For those of you who were not able to join our previous events, when you create a new character, you get to choose your primary and secondary powersets, as well as four starter powers to use right away. We advise taking at least one or two damage powers, but as you’ll see below, we’ve made it possible to focus on support powers even at a low level.

Each time you level up and visit a trainer, you’ll get to either choose an additional power, or add augment slots to powers you already have. Any time you want to see your powers, you can press the P key and pull up the powers menu. You can just pull your powers down from there onto your action trays, and set them in any arrangement that you like; just click the plus button above the ‘1’ on the power tray to give yourself a second tray to place powers on. Pressing the K key or clicking the augmentations button in the bottom-left corner of the powers menu opens the augment screen, where you can decide if you want to place or replace augments in your powers. Note that you can remove augments at any time, and they go back into your inventory for sale or later use. You can pick up new augments from defeated enemies, or you can buy and sell augments to various vendors on the map. Press M to open the map – augment vendors and level trainer NPCs are both marked on it. And SoH now has quite a few powers to try augmenting.

Several years ago, we promised to have 4 archetypes and 20 powersets at launch. Since that point, we’ve added a fifth archetype – Controllers – and increased the number of powersets to 25. While the next event only allows players to level up to level 20, we have the powers designed to scale up to level 50 for the days when we increase the level cap. During the upcoming mission event, you will be able to test all 25 powersets and all 5 archetypes. Every archetype has a pretty good set of options for the event, and we plan to add more powersets to the game as it evolves.

Another promise we made early on was that every player should get one decent, medium-powered attack that requires no energy to launch. We are players as well as developers – we don’t like it any more than you do if we are drained of energy, or all attacks are recharging and we’re forced to wait around doing nothing. So, every player gets a free power called Plasma Pistol. It does decent damage at moderate range, enough to be worth using for many heroes. We noticed that as soon as we added it, the tanks on our team slotted it into their regular attack chains. That is okay with us; we don’t want anyone to be completely unable to do damage.

Players can also test out two new universal powers that facilitate team play: Regroup and Assemble. Regroup allows any player to teleport to the team leader’s location so that when you are ready to play with your friends, you are won’t get stuck trying to find either them or the mission starting point. Assemble allows a team leader – and only the team leader – to teleport all members of the team to their location so long as the team leader is not in combat. It’s very handy if half the team went to buy augments and got lost!

As before, every player has the power to teleport out of a mission map should the mission not offer to teleport you out after completion. The teleport power will place you under the Arch. Unlike the other teleport powers, this one works even if you’re not on a team. Maybe you won’t need it… but we want you to have the best experience possible!

We won’t get into the details of each powerset, or each power, any time soon. But we will say that we are open to changes. One of our forum mods has been joining us for testing recently and played a healer using the Nanites powerset. He recommended multiple changes, including altering the duration and recharge time of several powers, and we made most of those changes. We listen to all of your feedback, especially if it’s posted in the forums. But please keep in mind, your idea may contradict someone else’s.

Come play in the upcoming mission event. Bring your friends, test your powers, challenge the enemies, and let us know what you think of Ship of Heroes. We hope to see you in Apotheosis City!