After another month of ValhallaMMO being developed here's another update, the first update introducing combat skills. This update introduces a lot of features and tools to make your server more excited, mainly focused around damage and countering it.

NEW Skill: Archery
Archery is focused on increasing your damage output and accuracy over long distances. Its skill tree allows you to spec into stats to decrease ammo consumption, increase critical strike chance and damage, increase accuracy, and increase damage the longer the distance is between you and the target. Archery also adds completely custom arrows which you unlock by leveling archery, each with their own crafting recipes. You can now craft Wooden Arrows, Diamond Arrows, Ender Arrows, etc. and a number of recipe modifiers have been added to allow you to make your own custom arrow types if you wanted to. Players gain more experience the further the targets they shoot are. I also nerfed infinity bows to do less damage and reward less exp, so it's more rewarding to craft and use your own arrows. Crossbows are also made stronger, because people don't really use them right now.

NEW Skills: Light & Heavy Armor
These are two separate skills, each focussing on different armor types. The entire damage system has been overhauled to make this work properly, so you now have lots of control over how much damage everyone should take. Both armor types now slow you down a bit while wearing, but this can be reduced or mitigated entirely by investing in their skill trees. Light armor, of course, slows you less than heavy armor, but heavy armor provides you additional damage resistances as well as knockback resistance. By investing in their skill trees you can get stats like decreased hunger consumption, increased reflect chance & damage, special damage or potion effect resistances, and various other stats whenever you're wearing a full set. Both stats also come with two passive special abilities: Rage and Adrenaline for Heavy & Light Armor respectively, which each give the player a number of potion effects whenever their health reaches a certain percentage threshold. Players gain experience for these skills while taking damage while wearing armor, and the longer they spend in combat (experience is awarded after combat ends).

NEW Party System
A party system has been implemented! You can now create parties (as long as you have the valhalla.createparty permission) and invite people to said parties. The party system includes an EXP Sharing mechanic, sharing your experience gained to party members in the vacinity, as well as various roles and permissions and a party chat system. You can also share held items to another party member (on a cooldown).
Of course, as server owner you get to decide which features parties should and shouldn't have by default, this system also comes with plenty of commands you can use to unlock said features your own way.
This feature is very new, and I can't realistically test everything on short notice. If you find any bugs, let me know and I'll fix them. If you find any severe bugs, still let me know but also disable parties through config.yml until the issue is fixed.

FEATURE the "Power" skill has been expanded to allow players to have various stats by default. Through this, and its new perk rewards, you can give players additional base HP, armor, attack damage, movement speed, knockback resistance, etc. This is not implemented as perks by default, but you can use it to implement your own rewards should you feel like it.

FEATURE implemented MySQL database compatibility. If you previously used the plugin before and now want to switch to MySQL storage you can do that without losing progress also.

TWEAK the default introduction book has been expanded a bit to hopefully be more clear in how to use the plugin.

TWEAK added recipe selection notification for when a player uses the custom crafting GUI to select a recipe, as well as a first-time message describing how to use the custom crafting.

TWEAK the CustomDataModel of each button in the skill tree is now modifiable.

BALANCE "Power" skill has been nerfed a bit to require more experience to level up early game because early game leveling was a bit too rapid. The total amount of experience to reach the same level is still the same.

FIXED vein miner and ultra harvest using the same cooldown key, so if vein miner was on cooldown so was ultra harvest and vice versa.

FIXED blast mining not destroying any blocks if the custom blast mining loot table was empty.

OTHER implemented bStats, so i can now see what you guys are doing just kidding, it's all anonymous, but if you still want it disabled you can do so through config.yml

Again, thanks a lot for using the plugin in its early stages. The end of alpha is in sight, I just need to make a couple more skills and add a couple more features, but the vast majority of mechanics are already implemented.
If you find any issues or have any suggestions/questions, please let me know and I'd love to help out. A review would also be greatly appreciated