FIRST LOOK: LEGIONNAIRE POWERS
Published July 21, 2015
Welcome to the third installment of the combatants’ powers series. Today’s spotlight is on the Legionnaire. (If you missed the first two, you may want to read them now: First Look: Knight powers and UI and First Look: Confessor powers.)
First things first, let’s review the basics from previous weeks.
The Legionnaire is our first character to make use of a different resource model (or energy mechanic) to execute his powers. Our requirements were:
Legionnaire Musings!
The Legionnaire is our first archetype to fill a battlefield commander (frontline support) role, so we have been doing a lot of exploration to figure out exactly what that means in Crowfall. One of our early stated goals was to avoid recreating PvE-style firehose healers. Typically, support-oriented characters stand in the back, have a healing rotation and manage health bars rather than pay attention to the environment or movement of the combatants.
With the Legionnaire, we’ve taken a very different approach. While this archetype sacrifices raw damage to gain access to heals, group buffs and debuffs, they are still frontline fighters. By design, we decided to use a rage mechanic to force participation in the fray, to ensure that they were active, engaged participants rather than passive support.
This has caused some very interesting emergent issues because the Legionnaire is sooooo damn big! With friendly-fire enabled, he often blocks Confessor projectiles and takes damage from them. Even without FF, he often blocks the intended target and prevents damage. “OMG, Steve, get out of the way! I can’t hit anything but you!” This has caused interesting tactical elements that most players don’t consider when deciding how and where to move in relation to their teammates.
The Legionnaire is one of the largest character avatars that I’ve played in ANY game. This surfaces some of the size and movement issues you may have felt in other games when your character magically increases in size. (Generally, designers are fine with increasing a character’s size for a short duration so as not to show you size/feel problems for very long.) With our Legionnaire, however, not only does he have a huge base—all.the.time—but he’s also a quadruped. Making this feel right has been challenging. We currently have the Legionnaire moving slightly faster than other archetypes -- yet they don’t feel any faster, since you’re moving such a large creature.
(FWIW, this was a problem that Todd faced in Shadowbane, too. It means we’ll have to adjust the balance of the archetype in other ways to account for this additional speed. Hitting the Mounts & Caravans stretch goal certainly helped offset this advantage to some degree!)
All of that being said, the Legionnaire is super fun to drive! The animators have tried to make him feel as horse-like as possible with lots of rearing up and bucking and kicks. If you’re going to include a character with a horse body, you might as well use it!
On to the Legionnaire!
Mechanically, the Legionnaire uses Rage to fuel any power in the 1-0 position. His left click primary attackis a melee attack chain which generates rage for the Legionnaire. Additionally, every power in the chain also generates rage for the Legionnaire. The third power also applies a buff to other players in his group calledDiscipline which generates mana for 30 seconds. The fifth power in the chain also applies a mana buff for the group called Command for 30 seconds. Command restores more mana per second, and will overwrite any instances of Discipline. Yes, this does mean stacking multiple Legionnaires may not be optimal -- not only do they not benefit from mana regen, (since they use rage) multiple instances of Discipline/Command do not stack.
Part of making the Legionnaire powers work was to ask Engineering for the backend concept of “group members”. (In our first iteration, the Legionnaire powers were helping everyone in the area, even enemies. Certainly interesting, and it might even be an interesting thing to explore for some powers, but not intended behavior right now.) At this point, we haven’t locked down the max size of a group, so the easy answer was to limit these powers to some radius in 3D space, around the caster.
We had to spend some time refining our buff and debuff stacking rules since the Legionnaire needs slightly different functionality than we’ve seen before… On the plus side, most of the core functionality was already done as part of the work we did supporting the Confessor’s powers!
The Legionnaire’s right click power, Dodge, leaps the Legionnaire 10m in whatever input is direction provided, WASD-based. Any characters in the path are also shoved and will take damage. Due to the size and mass of the Legionnaire, this may or may not knock those characters out of the way. This power is fueled by stamina.
iFrame Powers
For reference, I’m going to reiterate the definition of iFrame powers again this week in case anyone forgot or missed it:
Passive Powers
Similar to the Knight/Confessor, the Legionnaire has an archetype-specific Retaliate passive power that can only be used when he is knocked down. This power, when activated, will leap him back to his feet from a knocked-down state and will then deal damage to everyone in the area.
Retaliate is treated like a hidden combo, so the player never sees it on their bar; the button to activate it only appears when you are knocked down. The cooldown is lengthy, so you might have to eat a full knockdown in some cases if crowd control immunity hasn’t kicked in on you yet.
The other passive on the Legionnaire is called Rear Kick, a chance when the Legionnaire is damaged (currently “from any direction” but as soon as we have the tech it will become “when attacked from the rear”) to activate a hidden combo (similar to how Retaliate works). When activated, it causes the Legionnaire to do a rear kick that damages and applies a rather large knockback to all targets behind the Legionnaire.
