Issue 21 Special Update - New Incarnate Abilities
by Jeff "Arbiter Hawk" Hamilton
Greetings, citizens of Paragon City, the Rogue Isles, and Praetoria!
My name is Jeff "Arbiter Hawk" Hamilton, and I've been working on City of Heroes for about a year and a half now. I first heard of City of Heroes back in February of 2004 - I was an avid MMO gamer, and a lot of what CoH promised got its hooks into me in a way no other game has since. The open-ended character creation, the immersive world with tales from all genres of comics and fiction, and especially the in-depth powers system all came together to inspire me to create 40+ characters across a number of servers. I still remember vividly how shocked I was when I did a cape mission at level 30 on one character and got my first hint of what Omega Level Clearance would later reveal, my first unraveling of the Terra Conspiracy, and my glee at discovering the existence of the original Praetorian story arcs.
You can imagine how thrilled I was to be given the opportunity to work on that very same game! I joined the CoH team as a QA tester and spent the majority of my time testing the Incarnate system and content, and then moved up to the Powers design team in time to help with I20: Incarnates Ascend and beyond. Black Scorpion and I did the Lore pets expansion for Issue 20, which vastly increased the number of character concepts that could fit with the Lore slot, which brings us to my topic for today's article: expanding the Alpha, Interface, Destiny, and Judgement slots of the Incarnate system with Issue 21 Special Update: Media Blitz!
New powers available in the Alpha, Interface, Judgement, and Destiny trees help complement the Lore pets added in the update to Issue 20.
Balance
The biggest challenge in making new abilities in the existing Incarnate slots is that they have to be desirable in order to be worth creating, but they can't completely supplant the existing abilities. If they were numerically superior to the original powers in the slot, we'd just be shoehorning players into taking the new powers, when our true objective is to increase the number of choices a player can make in building their character.
Judgement
Judgement powers are probably the flashiest powers in the Incarnate system. They are exciting to use, but also a lot of fun to make. I wanted to make a Judgement power which Natural-origin characters would feel comfortable using, and I wanted to make sure it was cool and unique. Judgement powers are very resource-intensive to make, since they require unique FX and animations, so we had to make sure that the one power we made would appeal to the widest swath of players possible.
The radial tree of Vorpal Judgement provides the user with a significant but short-term defense boost, which makes it an attractive choice if your character has been building defense but isn't yet at the soft-cap, or if you've started to be hit by defense debuffs and want to avoid cascade failure. The core tree provides a significant DoT on top of the power's base damage, and has the bonus of being a second damage type, so will still remain effective against enemies with high Smashing resistance.
This power is also a self-targeted cone, which is a new type of ability targeting that we're starting to work into powers. What this means is that you can use the power any time you want, regardless of whether or not you have a target, and it will hit any enemy in the cone area projected in front of your character. This requires additional attention on the part of the player, since they need to aim their character at the desired target, but it pays off by enabling attentive players to target their cone much more accurately than they could do with a traditional cone. I like to think of it as a "skillshot" - something which encourages active participation in the game and rewards the player for their positional awareness by increasing the effectiveness of their powers relative to powers which don't require that same awareness.
A large group of IDF Rangers get simultaneously kicked in the face with Vorpal Judgement.
Destiny
Incandescence Destiny was the most difficult power to design for this slot expansion. The original Destiny powers are both very powerful and exhaustive in terms of what buffs they bring to the table, so we had to come up with something completely out-of-the-box in order to make it attractive to players who already have other Destiny powers while still making it a unique tool in the player's toolkit. This ability was inspired by the notion of "Cosmic Power" - something luminous that would catch your eye if you saw someone using it anywhere nearby.
From a gameplay standpoint, I thought that providing players with an Assemble-the-team type function even when temporary powers are disabled (such as in Incarnate Trials) would certainly broaden the players' toolkits without being seen as completely necessary.
Obviously, the ability to teleport 23 of your friends into one spot can be powerful for moving them out of giant laser beams from spaaaace, but it also opened up the doors to griefing. In order to counter this, we did two things with this power: we made it obey your "Prompt Team Teleport" options setting so that you can decline Incandescences from players likely to put you in the wrong spot, and we added a pulsing sphere of knockback and disorient to the teleport location, which keeps characters safe for several seconds after their arrival.
