In the twenty-fifth century, heroes have advanced to the point of being able to strengthen – or augment, hence the name – their own superpowers, making themselves more capable of handling the many enemies the FHS Justice faces on a regular basis. These augments can include anything from a magical power-up, to specialized technology, to even downloading new skills and memories. Future updates will likely give more detailed explanations about how different augments work in the lore. You, the player, get to decide which backstory and which augments you choose for your character.

Augmenting powers has its own menu, which can be accessed from a button on the general powers menu. Augments can be dragged and dropped on or off a power any time you wish. Augments themselves get placed into slots which are on each individual power, and over time a character can gain more slots that can be placed on any power they like.

Recently, we’ve added a new feature: at the bottom of the power augments menu, you can see how many slots you have left to place onto powers, and how many augment slots are still empty. We added this feature after feedback from our last event, because people didn’t seem to realize that they could place slots onto powers after leveling up or put augments into those slots in order to improve the power further.

Currently, there is no penalty for having more than one of a type of augment on any particular power. You want to have your fireball power with every slot having a damage augment? Knock yourself out! The attack will miss sometimes, but we feel that if that’s how you want to play, then you should be able to play that way. Or you could slot a bunch of recharge augments to speed up how often you can cast fireball, if you would rather spam a weaker fireball more of-ten. Or you could even do a mix of augments – it’s all up to you.

Most augments need to be purchased from a vendor, but a few may drop from enemies. And keep in mind, augments stack additively with buff powers, and with infusions If you carry a lot of accuracy or healing infusions, you may need more damage augments to do any real damage. Augments and infusions, as much as power sets and archetypes shape the combat mechanics of Ship of Heroes.

In the future, we plan to have special augments that are designed to be placed on a single pow-er as a set. These special augment sets would give players additional bonuses if they’re placed all together on the same power, making them better than the current basic augments that drop from enemies or are bought from vendors. We haven’t finalized anything though so if you’ve got a cool idea, feel free to share it! If we like it, we may use it.

So, what else should we know about augments?

• Our augments are not currently level -bound. This feature responds to requests from the community. An augment that works at level 1, continues to work at level 20.
• Augments can be added or removed without any penalties. You do not need to respec your character build or buy some expensive consumable to remove an augment.
• In the future we will be adding a few extra slots for “universal” augments that impact all your powers. We’re planning for one slot per every ten levels of advancement.
• The maximum number of augment slots for any power is seven.
• While augments will drop from defeated enemies, they can also be purchased inexpensively from vendors. And the ones that have dropped can be sold to those same vendors.

Once you begin playing SoH you’ll realize even below level 10 you will likely have one of two favorite powers that have four or more slots installed. Which means your damage, accuracy, recharge or other stats will be improved quite a bit if you have the right augments installed. Don’t take the risk of being under-powered! Install those augments as soon as you level up.