead, each character advanced based on a combination of what they learn and what they actually put into practice. In Elyria, simply "being" a fighter or carpenter won't guarantee advancement. Instead you will seek out experts or books to learn from, patterns and techniques to acquire, and then spend time practicing what you've studied in order to improve.

Many will take the traditional route, joining a school or apprenticing to a master of their art to learn skills. Others will travel far and wide in search of practical applications, new techniques to master, or new fighting styles to adopt. No matter which way your characters acquire their skills and knowledge, putting them to work will require your player skill as well. In Chronicles of Elyria, every element of skill use, activation to outcome, uses a combination of character skill and player skill.

Player-Run Trade Guilds & Educational Institutions

While it's possible to increase some skills on your own, it's much easier to do so if you're part of a group! Players can apprentice others in their skills to increase skill gain. On a larger scale, joining a Guild or School can be a great way to maximize your results and join up with like-minded individuals in your region or on your server.

Training at a guild or school can bring many advantages, such as increasing your rate of skill improvement. In addition, if you do research as part of a guild or school, your ability to discover something is based not only on the time you've spent in research, but also the time everyone else in your guild or school has spent in research. This can result in dramatically increased chance of discovery! There is a trade-off, however. If you perform research on an organization's equipment, you're agreeing to share all discoveries you make with the institution.