Infusions in Melee Combat – Dev Video
“We can take you, Yekus! Who’s we? Me and my infusions, of course!”
Infusions are cheap, single-use click items that give instant or temporary benefits to the player – or to a targeted ally. These can range from direct healing, to 60-second buffs to damage or defense, or even things like health regeneration, or temporary resistance to mez effects like stuns. We want basic infusions to be useful and easily replaced, not hoarded until the end of time. You can consume them casually and not regret it later. Of course, you may find, or even create, rarer and more special infusions down the line…
Vending machines are actually portals to an infinite storage of consumable items. Probably.
The video also highlights a feature that is under consideration. You’ll notice a temporary blurriness when the Yekus stun the hero at a couple of points in the fight, sort of like a fighting game. Stunning enemies is a signature Yekus trait. As trained mercenaries, they also target healers and buffers preferentially, unless they’re distracted by heroes with high damage or taunt. But in Ship of Heroes, most Tanker heroes are almost completely resistant to stun and to mez, and Brawlers are strongly resistant. A couple of times during this fight, stuns stack up and briefly overcome his resistance.
We’re likely to add something like a pop-up on the screen that briefly says “stun resisted” or something similar as context. Feel free to share your view on our forums about this possible feature.
Is this blur effect fun, or annoying? Tell us in the forums!
Teams have more flexibility, since you can have allies buff and heal you, or debuff enemies. You can even use infusions on turrets in many situations. They’ll definitely help for surviving boss fights and unusual foes, or just clearing hordes of regular enemies faster. And if you’re battling alone, infusions are absolutely vital. You can carry up to 20 infusions at a time in your infusion inventory, depending upon your level.
Infusions are designed to work on anyone, including allied NPCs and turrets.
Under the hero health bar, you can always tell which infusions and buffs are actively working. The same is true for your opponents, and for debuffs. The remaining time countdown for each buff/debuff is displayed inside its icon under the health bar. This helps you stay aware of what is happening to these critical combat effects.
Under the health bar, each infusion shows time remaining
In the future, we intend to add special challenges where you complete missions without using infusions for extra rewards. But this kind of extra difficulty can easily get you killed, so it’s best to use infusions in every battle you can. And if you lose with five infusion buffs, maybe chugging 20 and then refilling with healing infusions would be better.
“I turned off godmode, and now I need infusions to win!” — a dev
Please let us know if behind the scenes newsletters and unedited videos should be a regular thing. Is this fun for you to read and watch? Or should we have fewer, more polished videos, like the biggest studios do?
Tell us more in the forum poll thread
Health bars appear over enemies before they detect you.
Technical Notes
- Infusions generally last for 60 seconds, and the stat boosts from each infusion stack with the prior infusions up to normal stat limits. An example of a limit is that healing infusions can only increase a character’s health up to 100%, and not beyond that point. Many stats do not have limits; boosting them to incredible, heroic highs for short periods is part of the fun.
- The infusions shown in the video are small infusions. There are also medium and large infusions, with proportionally more effect. In SoH, large infusions are crafted items, but they will be available from the auction house, Ivar & Sons. And we’re considering more exotic types of infusions.
- Keen observers will note that as enemies are defeated, the brawler hero automatically turns to face the next enemy. This is an important feature of melee combat, since many attacks have a limited arc. 360-degree, player-based AoE powers exist, but many melee powers only affect enemies in front of the hero.
- Recently we have adjusted the size, placement, and detection of enemy health bars. Health bars are now smaller, but almost always become visible above enemies just beyond the detection distance of the enemy. So if you’re running towards a glowie and enemy health bars pop up, you still have a little time to stop and change directions if you want to avoid a fight.
We have plans for this arena, as well. It’s tall enough to fit a giant monster!
2018 – Accelerating to Lightspeed The Year in Review
It’s been a very good year for our Ship of Heroes team. Despite some delays, we’ve surpassed every challenge and pushed forward, moving ever closer to launch. Those of you who were with us all year have seen extremely rapid, visible progress, resulting in a prototype game that more than 200 of you, our supporters, were able to log into and test in 2018. Here are some of the year’s highlights:
FPS Success in SoH
This newsletter is quite different from what we’ve published in the past. First off, this is part one of a series of four newsletters in which we’ll share some really good news. Second, we’re going to do something that is very rare for a game at our stage – we’re going to publish some of our current, internal FPS numbers, and we’re going to share what we think these numbers mean.
What Makes an Alpha?
For over a year we’ve been asked variations on the question of what counts as an Alpha or a Beta, and we’d like to share our thinking.