Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Champions Online is inching its way towards the final stages of development and in a couple of short months, this fan favorite will release superhero madness everywhere! 

Are you prepared to fight crime or instigate chaos?  No matter which side you are on, your super powers will be your edge in any battle.  Be prepared by reading up on the various powersets!  We have this exclusive interview with Design Director and Executive Producer Bill Roper of Cryptic Studios discussing the sorcery, darkness, and supernatural powersets.  Ten Ton Hammer's Cody Bye asks the questions that we all want to hear the answers to.  Learn all about these mystical powers and get some inside info on what is happening behind the closed doors of Champions Online!

Ten Ton Hammer:  For those not in beta, can you give us a brief overview of what the sorcery, darkness, and supernatural power sets are like? What are the big themes behind them?

Bill Roper:  Darkness, supernatural, and sorcery go together in the way that they are in the feeling of "otherworldly".  We tend to group powers around what their base ideas are, so sorcery and supernatural go together really well since they are otherworldly powers.  Darkness fits into that as well, although it isn't as magical in nature but it can be laid out that way.

Darkness and sorcery are predominately ranged power sets and supernatural tends to be a mix of ranged with a lot of melee.  For example, the energy building power in supernatural, which is Beastial Fury, is a melee combo.  We want supernatural to have the ability to have both ranged and melee flavors.

Sorcery blows into the areas of blasts and bolts and actually has a whole series of "circles" that give AoE type buffs or defense and allows you to cast your spells. It kind of gives you an area-based gameplay where you're laying down these circles and trying to be near them to gain their advantages.  That's how it's designed to work.

With darkness, the secondary tier of powers that you're doing other than damage, is fear.  Fear is a very common idea for RPG players where you control different enemies and lock them down distances away from you getting them off of their aggressive mode.  We also have within darkness a feature that when you defeat an enemy that has been feared, it gives you an additional way to gain energy with a secondary energy builder.  So with a lot of the combinations, you’ll fear different enemies and then when you defeat them you’ll get a little energy return.

Supernatural is built around a secondary damage type.  Lash, for example, is the second power you get in the basic set.  As you add ranks to it, you not only get additional damage, but you can also add things like Aspects of the Celestial which has a chance to do a heal over time for you and your allies, or Aspects of the Inferno which does additional fire damage over time, or Aspects of the Dragon which does toxic damage over time.  So basically you can add different DoTs or heals that can be either positive or negative over time effects using different supernatural powers as a secondary feel.

Ten Ton Hammer: It's been argued that sorcery may be the power set in the game that's most like a healer or a support class.  Would you say that's true? Would a healer classes want to play a sorcerer?

Bill Roper: I can see that.  Basically when you're laying down the power circles it does have different buffing effects.  I can see that if you wanted to play a healer and you went really heavy in that direction, you could do that.  It does have a really good offensive set as well, but it is also a really good support class so I can see why players are saying that.

Ten Ton Hammer: We've also been seeing that Darkness is really powerful and sort of a soloer type power set where you can drain life and do lock down effects that are helpful as a solo player.  Would you say that Darkness is a good power set to go into if you wanted to play solo?

Bill Roper:  Yeah, I think it works in both ways.  It's also really good in terms of working with a team, because you can do a lot of crowd control with the lock downs and fears, so when you're going into a group or into the persistent world where we use the reinforcement system to increase enemy group sizes, they can get help.  Or if we are going into instances where we scale up the encounters to the size of your team, this is a really good way for a team to use the darkness guys.  So darkness can work for both solo and for groups.

Ten Ton Hammer: We haven't talked about crowd control much, is crowd control really something that we will see a lot of in the power sets?  Obviously darkness has it included, and I would assume that telepathy has some form of crowd control but the rest of the power sets don't seem as focused on crowd control.  Is that a correct assumption or are there select power sets that people can dip their toes into if they want to use crowd control?

Bill Roper:  There are different types.  We tried to put in crowd control skill in a broad way like electricity has a cage type skill that will allow you to lock down opponents.. Even in Might, we are adding some things where you can do a hamstring like move to stun which was kind of already in there.  Really there are different ways and almost all of the power sets have the ability to do that.  Some power sets are more focused in that direction but the nice thing about having open power set system is that if I want to do a little crowd control you can get them through another power set.