Game Designer Brian Urbanek is continuing his discussion on powers on both the Champions Online Web site and the Daily News blog. In case you missed it, he already outlined the Energy Protector and Martial Arts power sets. In his most recent blog entry, Urbanek talks about Mystic powers.

The Sorcery power set contains a bunch of buffs and debuffs through Circles of Power and Sigils, as well as general spells called Invocations. Urbanek says the team is considering breaking Sorcery into several subsets. As for the Supernatural power set, it's "intended to let you create a character that is supernaturally inspired: angelic, demonic, etc." You can read the full blog entry after the jump.

If you're looking for some information on the math behind powers, Urbanek talked about that very topic on the Champions Online Daily News blog. "I daily work with a pair of spreadsheets which individually are twelve megabytes in size. Everything is on spreadsheets and everything is driven by the formulae and in theory everything falls within the same space in terms of its efficiency and utility to cost over time," he said.

We're finishing up our coverage of powers this week with details about two of our Mystic power sets: Sorcery and Supernatural. Thanks once again to Brian "Balseraph" Urbanek for his help!

Currently, Sorcery is one big power set with many different aspects to it. You've got "Circles of Power", which create areas that, if you stay in them, give you a very strong buff. If you leave that circle, you lose the benefit. "Auras" grant a buff to you and your teammates. "Circles of Summoning" summons a critter that can leave the circle to attack an enemy as long as you stay in the circle. Circles of Summoning and Circles of Power are mutually exclusive, meaning you can only have one or the other up at any time. You can also have one Aura up at any time in addition.

"Sigils" create little sigils and runes in the air around you that have a detrimental effect on enemies. For example, they can hide you, blow up when an enemy gets near, or fire lightning bolts at enemies. "Invocations" are general purpose spells. Some examples include a healing invocation, a resurrection invocation, a "Raise Zombies" invocation, and a "Summon hurricane around yourself" invocation.

We're actually thinking about breaking Sorcery into several subsets like Martial Arts. The difference would be that while Martial Arts power sets each have their own endurance builder, crowd control power, and heavy attack, all subsets of Sorcery would share these basic attacks. There would be subsets for Circles of Power, Circles of Summoning, Auras, Sigils, and Invocations. It would be sort of a "You're a Primal Shaman" or "You're a Necromancer" or "You're a pure Arcane person". But, you'd basically start as an Arcane guy, and either stay as an Arcane guy, or branch into one of the other sets. You couldn't start as a Necromancer. It's a unique structure that no other power set has, which is why we're debating it.

Supernatural is a set intended to let you create a character that is supernaturally inspired: angelic, demonic, etc. Their powers are like, "Condemn your enemy with bolts of holy doom," "Infect your enemy with clouds of pestilent flies," "Bite your enemy and drain their living essence to yourself," and "Summon animals from the wilderness to serve your will." There's definitely a very wide variety of skills in this single power set. It is our intention to break this power set after launch into multiple sub sets. We have plans to add more to these sets in our ongoing post-launch power expansions.