Champions Online Ask Cryptic Q&A

Another informative “Ask Cryptic” Q&A is now available on the official Champions Online website.

Can we take multiple defense sets, or mix max between them? (Steamtank)

Defense is going to come from several different sources. The first of which is your gear. Whether it’s that your vest is made of Kevlar, or some sort of nano-gear, or you’re shielded by your heroic certainty. That’s not the majority of your defense, though. The majority comes from your choice of defensive powers. The defensive powers in the game have been reworked such that while they can stack, they all have differing areas of coverage. For example, the Forcefield defensive power is extremely strong at the start of a fight, but it will wear down and weaken during the course of that fight. Conversely regeneration will ramp up in effectiveness, being a very slow heal as you’re first getting wounded, but the more times you get hit, the faster you’ll regenerate up to a certain cap. Similarly Invulnerability and Lightning Reflexes are on their own axis. Also, every defense has an active power, a button you can press on a cool down which gives you an extra little burst of defensiveness. All of these powers have a certain amount of inherent strength, and they’re also going to be driven by your stats. No two defenses use the same stats. While there is some stacking, because the defense powers all have different areas of specialty coverage and are all pumped up by different stats, you’ll never be able to get maximum protection from all of them at the same time. This is our inherent balancing factor.

In a previous “Ask Cryptic”, you stated that there are essentially four categories of defensive powers, two axis of two (resistance & dodging, force fields & regeneration). Will players be allowed to mix-and-match from these pools, or are they mutually exclusive? Or is there some other limitation, such as players can only pick from one power in each axis (resistance and force fields = okay, resistance and dodging = not okay)? Finally, if I wanted to make a character who is impossibly tough, could I give him resistance, defense, force fields, and regeneration? (The_Altruist)

Question 1 answers this, but here’s an addendum. Certain defenses are specifically tuned to synergize well with certain power sets. We are setting up the rules so that you can synergize any defense with any power set, you just have to deliberately take some build steps to do it, as opposed to it being the default. We build in some synergies so that we can easily point them out to players so we can say to players if you want to be this guy, here’s the simplest path to doing it. For people who really want to tweak and customize, as much as possible we are putting in the ability to redirect which stats benefit which powers. That’s our secondary priority, though. It will never be the case, however, that you’ll be able to strongly combine two defenses for example.