Sprint is technically a passive ability, but we don’t display it on the power bar. Depressing the Shift key will increase the speed of the character (currently, by 40%) and rapidly drains the stamina bar. The Legionnaire Sprint has the added effect of making the Legionnaire look AWESOME! (I really like the animation for this one if you can’t tell!)
The Powers Bar
Let’s look at the powers bar in detail.
The first power in the active power tray is Charge. This instant power charges the Legionnaire forward 25m dealing multiple small sphere area pulses of damage and physics impulses along the way. This power has a combo off of it—Wheel Left and Wheel Right—that enable the Legionnaire to instantly stop his charge and deal damage in a cone to either his left or right based on which version of the combo he selected. We hooked up something similar on the Knight (though his doesn’t have a left and right version) and found that we really liked it as a great way to offensively break out of a power that has the character charging around the map. Charge also has a great, high-energy animation.
Scatter Horde: The Legionnaire rears up, spins his weapon and slams it into the ground, knocking back enemies around him. This a great way for the Legionnaire to create space in his immediate area.
Once again, we found a use for that hold-to-charge power technology in Linebreaker. The Legionnaire can charge for a few seconds and, when unleashed, swings his weapon with so much force that it releases a shockwave of force dealing damage to all in front of him (for 10m) and applies a slight ‘push’ on them. If he charges this power to over 66%, all affected targets will also suffer a 50% movement reduction debuff.
The No Quarter combo is a five-part series. With this series, the Legionnaire is not allowed to branch. He must elect the A or B line and then stick with it all the way through.
The final tray power in the Legionnaire basic kit is Rallying Cry. This power is a group heal and group Attack Power stat buff, two things you don’t want to leave home without. Attack Power is our generic stat for increasing all damage and healing characters can deal. (Yes, this currently allows healing to scale with damage on one stat; we may break this functionality into a support power stat at some point, but for now it was easier to implement as a single stat.)
TL;DR Summary
There you have it! The Legionnaire is currently very focused on melee attacks, movement and a few critical support powers. He also has a handful of secondary control tactics available via physics impulses on his powers. Our goal for the Legionnaire is to be that frontline melee-healer, not a very common role in MMOs, but very interesting in a physics-based combat model. Additionally, it also seems to fit this archetype very well as a character who is well-suited for melee and also geared towards group-play.
We hope this gives the basic Legionnaire a good kit of potentially fun toys to play with… and, of course, plenty of room left to customize.
As always, excited to hear your thoughts and ideas!
Thomas Blair
Design Lead
Crowfall - Centaur helmet creation by Eric Hart
Published July 21, 2015
Welcome to the third installment of the combatants’ powers series. Today’s spotlight is on the Legionnaire. (If you missed the first two, you may want to read them now: First Look: Knight powers and UI and First Look: Confessor powers.)
First things first, let’s review the basics from previous weeks.
As usual, the >standard caveats apply: We are still building this system, so things are liable to change. In fact, they are almost guaranteed to change!
Our Approach: Minimum Viable Powers
We have been building each archetype with what we think would be a ‘minimum viable power’ kit for that archetype to be useful and fun in combat. This means that the current list isn’t final, and some of the powers might even jump to other archetypes (or be cut entirely!) as we continue development.
This is just our first iteration of the combat user interface (UI). As such, we are leaving ourselves room on the powers tray for the player to eventually slot additional combat powers (i.e. the ones that the player will acquire via disciplines, advantages or class promotions). We also assume there will be another non-combat related power bar when we start building those systems.
In other words, don’t freak out about the interface!
This first round of powers was selected for a dual purpose: we wanted to use them as a trial set to prove that we can do something within our powers tool and the PhysX portion of Unity. Each power often had a set of new (and different) components that would be useful not only in the construction of that particular power, but that would also open up a new area of design discovery. The goal is to build reusable elements that we can repurpose in other powers.
Legionnaire Power ResourcesOur Approach: Minimum Viable Powers
We have been building each archetype with what we think would be a ‘minimum viable power’ kit for that archetype to be useful and fun in combat. This means that the current list isn’t final, and some of the powers might even jump to other archetypes (or be cut entirely!) as we continue development.
This is just our first iteration of the combat user interface (UI). As such, we are leaving ourselves room on the powers tray for the player to eventually slot additional combat powers (i.e. the ones that the player will acquire via disciplines, advantages or class promotions). We also assume there will be another non-combat related power bar when we start building those systems.
In other words, don’t freak out about the interface!
