Friday 22 April 2005

Pic of the day: Defender (right) siphons power from villain (with axe) and transfers it to her team. Screenshot from City of Heroes.

Kinetic defenders

Some City if Heroes fluff. "7.juni", My main character on the European servers (on the English server Defiant more exactly) is a tanker, so-called "invulnerable" although that is certainly relative. These days, he rarely goes anywhere without his duo companion Booster Paque, a kinetic defender. There are good reasons for that.

More than most archetypes (except the classic healer, the empathy defender) the invulnerable tanker is rigidly defined. Each type of invulnerability is acquired separately, becoming available one after the other. Unless he wants a gaping hole in his armor, he has to pick them up as soon as possible. This leaves barely room for enough attack powers, let alone frivolities like flight or superspeed.

The kinetic defender, unlike the classic healer, has a toolbox of booster powers. Basically she can give temporary superpowers to others. This means they don't need to get those powers for themselves, or at least it is not a priority. For instance, usually my tanker would absolutely need "unyielding" (formerly "unyielding stance"), a power that protects from status effects such as sleep, hold, disorient and knockdown. These status effects put you out of the fight for some seconds, but many of them also turn off some of your powers, making you vulnerable until you get them back up.

Enter "increase density", a kinetic power. When Booster casts that on me, I am nearly immune to status attacks for a minute. Unlike Unyielding, I don't need to maintain this from my own endurance, and it doesn't drain her much either. Besides, she is not the one who has to attack all the time.

Attacks and active defenses ("toggles") all use endurance. The longer a fight lasts, and the more you have to attack and defend, the greater risk that you may run out of endurance. Then you will not be able to attack anymore, and in extreme cases your defenses are also turned off. This is obviously not good! To keep up with the heavy workload, most heroes take "fitness" powers. The first is Swift, which lets you run faster without using endurance. (Or you can take one that lets you jump higher, but I've found that I run far more than I jump.) At level 14 you can get Health, which makes you heal faster. Again, this can save endurance for tankers and scrappers (who are the ones most likely to take damage, after all). Often they have a moderate self-heal they can use now and again, but this takes endurance. Finally at level 20 you can get Stamina, which lets you recover endurance much faster. By then you can mostly stop worrying about endurance at all. But you need two of the three other fitness powers first. Since you only get one power every other level, that's about 30% of your powers up till then, just to keep you from running out of breath.

Enter the kinetic defender. Admittedly, empathy has a group stamina flash, and I think radiation has too. But Speed Boost not only gives you 2 minutes of stamina. It also gives you a run speed close to the Superspeed travel power, and 50% faster attacks, similar to the Hasten power. Hasten and Superspeed are two powers from the Speed power pool. Basically then, having my defender with me saves five powers or about half of the power picks up to level 20 ... and it's available when she is 12. Beat that!

Still not satisfied with your mode of travel? Running is nice on flat terrain, but it's not cutting it when you fall into a ravine or have to jump to the roof of an office block. For this purpose there exists a movement power, Superjump. It is available at level 14 and requires you to first have either Combat Jump or Jump Kick. Combat Jumping is actually useful for a tanker, as it adds to defense as well as a little to movement. As the astute reader will have guessed by now, Kinetic defenders also get the ability to bestow this power on their fellow heroes. And unlike Speed Boost, Inertia Reduction will work on her as well as all nearby heroes. She doesn't have it yet at 16, but probably will at 18. I can just imagine the combination of Speed Boost and Inertia Reduction. Jumping over tall buildings at superspeed! There are very few places you can't reach with this.

The defender herself is not left in the dust. If she wants, she can take an earlier power Siphon Speed that lets her drastically slow down an enemy, while increasing her own speed just as drastically. Booster doesn't have it, because I can teleport her wherever she needs to be (plus she is on a slow machine and fast movement would really make her lag).

***

In addition to this toolbox, kinetic defenders also have some more directly combat-related powers. The first is the ability to heal by drawing energy from an enemy. This creates a circle of healing energy centered on the enemy, healing all nearby heroes. It draws a little endurance from the opponent, but is not really an offensive power.

Then there is "Siphon Power", which reduces the damage power of an enemy and transfers it to all nearby heroes. This means that for the next minute, the villain will do less damage and the heroes more. It may not be as obvious as healing, but it quite nifty. Things get even better toward the end of her career, when the defender gets an area effect of the same spell. It hits all enemies near the target and drains damage from each of them, transferring it to all nearby allies. If you have a large mob of villains, you could easily reach the maximum of your damage potential this way.

There is also a power to transfer endurance from enemies to allies. As I mentioned above, in a lengthy battle endurance is the key to survival and victory, so this is also a highly sought-after power. However, I have not seen it used myself. Even though I have played this game for over a year, I have never come as far as halfway through the levels. This is because I start new characters all the time. ^_^* If I ever get a high-level character, I will be sure to tell you!