New CoX patch puts the wallop back in Martial Arts
Dev Back Alley Brawler has been a very busy guy of late. When he's not fending off incoming questions like a tank herding Rikti monkeys, he's working on animations and visual effects. Recently, several powers have seen improvements to their animation speed, allowing players to beat the tar out of stuff much faster than they used to.
Katana was recently improved in this way, and now the set in the spotlight is Martial Arts, which hasn't seen any love for a long, long time. The little pauses have been shaved off, meaning that the kicks and punches now flow beautifully. Forum poster Tormentoso has put together a little demonstration.
This isn't the only major improvement for a melee set. Electric Melee, recently ported over to Stalkers, contains one power that's never quite worked properly. Chain Induction was supposed to generate arcs of electricity that jumped from one target to another (think the Nazi-frying scene at the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark). Sadly, the arcs weren't subject to damage buffing from Enhancements, nor from the Brute's all-important inherent, Fury. Add that to the power's tendency to jump from enemies suffering from Confusion effects to players, and you have a power very few people bothered to take.
It's now fixed, courtesy not of Castle this time, but of one of the 'new guys' - the new blood hired by the CoX team following the NCsoft decision to reinvest in the City of Heroes property. Castle tells us 'He seems to like tinkering with things that "shouldn't work" and getting them to do interesting things.'
The patch with these and other fixes is currently on the Test server.