In keeping with the cosmic power theme, Incandescence also boosts the healing received by all players affected by a significant amount, reflecting those moments in comic narratives where a character or team's inner light burns particularly bright, allowing them to perform feats beyond their normal capabilities. I'm very curious to see how player strategies for encounters evolve over time to use this ability as damage mitigation and utility.
Preparing to teleport using the Incandescence destiny ability.
Creating a safe zone of pulsing light around the location for the teleport of their League allies. This zone stuns and knocks back nearby enemies for a short time.
Interface
As with Destiny and buffs, the original Interface powers covered such a broad suite of debuffs that there was not much left to fill in. One thing was clear from the original Interface slots - CoH players love seeing numbers appear over the heads of their enemies, making them want to play the game. All of the new Interface powers add a type of damage to the player's powers - you can choose between Energy, Negative Energy, Psionic, and Toxic. The amount of Psionic and Toxic damage is 80% that of the Energy, Negative, or Fire damage choices available, but they have the advantage of being able to reliably deal damage against enemies using tier-9 defensive powers.
Two of the new interface abilities, Cognitive and Spectral, experiment with swingier, more binary procs - status effects. While they have a much lower chance to take effect than traditional interface procs, when they do go off they will have more of a tide-turning factor in minute to minute combat. Consider a Blaster or a Dominator soloing a large group of enemies with powerful melee attacks - let's use Freakshow as the example. Where Reactive Interface would debuff the resistance of a group hit by Power Torrent, if Spectral procs twice in the group, that's two fewer enemies hitting the player with their high damage lethal powers. If Cognitive procs, those enemies have a decent chance of wasting those melee attacks against their own comrades!
An unfortunate member of the IDF is immobilized by Spectral Interface outside of TPN Campus.
This Super Strength brute drains the Endurance of his target with Preemptive Interface.
The Degenerative Interface adds a Toxic DoT to every attack.
The IDF Ranger is confused by Cognitive Interface.
Alpha
Alpha Incarnate powers are the most accessible to the greatest number of players, and have probably the biggest effect on our overall build meta-game of any of the Incarnate slots. With the new Alpha trees, I had two goals in mind: provide new boosts for archetypes and powersets which are viewed as underdogs, and provide players with a number of new tools to play with when building their characters. I've seen a lot of posts on the beta feedback forums of people saying "I want to take this ability, but not these other three!" - but the abilities named change in almost every post. This, to me, signals that we succeeded with the Alpha tree expansion.
Vigor Boost is aimed not only at ATs with Support powersets, but also at ATs with significant self-healing in some of their powersets. Empathy, Thermal, Fiery Aura, Electric Armor, and Regeneration will probably get the most out of the Core branch, while the Radial branch supplements the crowd control aspects often present-but-not-enhanced in the Melee, Blast, and Control powersets that complement these powersets.
Agility Boost provides the powerful combination Defense and Recharge within the same tree, and provides a DPS increase in the form of increased Endurance Modification. The radial branch provides a further DPS increase for any encounter which requires movement, by boosting the effect of all of your move speed increases like Swift, Hurdle, and Sprint.
Intuition Boost is designed for characters who support and control and want to do so from long-range. Boosting Holds, Defense Debuffs, Snares, and ToHit Debuffs in one tree while also increasing your damage and range is meant to be useful to many of the possible control/support types in CoH. There is a catch though - it's not meant to be equally useful to all of them, because we don't want to make one option available that's the only good choice. If a single tree boosted Hold, Immobilize, and Stun, for instance, it would become the Alpha of choice for any Controller or Dominator looking to augment their Primary powerset. We want to avoid any given tree being a no-brainer choice, and instead provide you with interesting abilities to weigh against each other for each build you make.
Last but not least, Resilient Boost offers boosts for those who wish to grab agro and survive it. Whether you're a Tanker who wants extra taunt slotted in every attack or you're a Mastermind who wishes your soft capped Bots/Traps wouldn't get hit as hard when it uses Confront and a lucky shot punches through your defense, this slot offers enhancement to many common powersets who like to hold aggro. It's also a viable choice for resistance-heavy support sets, or for control-heavy builds.
Well, that's a wrap! I hope that you continue to have fun with new Incarnate powers and trials, and that they empower you to do things with your character that would have been impossible before your fateful rendezvous with Mender Ramiel. I look forward to seeing new builds and strategies coming out of the community with these new additions to your powers!