This first round of powers was selected for a dual purpose: we wanted to use them as a trial set to prove that we can do something within our powers tool and the PhysX portion of Unity. Each power often had a set of new (and different) components that would be useful not only in the construction of that particular power, but that would also open up a new area of design discovery. The goal is to build reusable elements that we can repurpose in other powers.
The Legionnaire is our first character to make use of a different resource model (or energy mechanic) to execute his powers. Our requirements were:
- The Legionnaire should perform primary attacks to gain resource,
- The Legionnaire starts with zero resource instead of full resource,
- Archetypes should have an archetype-specific resource defined, with a gain that can be set to a negative value (causing his resource to decay slowly out of combat) and, lastly,
- The values should be reduced by a factor of 10 (because math!)
Legionnaire Musings!
The Legionnaire is our first archetype to fill a battlefield commander (frontline support) role, so we have been doing a lot of exploration to figure out exactly what that means in Crowfall. One of our early stated goals was to avoid recreating PvE-style firehose healers. Typically, support-oriented characters stand in the back, have a healing rotation and manage health bars rather than pay attention to the environment or movement of the combatants.
With the Legionnaire, we’ve taken a very different approach. While this archetype sacrifices raw damage to gain access to heals, group buffs and debuffs, they are still frontline fighters. By design, we decided to use a rage mechanic to force participation in the fray, to ensure that they were active, engaged participants rather than passive support.
This has caused some very interesting emergent issues because the Legionnaire is sooooo damn big! With friendly-fire enabled, he often blocks Confessor projectiles and takes damage from them. Even without FF, he often blocks the intended target and prevents damage. “OMG, Steve, get out of the way! I can’t hit anything but you!” This has caused interesting tactical elements that most players don’t consider when deciding how and where to move in relation to their teammates.
The Legionnaire is one of the largest character avatars that I’ve played in ANY game. This surfaces some of the size and movement issues you may have felt in other games when your character magically increases in size. (Generally, designers are fine with increasing a character’s size for a short duration so as not to show you size/feel problems for very long.) With our Legionnaire, however, not only does he have a huge base—all.the.time—but he’s also a quadruped. Making this feel right has been challenging. We currently have the Legionnaire moving slightly faster than other archetypes -- yet they don’t feel any faster, since you’re moving such a large creature.
(FWIW, this was a problem that Todd faced in Shadowbane, too. It means we’ll have to adjust the balance of the archetype in other ways to account for this additional speed. Hitting the Mounts & Caravans stretch goal certainly helped offset this advantage to some degree!)
All of that being said, the Legionnaire is super fun to drive! The animators have tried to make him feel as horse-like as possible with lots of rearing up and bucking and kicks. If you’re going to include a character with a horse body, you might as well use it!
On to the Legionnaire!
Mechanically, the Legionnaire uses Rage to fuel any power in the 1-0 position. His left click primary attackis a melee attack chain which generates rage for the Legionnaire. Additionally, every power in the chain also generates rage for the Legionnaire. The third power also applies a buff to other players in his group calledDiscipline which generates mana for 30 seconds. The fifth power in the chain also applies a mana buff for the group called Command for 30 seconds. Command restores more mana per second, and will overwrite any instances of Discipline. Yes, this does mean stacking multiple Legionnaires may not be optimal -- not only do they not benefit from mana regen, (since they use rage) multiple instances of Discipline/Command do not stack.
Part of making the Legionnaire powers work was to ask Engineering for the backend concept of “group members”. (In our first iteration, the Legionnaire powers were helping everyone in the area, even enemies. Certainly interesting, and it might even be an interesting thing to explore for some powers, but not intended behavior right now.) At this point, we haven’t locked down the max size of a group, so the easy answer was to limit these powers to some radius in 3D space, around the caster.
We had to spend some time refining our buff and debuff stacking rules since the Legionnaire needs slightly different functionality than we’ve seen before… On the plus side, most of the core functionality was already done as part of the work we did supporting the Confessor’s powers!
The Legionnaire’s right click power, Dodge, leaps the Legionnaire 10m in whatever input is direction provided, WASD-based. Any characters in the path are also shoved and will take damage. Due to the size and mass of the Legionnaire, this may or may not knock those characters out of the way. This power is fueled by stamina.
iFrame Powers
For reference, I’m going to reiterate the definition of iFrame powers again this week in case anyone forgot or missed it:
iFrame powers, on activation, typically remove the player from the physics simulation and render them invulnerable to damage while performing the power (a very, very short duration, obviously!)
This means if you use a physics impulse on a character performing an iFrame power, they won’t get pushed around. We are putting all attacks we designate as iFrame powers on the C key for now.
We generally try to associate powers that use this property with those powers that send a player into the air. We are also limiting both use and availability of these powers, since they step outside the simulation. In other words, we only plan on giving some of the archetypes access to these powers.
