player-abilities
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Champions Online brings the Steel Crusade on September 4th
If you've been sitting around in Champions Online and cooling your cape for a while, you'll be happy to know that a new update is dropping in September, and it's a big one. Partly because players will be facing off against Mechanon, and he's pretty large to begin with. But it's also an update that introduces several new areas, a new mission arc, and a new experience for players who have hit the level cap and want something new to do. Steel Crusade is a two-part update that starts with players finding people bursting into flames across Millennium City in an adventure that leads inside the bodies of the victims to identify the source of this affliction. Ultimately, the arc culminates in a direct attack on Mechanon's orbital station... followed by an anniversary event that pits players against Mechanon himself in a world boss encounter. It also introduces something that City of Heroes veterans will find familiar in the form of the Reawakened Automaton: a new archetype available to experienced players with unique perks.
WildStar unveils the details on ability mechanics
Abilities are the bread and butter of games. You have to be able to do something, after all. WildStar started with the same basic foundation as several other MMOs, but as it is wont to do, it's evolved to have a very different foundation now. It's so different, in fact, that the latest Dev Speak video is all about how abilities work and how they differ from the standard MMO trifecta of casts, channels, and instant abilities. Of course, we could just tell you how all of this fits together... but why would we do that when we can just show you? So click on past the break for the video itself, and then keep reading for more specific details on these new mechanics. Even familiar things like cast bars are a little different here, and you'll want to see some of this stuff in action.
Dev Watercooler: Ghostcrawler discusses the number of player abilities
In his continuing conversational blog series Dev Watercooler, Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street (lead systems designer) muses about the number of abilities players have, what the sweet spot is in terms of quantity, the need for all classes to have a viable AoE rotation, and the difference between rotational abilities and situational abilities. From a game design perspective, this might be the coolest Dev Watercooler yet. Read this full Dev Watercooler after the break, or check out the other Dev Watercoolers with Ghostcrawler: Dev Watercooler: Expertise and hit for tanking Dev Watercooler: Interrupts Dev Watercooler: Critical hits
Abilities I usually wish didn't exist in 5-mans
Most tanks are control freaks. As a matter of fact, you should hope that your tank is a control freak, because the ones who shrug off a mob running around loose are the ones you probably don't want tanking your run anyway. With that in mind, there are several player abilities that, while great for soloing or PvP, don't make the transition to a 5-man very well. Either they make life a real nuisance for your group members due to inherent design, or they tend to do so in the hands of a player who doesn't deploy them in a particularly helpful fashion. Not all tanks will have the same degree of irritation with all of the following skills (for example, I play a druid, and because bears don't have a ranged silence, a knockback on a caster mob is much more likely to annoy me than, say, a death knight tank), but I promise you that they've all been mentioned by my tanking colleagues as abilities with a high chance of blowing a pull.
