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What about telekinesis?

BR: Telekinesis has a couple different side effects. Some of them can shock players, like stuns that hold them in place. The other side effect is that you can stack effects within the power set, so you can get additional damage.

For example with ego weaponry, you can form a blade with your skill with telekinetic energy. There a couple of other powers you can have activated, like ego form or ego surge, which are giving you more power or using your telekinetics to enhance your physical form. That activates “Hidden Blade,” which creates a second blade of telekinetic energy for additionally damage.

Basically, ego weaponry is your melee attack, but then if you use another power to enhance yourself it enhances your attacks and gives them alternate effects.  So, when I use ego form or ego surge, now my ego weapon actually has a second blade. In ways you can increase your powers by stacking powers. Of course then there is always the fact that you can pick up and throw objects.

When I first look at these “psychic” powers on paper, they seem like ranged powers, but talking to you they sound like they are almost a mixed bag of ranged and melee sort of stuff. Is that accurate?

BR: Telepathy definitely tends to be more ranged. Telekinesis has a little of both. It does have a couple of melee components, but it is predominantly ranged. We wanted to throw in the fact that you could use telekinetics to shape different types of weaponry. We felt that was a pretty important thing to do. 

And force it seems like it is a power people pick up to keep enemies off of them, especially with all of the knockback components it has. 

BR: I love characters that use force. I try to play to some degree with each of the power sets. Force is definitely a good one to use mixed in with other power sets, but it’s actually pretty fun by itself. You get really into imprisoning [enemies] with force bubbles, protecting yourself in a force shield, and throwing [enemies] around. It’s a fun power set just in itself, but it’s also a really good secondary set. 

Would you say that force is one of the more active power sets? It seems very rough and tumble where maybe you aren’t in the mix but you’re constantly doing stuff to hamper enemies.

BR: Yeah, it’s a really active set. There is a lot of utility with that set. 

To some degree it seems that telepathy is not as focused on damage as some of the other sets. It seems more like a support sort of set.

BR: I may have misrepresented it. It has things like ego blast and psi lash, I mean, Vader-esque stuff like choking a guy with mental powers. It has a reasonable amount of utility. But really a lot of what it is about is doing damage and getting guys down to tap into that telepathic reverberation.

Force is maybe more of a mixed bag that has support stuff. Telepathy I see as having maybe a little more damage than force. It’s not one of those pure support sets like sorcery, which still has some damage. Telepathy has a lot more damage going on.

That makes sense. Is there anything that has been added recently that is pretty notable? Are there things that are going into the game that are really cool? 

For example in these power sets, for telekinesis we don’t have the actual throw in yet for beta testers. We had to do a bunch of work to base things off of ego and then create tables on objects in the world. Basically, right now you can pick things up physically. So if there is a crate or a car or a piece of building that has fallen you can try to pick them up if you are strong enough or you can destroy it with your powers.

We had to get through and get [those objects] cataloged so you can move them with your mind. Ego is that stat that we are checking instead of strength to see if you can pick them up or not. So the actual telekinesis power of picking up things in the world isn’t in beta test yet but will be going in the next week or so.