Game Designer Brian Urbanek has been busy discussing various power sets in Champions Online. First he sat down for an interview on the Champions Online Daily News blog, where he says what the team "really wanted to do was bring into the game something that better reflected the tempo and momentum of combat in traditional fiction." He talks in-depth about the energy system and explains some attacks drain energy, while others create it. This is all done so that "during the combat players can moderate their own actions to their own advantage."

If that's not enough power talk for you, Urbanek has written the first in a series of power set articles on the game's official site. This one focuses on Energy Protector power sets. Fire and Electricity are basically ranged and AoE attacks, while Ice is crowd control and Force is "a defensive set masquerading as an offensive set."

You can read Urbanek's full article on Energy Protector power sets below.

At first, many of the Energy Projector power sets probably seem identical. But a great deal of work went into making the differences, which appear to be irrelevant subtleties to an amateur, be game-changing to a professional.

In general, Fire and Electricity are ranged, with easy access to Area-of-Effect damage. But it’s not as simple as that. For example, Fire is all very much about location-based AOE. For example: I hit you, and I cause damage to any friends that are near you. Electricity has arc-based damage: I hit you, and an arc will bounce to a friend of yours, and that arc could be double or triple what the Fire damage would be. Fire damage tends to linger over time, while Electricity has more up-front damage. Fire is built more to be a “fire and forget” set, where I blast the person, they catch on fire, and then I can ignore them. Whereas Electricity is built to beat-down one guy and then move on to the next set. To a novice player, they may feel very similar in what they do, but to an expert player, it’s an entirely different playing style.

Force is a defensive set masquerading as an offensive set. Force has personal force fields, the ability to wrap force fields around allies. It’s got a very good block enhancer, and force has a lot of knockback, enabling it to do damage without allowing enemies to get close. The flipside is that force doesn’t have a “form” power, like Fire and Ice do. So, indirectly, Force’s maximum damage is comparatively capped against a Fire attack. Also, Force isn’t natively AOE. A person who uses it while soloing one target will be nearly indistinguishable from a person using Fire, but in terms of total damage output over time in a large group, Force will fall far behind.

Ice introduces many elements of crowd control. It has lots of slows and snares. You can create walls, barriers, and columns of ice. This is all based around both crowd and environment control. Ice will hold its own in terms of damage and if you play the environment correctly and get people caught in between your ice structures when you detonate them, it can do extremely high damage. But at the same time, it’s a set that requires a lot of micromanagement to keep up with the amount of damage you could do almost effortlessly with Fire or Electricity.

It is explicitly our goal to allow anyone to jump in and play with any power set they want, and if they want to take it to a deeper level, anyone can excel at the specific play style. And because these powers all use the same model, you can criss-cross them however you want.

Of these power sets, my favorite is definitely Force. I’m always the type of player who enjoys being able to perform a variety of goals and being able to do a variety of things. Force’s combination of solid (though not top-class) offense, together with very good defense and the ability to provide support in the form of protective bubbles on your allies makes it, in my opinion, as the most fun.

 On Friday, we'll be talking about the Martial Arts powers and how they play differently from the rest of the sets. See you then!