The Mission Event and Utility Powers
When a hero starts glowing like that, you know things are about to get serious.
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.
“Going AFK while this guy kills himself in my fiery aura. See you later!” – a very confident hero
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.
Shooting an enemy in the back might not be honorable, but it sure is satisfying!
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.
Assemble can be very convenient, but make sure to use it wisely.
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!
There’s also Teleport, which takes you to a safe place. It can be a long walk back, though…
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!
“Today’s forecast is stormy with a chance of severe beatdowns!”
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.
You just can’t go wrong with a giant energy blast.
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!
Technical Notes
1. Participants in the next event will need to download the entire game again. Sorry about that, but we’ve made quite a few improvements… and full downloads are much more stable than small patches.
2. In most cases, you will be able to play your old characters. But you may also want to make a new one, since there are new costume options available since the last event.
3. We will make a document available on the forums with a lot of features like the emote commands, how to use the powers, how to change superspeed FX, etc., for those who want to test out the options. Also, SoH gives a lot of flexibility to adjust your settings to balance framerate and the quality of the visuals and FX. You get to choose.
4. The missions and content play differently on a team compared to playing solo. Also, your choices matter in subtle ways. We’ll have more to say about this in our next newsletter!
5. This is a beta. And like all betas, you will find some bugs. We are at a point where we need to see a wider array of bug reports to continue polishing. And sometimes something happens that we cannot seem to reproduce. Those are the hardest issues to resolve, but every new beta-tester’s report helps!
Play the Demo!
Come and play the Ship of Heroes demo on Steam as we participate in Steam Next Fest, Oct 9 through October 16. This will be our 10th public event, and it is completely free. Three times a year, Steam holds Next Fest, a game festival where studios can let the public play a demo of their unpublished games. Each game can only participate once. Players typically come in and try out a demo for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more, but there’s no actual time limit.
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.
2021 Summer Mission Beta Event
We’re showing off a massive boss fight in Showdown, the final mission of the Iris arc. The Iris mission arc is available to everyone who registers for the event. Donors are in the game now, playtesting the content to look for bugs, and non-donors will be allowed in on August 14th.
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