2021 Summer Mission Beta Event
This mission video was carried out by a pick-up team of a couple of devs and one donor who met up in Apotheosis City to show one way to complete the mission.
“Teamwork means you’re going in first, buddy.”
We’ve gotten feedback that the final boss battle of the arc is really hard. You’ll see a couple of the team members were killed despite having a great deal of practice and experience. There is active discussion of how difficult it should be to complete a hard mission, and which missions should be hard, happening in the forums right now. Tell us what you think on this important topic! Your opinion matters to us.
Oops. Maybe just charging in wasn’t the best strategy. Still fun, though.
That being said, there are also things you can do to make difficult missions easier in SoH. We place respawn points inside of most mission maps; Showdown has three of them. You can select your respawn point as you pass them by. We’ve also provided infusion vending machines on several floors of the building. Tough fight coming up? Stock up now on defense, regeneration, and resistance-enhancing infusions. Or, if you’re a firm believer in the best defense being a good offense, pick up some attack and accuracy infusions! It’s all up to you.
Right-click the computer screen to set it as your respawn point.
Of course, if you form a team with a healer, as these devs were lucky enough to do, that also helps a lot. We want to give a shout-out to Indigowulf, a frequent poster on our forums and a great healer, for jumping and helping us with this mission. Also, the strategy of pulling enemies out of the room one at a time does work; it’s just not the way these players roll. They like to charge in. This was a team of four – team sizes for regular missions like this go as high as ten players, with enemies becoming more challenging to match the players. For some guilds, that makes regular content into guild content. Two teams could even challenge each other’s best completion speed, kill count, or anything else that interests them.
We finished the mission in roughly 20 minutes. Can you beat our time?
We don’t want to give away too much, but if you are thinking that two big bads escaped into a hellish parallel dimension, you are right. And as we all know, that obviously spells “sequel.” But to see that, you will need to keep playing Ship of Heroes in the future.
“Hey, don’t just run away! Get back here! I’m not done beating you up yet!” – a healer
The current mission Beta event opens to registered participants in four days. You do need to be registered to join the Beta. The event is free, and our next newsletter will include a quick video answering common questions, like “Where is Iris the Great actually located on the map?” and “Why do I die when I don’t use infusions or augments?”
It isn’t as cool as this explosion, but it could be more important. Maybe.
We look forward to seeing you in the game!
Technical Notes
1. The character Golden Tanker has a fiery aura that taunts nearby enemies, helping him with crowd control. At his current level, this is his main AoE taunt power.
2. One of the important points of this Beta is for us to receive community feedback on the level of difficulty of SoH content, so please share your thoughts on the forums. In the Beta, there are also two challenge missions, with content intended to be significantly more difficult than this mission, plus a public area in the Snow Lair.
3. You can expect the relative difficulty of all of these fights to change as we polish the game. Showdown will likely get easier, since regular mission arcs aren’t meant to be hard. There have to be parts of the game where you can play distracted, after all.
4. The clever use of infusions is an important feature of the game. SoH is not filled with endgame content, and the characters you will be playing are not endgame characters with ultimate powers, stats, or gear. For those of you who stress over using a single item just in case you need it, relax – you can replace your infusions at any time.
5. For those who have created characters in past events, you should still be able to access and play them. But there are new costume pieces in the character creation tool (CCT) that you might want to explore, and several existing options have improved.
Massive Plasma Cannons!
The Plasma Cannon Defense is an exciting challenge mission, one of the missions currently under development. We are using it here to illustrate the massive size of the spaceship FHS Justice. A cramped shuttle craft it is not! We are also adding to our social media presence: Ship of Heroes is now present on eight social media platforms, in addition to the forums on the SoH website.
Iris Story Arc
Sign up here to join the upcoming mission Beta event. This time we’re showing off three new kinds of mission content: story arcs, challenge missions, and holiday missions.
The Mission Event Begins in July
We’ve been working hard to set up another Ship of Heroes Beta event, and now the time is approaching. We have wanted to show off a full mission arc for some time, as well as some other missions. It did take longer to bugfix than we had hoped, but you can expect to try out these missions in late June or July. We are showing off the first Iris mission arc, which has several branching choices that can interact in complex ways – more on that in a future newsletter.