Champions Online designer clarifies power changes

It's easy for Champions Online players to feel like the game is in a constant state of change as the developers work on the free-to-play transition. Late last week our Champions Online columnist took a look at the first eight archetypes, and there was quite a bit of feedback from the CO community.

We spent some time chatting with Champions Online developer Chris Matz, who had plenty to say about the current and upcoming changes to the archetypes. Chris gave a great look at where things stand now and what the team has planned for the future, so follow along after the jump to see what he had to say!

Our first look was at passives. At first, stat choices for the passives weren't optimal for the archetypes. Thankfully, that has changed, says Chris. "All of those -- or the vast majority of passives in the game, at least -- have been switched over to no longer being stat-specific. So they now just scale with your Super Stats as opposed to just specifically scaling with your specific stats."

Targeting Computer for the Soldier archetype is a passive that's gotten a huge amount of attention from the designer, which caused it to be almost completely reworked. "It now provides a substantial DPS boost to the entire technology tree instead of being the energy-return mechanic that it was previously."

The developers aren't anywhere near done, though. "A lot of it's being reworked. Our current list of patch notes that I've typed up personally is over 70,000 characters, just for this patch. It's a lot of power revisions, and we've been working on them for a while. There are things we didn't want to do in just small one-off patches instead of one big patch. There are some big changes. Obviously the change to Super Stats and passives is a big deal. We re-did the entire Hold system, basically. We reworked how a lot of that works, how diminishing returns and resistances work. I'm still working on some of the things related to that, like knockback resistances and such, which should hopefully be in before we actually get to free-to-play, but no promises on all of that."

This large patch is not dated yet, but there's a window of early next year. With such a large change, the Champions Online development team is spending a lot of time creating, refining, and changing things. "We obviously plan on having more of these [archetypes] over time, so these eight we're starting with here are our first attempt at getting us in there, and during this beta there are still going to be some bumps. I'm sure you saw the list of what the starting powers were, and several of those have already changed. We're going to be moving those powers around so you get them at different levels, finding out where the right spot is for you to pick up those powers, all while trying to make sure that all eight of those are viable for someone to solo with and group with.

"For the first phase of beta testing we only had access to the archetypes, we didn't allow access to the free-form characters so we could get really good focus testing on that. That's been really beneficial, so just yesterday we opened up free-form characters. We've gotten a ton of feedback about all of the different power changes that aren't in the archetypes."

All of these changes and adjustments are being refined for one large patch early next year, so while you may see minor changes along the way, the really significant ones are coming.

Thank you for your time, Chris!