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Ten Ton Hammer: In a previous interview, we talked about the ego weapon that telekinetic power set characters can wield. Those weapons can’t be applied to dual blades or single blade, can they?

Roper: You can’t have those. It’s just a telekinesis power ability. You might be able to find some other types of blades you can use that are basically “ego blades” but there isn’t a way now to use ego blades to attack your enemies with martial arts.

That is a neat idea though. We may have to look into that.

The cool thing about the power generating system that we use is that it’s really powerful and lets us do a lot of crazy things with our powers. We’ll talk about stuff, and then ask “can we do that?”

And the answer is usually “yes” but then we have to figure out how to actually achieve that goal. I think the ego blade concept is definitely possible, but I have no idea how they’d actually do it.

Ten Ton Hammer: I was looking over the “big picture’ with Champions Online the other day, and essentially at your end level players can have fourteen active powers. With that in mind, how critical is it to stay within a power set at those later levels? It seems like there are a lot of synergies, how much power is lost if you don’t get those synergies?

Roper: That’s the beauty of the system, as I think it really depends on the player. I’ve seen mixed power sets that are really good. The focused ones are very functional and very fun, but they don’t delve into the nuts and bolts.

The people that get into that and really find the synergies are going to be those players that find the really powerful builds.

The late game synergies tend to be other ways to build up endurance. I’ve built up a few characters, and if you find different ways to build up endurance in each of those characters, it works out okay. It’s not like there’s only one way to build a character and you need to do it that way.

I think our game really rewards the sort of creativity that players can find. I mean, you might make a single blade and munitions character, and those would work really well together because both of those power sets have bleed functions in them.

You can do that in other power sets as well with different abilities.

For the people that want to delve into it, there are lots of “sliders” and “knobs” that they can twist and tweak.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is energy the big resource that everyone is trying to manage at later levels? Obviously it’s the single resource everyone is drawing their powers from. Are those the players that are going to succeed; those that have good energy building and pool capacity?

Roper: I think in most games you can ask the same question. Is having a lot of mana important for a spellcaster?

Ten Ton Hammer: It can be…

Roper: It’s what powers your character. Is it going to be hugely important for your character to have a lot of it?

It depends on the character. That’s the cool thing about our system. You don’t have to necessarily pick one way to manage your energy. You might have really high endurance for a large pool or just generate energy quickly so you can do a lot of attacks.

Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks again for your time, Bill!