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

For the latest installment of Ten Ton Hammer’s weekly review of the Champions Online power sets, we spoke with Bill Roper about the title’s martial arts themed power sets; Dual Blades, Single Blade, Fighting Claws and Unarmed. Each of these sets will provide some interesting options for those of you looking to get into some fast-paced martial combat, so read on to learn all the details!

---

Ten Ton Hammer: What can you tell our readers about the martial arts power sets, which includes dual blades, single blade, fighting claws, and unarmed?

Bill Roper: The martial arts are a particularly fun and active set of powers, and there’s a lot that goes into them. One of the things that all the martial art school share is this concept of “momentum.” This helps you build out a sort of mixed martial arts character, because all the secondary effects of these power sets generate energy. Although we’re still finalizing all the text for these power set descriptions, I like to describe it as basically as you’re fighting these monsters you’re adding an effect onto the attack that is a “momentum counter” and the more of those you build up, the more additional energy you generate.

So the idea is that the more you attack and the more different attack types you use against your enemies, the more energy you generate. The martial arts schools are all designed around being very active. The more you do, the more you benefit from this secondary stuff.

Ten Ton Hammer: What kind of attacks can we expect from each set?

Roper: The unarmed power set is really set up to do single target attacks that are very powerful. It also does crushing damage, if players are interested in specific damage types.

The claws are using slashing damage, and they have some specific powers in this particular set that are interesting, such as Viper’s Fang. Basically, when you do the Viper’s Fang attack three times in a row, you actually do toxic damage over time. A lot of the claw attacks are built to be doing these chains of attacks on single targets. It’s really a back-and-forth sort of combat with the claws.

Because, if you’re not getting momentum to happen, you always have to go back to that energy builder, but the good thing about the martial arts is that if you’re focusing your advantages towards building that momentum, you can do more of those “alpha strikes” against the enemy and hurt them more.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do any of the other power sets have these “chain attacks?”

Roper: Single blade tends to work this way as well. There’s the normal energy builder powers, and then there’s a power called Reaper’s Caress, which is a sweeping attack. If you do that attack three times in a row, it applies a bleed to the target. Bleed is basically slashing damage over time – a physical DoT. That one doesn’t do as much damage to a single target, but it does damage more enemies in an arc in front of you.

And there are more powers that work off of these damage types, like “bleed” and “toxic” as well. We’ve gone through the core mechanics and added in a sort of “class” of damage or ability – like the bleed – in other power sets.

So for example, we can use fear or bleed or momentum and use those where we want to. You can then look through all the powers and enhancements and figure out things that might have some good synergy with your bleed martial art powers.