That being said, we actually elected not to give the Legionnaire an iFrame power, to see how that plays out. Instead his C key is Eternal Rage and it instantly gives the Legionnaire an instant Rage boost. This is how the Legionnaire can start combat using powers, or to generate some rage even if no one is in range for him to attack. The cooldown is long enough that it can’t be used as a primary method to regen rage.This means if you use a physics impulse on a character performing an iFrame power, they won’t get pushed around. We are putting all attacks we designate as iFrame powers on the C key for now.
We generally try to associate powers that use this property with those powers that send a player into the air. We are also limiting both use and availability of these powers, since they step outside the simulation. In other words, we only plan on giving some of the archetypes access to these powers.
Passive Powers
Similar to the Knight/Confessor, the Legionnaire has an archetype-specific Retaliate passive power that can only be used when he is knocked down. This power, when activated, will leap him back to his feet from a knocked-down state and will then deal damage to everyone in the area.
Retaliate is treated like a hidden combo, so the player never sees it on their bar; the button to activate it only appears when you are knocked down. The cooldown is lengthy, so you might have to eat a full knockdown in some cases if crowd control immunity hasn’t kicked in on you yet.
The other passive on the Legionnaire is called Rear Kick, a chance when the Legionnaire is damaged (currently “from any direction” but as soon as we have the tech it will become “when attacked from the rear”) to activate a hidden combo (similar to how Retaliate works). When activated, it causes the Legionnaire to do a rear kick that damages and applies a rather large knockback to all targets behind the Legionnaire.
Sprint is technically a passive ability, but we don’t display it on the power bar. Depressing the Shift key will increase the speed of the character (currently, by 40%) and rapidly drains the stamina bar. The Legionnaire Sprint has the added effect of making the Legionnaire look AWESOME! (I really like the animation for this one if you can’t tell!)
The Powers Bar
Let’s look at the powers bar in detail.
The first power in the active power tray is Charge. This instant power charges the Legionnaire forward 25m dealing multiple small sphere area pulses of damage and physics impulses along the way. This power has a combo off of it—Wheel Left and Wheel Right—that enable the Legionnaire to instantly stop his charge and deal damage in a cone to either his left or right based on which version of the combo he selected. We hooked up something similar on the Knight (though his doesn’t have a left and right version) and found that we really liked it as a great way to offensively break out of a power that has the character charging around the map. Charge also has a great, high-energy animation.
Scatter Horde: The Legionnaire rears up, spins his weapon and slams it into the ground, knocking back enemies around him. This a great way for the Legionnaire to create space in his immediate area.
Once again, we found a use for that hold-to-charge power technology in Linebreaker. The Legionnaire can charge for a few seconds and, when unleashed, swings his weapon with so much force that it releases a shockwave of force dealing damage to all in front of him (for 10m) and applies a slight ‘push’ on them. If he charges this power to over 66%, all affected targets will also suffer a 50% movement reduction debuff.
The No Quarter combo is a five-part series. With this series, the Legionnaire is not allowed to branch. He must elect the A or B line and then stick with it all the way through.
- No Quarter: Slight forward surge with damage dealt to all in the cone.
- No Quarter 2a: Follow up with increased damage dealt to all in the cone.
- No Quarter 3a: Once again deals damage to all in the cone and also applies an armor break debuff to all in the cone. (Think of this line as cone damage that ends in a armor debuff.)
- No Quarter 2b: Deals piercing damage to a single target in front of you. (Our first explicit use of piercing as a damage type.)
- No Quarter 3b: Again deals piercing damage to a single target in front of you, applies a bleed and applies a power damage debuff to the lucky recipient. (Think of this line being more useful in single target scenarios with a bleed and nasty damage debuff on the end of it.)
The final tray power in the Legionnaire basic kit is Rallying Cry. This power is a group heal and group Attack Power stat buff, two things you don’t want to leave home without. Attack Power is our generic stat for increasing all damage and healing characters can deal. (Yes, this currently allows healing to scale with damage on one stat; we may break this functionality into a support power stat at some point, but for now it was easier to implement as a single stat.)
TL;DR Summary
There you have it! The Legionnaire is currently very focused on melee attacks, movement and a few critical support powers. He also has a handful of secondary control tactics available via physics impulses on his powers. Our goal for the Legionnaire is to be that frontline melee-healer, not a very common role in MMOs, but very interesting in a physics-based combat model. Additionally, it also seems to fit this archetype very well as a character who is well-suited for melee and also geared towards group-play.
We hope this gives the basic Legionnaire a good kit of potentially fun toys to play with… and, of course, plenty of room left to customize.
As always, excited to hear your thoughts and ideas!
Thomas Blair
Design Lead
Crowfall - Centaur helmet creation by Eric Hart