Issue 21 Special Update - New Incarnate Abilities
by Jeff "Arbiter Hawk" Hamilton
Greetings, citizens of Paragon City, the Rogue Isles, and Praetoria!
My name is Jeff "Arbiter Hawk" Hamilton, and I've been working on City of Heroes for about a year and a half now. I first heard of City of Heroes back in February of 2004 - I was an avid MMO gamer, and a lot of what CoH promised got its hooks into me in a way no other game has since. The open-ended character creation, the immersive world with tales from all genres of comics and fiction, and especially the in-depth powers system all came together to inspire me to create 40+ characters across a number of servers. I still remember vividly how shocked I was when I did a cape mission at level 30 on one character and got my first hint of what Omega Level Clearance would later reveal, my first unraveling of the Terra Conspiracy, and my glee at discovering the existence of the original Praetorian story arcs.
You can imagine how thrilled I was to be given the opportunity to work on that very same game! I joined the CoH team as a QA tester and spent the majority of my time testing the Incarnate system and content, and then moved up to the Powers design team in time to help with I20: Incarnates Ascend and beyond. Black Scorpion and I did the Lore pets expansion for Issue 20, which vastly increased the number of character concepts that could fit with the Lore slot, which brings us to my topic for today's article: expanding the Alpha, Interface, Destiny, and Judgement slots of the Incarnate system with Issue 21 Special Update: Media Blitz!
New powers available in the Alpha, Interface, Judgement, and Destiny trees help complement the Lore pets added in the update to Issue 20.
Balance
The biggest challenge in making new abilities in the existing Incarnate slots is that they have to be desirable in order to be worth creating, but they can't completely supplant the existing abilities. If they were numerically superior to the original powers in the slot, we'd just be shoehorning players into taking the new powers, when our true objective is to increase the number of choices a player can make in building their character.
Judgement
Judgement powers are probably the flashiest powers in the Incarnate system. They are exciting to use, but also a lot of fun to make. I wanted to make a Judgement power which Natural-origin characters would feel comfortable using, and I wanted to make sure it was cool and unique. Judgement powers are very resource-intensive to make, since they require unique FX and animations, so we had to make sure that the one power we made would appeal to the widest swath of players possible.
The radial tree of Vorpal Judgement provides the user with a significant but short-term defense boost, which makes it an attractive choice if your character has been building defense but isn't yet at the soft-cap, or if you've started to be hit by defense debuffs and want to avoid cascade failure. The core tree provides a significant DoT on top of the power's base damage, and has the bonus of being a second damage type, so will still remain effective against enemies with high Smashing resistance.
This power is also a self-targeted cone, which is a new type of ability targeting that we're starting to work into powers. What this means is that you can use the power any time you want, regardless of whether or not you have a target, and it will hit any enemy in the cone area projected in front of your character. This requires additional attention on the part of the player, since they need to aim their character at the desired target, but it pays off by enabling attentive players to target their cone much more accurately than they could do with a traditional cone. I like to think of it as a "skillshot" - something which encourages active participation in the game and rewards the player for their positional awareness by increasing the effectiveness of their powers relative to powers which don't require that same awareness.
A large group of IDF Rangers get simultaneously kicked in the face with Vorpal Judgement.
Destiny
Incandescence Destiny was the most difficult power to design for this slot expansion. The original Destiny powers are both very powerful and exhaustive in terms of what buffs they bring to the table, so we had to come up with something completely out-of-the-box in order to make it attractive to players who already have other Destiny powers while still making it a unique tool in the player's toolkit. This ability was inspired by the notion of "Cosmic Power" - something luminous that would catch your eye if you saw someone using it anywhere nearby.
From a gameplay standpoint, I thought that providing players with an Assemble-the-team type function even when temporary powers are disabled (such as in Incarnate Trials) would certainly broaden the players' toolkits without being seen as completely necessary.
Obviously, the ability to teleport 23 of your friends into one spot can be powerful for moving them out of giant laser beams from spaaaace, but it also opened up the doors to griefing. In order to counter this, we did two things with this power: we made it obey your "Prompt Team Teleport" options setting so that you can decline Incandescences from players likely to put you in the wrong spot, and we added a pulsing sphere of knockback and disorient to the teleport location, which keeps characters safe for several seconds after their arrival.
