Every MMO design team has a wizard turning balance knobs and experimenting with the magical formulas to make gameplay both fun and challenging. On the Champions Online team, that wizard is Chris Matz, better known as Ame on the CO forums. He's one of the more active developers on the boards, keeping a strong hand on the pulse of the player community to get a feel for what the players think about new gameplay changes.
Recently we got to sit down and have a chat with Chris, and he leveled with us on everything from the new heavy weapons powerset to the uses of Teleportation in PvP to the upcoming Void Archetype, which will be hitting the live CO servers next week.
It is a considerably slower-feeling set, and I don't mean that as in "it takes a really long time to do things," but we want the weapon to feel like it has weight and is heavy and has heft to it. And so the animations have some real weight in them, and so you can say, "Man that sword took him some serious effort to swing(Champions Online Gold)."
We've translated that to, in the mechanics side, making their activate times a little bit longer, so instead of the typical half-second or lower activate times on the Martial Arts blade attacks, you'll see more two-third-second all the way up to like, .83 seconds, and this allowed us to have bigger animation for these attacks.
It's a pretty full-fleshed set. It's going to be in the Brick meta tab, so it'll have some shared powers with Might, and Champions Gold will be able to use the Unleashed Rage tier 4, and we'll be making sure that all those interactions work. There will be some new interactions, of course.
