In Ship of Heroes, all of the melee powersets come in two versions: one for Brawlers with more damage, and one for Tankers with more resistance and defense, plus two explicit taunt powers that a player can select if needed. Powers are something a player chooses to have, or leaves behind. Normally each character will not have all of the powers from a powerset; the player will pick some and give up others to fit their playstyle. Every Street Fighting Brawler or Tanker will in fact be different in many ways from the others, unless their players actively try to match. Each is a unique, individual hero.

When we think about powersets, we always think about playstyles. Street Fighting is a great powerset for that player who wants to hit bosses hard, and who’s less concerned with clearing large crowds of mooks. Quick attacks deliver both high dps and a very useful debuff to enemy accuracy and damage, allowing a brawler to hang in the fight longer and mop the floor with an enemy sooner. One of our devs is convinced that Street Fighting paired with a stealth power – in SoH, stealth is a power, not an archetype or powerset – would create the ultimate Stalker. Another dev says that Street Fighting is a superb Tanker powerset, since the high damage and taunt powers will allow a Tanker to hold aggro on a boss even if he’s teamed with some powerful damage dealers.

Note the Throw Dust power shown above debuffs and interrupts the enemy. You can see the debuff show up, and then stack twice, under the Promethean’s portrait health bar in the video. Our hero also has a couple of infusions operating during the fight. He doesn’t need them in this video, but we’re testing to make sure everything still works correctly after our upgrade to Unreal 4.24. Little things like this are not that hard to do, but in an MMO, there are a lot of aspects to create and then to quality check.

So far we’ve shown four ranged damage powersets, two healing and buffing powersets, two tanker primary sets, and four melee powersets in videos, all in-game and working. With the variations involved, they contain more than 130 superpowers – and we have four more powersets queued up prior to the invasion test. We also have our first two Controller powersets in development, and at least one will be revealed later in the year.

This is the fourth of six melee powersets we’ve shown to the community so far. With a major event coming up in just a few months, it’s time to start planning which kind of character you want to try out during the invasion test; you may want to go back over some of our older videos and newsletters for ideas. The invasion test will be our next combat Beta – we did our first combat Alpha in 2017 – in which a large group of heroes, hopefully organized into multiple teams, resists and pushes back against a much larger Nagdellian army.

On a more personal note, please take care of yourselves during the coronavirus pandemic. Our team members are mostly hunkered down in our homes, working on SoH. Please be cautious.