In keeping with the cosmic power theme, Incandescence also boosts the healing received by all players affected by a significant amount, reflecting those moments in comic narratives where a character or team's inner light burns particularly bright, allowing them to perform feats beyond their normal capabilities. I'm very curious to see how player strategies for encounters evolve over time to use this ability as damage mitigation and utility.
Preparing to teleport using the Incandescence destiny ability.
Creating a safe zone of pulsing light around the location for the teleport of their League allies. This zone stuns and knocks back nearby enemies for a short time.
Interface
As with Destiny and buffs, the original Interface powers covered such a broad suite of debuffs that there was not much left to fill in. One thing was clear from the original Interface slots - CoH players love seeing numbers appear over the heads of their enemies, making them want to play the game. All of the new Interface powers add a type of damage to the player's powers - you can choose between Energy, Negative Energy, Psionic, and Toxic. The amount of Psionic and Toxic damage is 80% that of the Energy, Negative, or Fire damage choices available, but they have the advantage of being able to reliably deal damage against enemies using tier-9 defensive powers.
Two of the new interface abilities, Cognitive and Spectral, experiment with swingier, more binary procs - status effects. While they have a much lower chance to take effect than traditional interface procs, when they do go off they will have more of a tide-turning factor in minute to minute combat. Consider a Blaster or a Dominator soloing a large group of enemies with powerful melee attacks - let's use Freakshow as the example. Where Reactive Interface would debuff the resistance of a group hit by Power Torrent, if Spectral procs twice in the group, that's two fewer enemies hitting the player with their high damage lethal powers. If Cognitive procs, those enemies have a decent chance of wasting those melee attacks against their own comrades!
An unfortunate member of the IDF is immobilized by Spectral Interface outside of TPN Campus.
This Super Strength brute drains the Endurance of his target with Preemptive Interface.
The Degenerative Interface adds a Toxic DoT to every attack.
The IDF Ranger is confused by Cognitive Interface.
Alpha
Alpha Incarnate powers are the most accessible to the greatest number of players, and have probably the biggest effect on our overall build meta-game of any of the Incarnate slots. With the new Alpha trees, I had two goals in mind: provide new boosts for archetypes and powersets which are viewed as underdogs, and provide players with a number of new tools to play with when building their characters. I've seen a lot of posts on the beta feedback forums of people saying "I want to take this ability, but not these other three!" - but the abilities named change in almost every post. This, to me, signals that we succeeded with the Alpha tree expansion.
Vigor Boost is aimed not only at ATs with Support powersets, but also at ATs with significant self-healing in some of their powersets. Empathy, Thermal, Fiery Aura, Electric Armor, and Regeneration will probably get the most out of the Core branch, while the Radial branch supplements the crowd control aspects often present-but-not-enhanced in the Melee, Blast, and Control powersets that complement these powersets.
Agility Boost provides the powerful combination Defense and Recharge within the same tree, and provides a DPS increase in the form of increased Endurance Modification. The radial branch provides a further DPS increase for any encounter which requires movement, by boosting the effect of all of your move speed increases like Swift, Hurdle, and Sprint.
Intuition Boost is designed for characters who support and control and want to do so from long-range. Boosting Holds, Defense Debuffs, Snares, and ToHit Debuffs in one tree while also increasing your damage and range is meant to be useful to many of the possible control/support types in CoH. There is a catch though - it's not meant to be equally useful to all of them, because we don't want to make one option available that's the only good choice. If a single tree boosted Hold, Immobilize, and Stun, for instance, it would become the Alpha of choice for any Controller or Dominator looking to augment their Primary powerset. We want to avoid any given tree being a no-brainer choice, and instead provide you with interesting abilities to weigh against each other for each build you make.
Last but not least, Resilient Boost offers boosts for those who wish to grab agro and survive it. Whether you're a Tanker who wants extra taunt slotted in every attack or you're a Mastermind who wishes your soft capped Bots/Traps wouldn't get hit as hard when it uses Confront and a lucky shot punches through your defense, this slot offers enhancement to many common powersets who like to hold aggro. It's also a viable choice for resistance-heavy support sets, or for control-heavy builds.
Well, that's a wrap! I hope that you continue to have fun with new Incarnate powers and trials, and that they empower you to do things with your character that would have been impossible before your fateful rendezvous with Mender Ramiel. I look forward to seeing new builds and strategies coming out of the community with these new additions to your powers!
Jeff "Arbiter Hawk" Hamilton
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