Bill Roper has the latest State of the Game up and it’s a good read. The more notable parts:

• Skip the Tutorial – Cryptic is implementing a way to allow players to skip the tutorial after they’ve been through it once. Hopefully they allow skipping of the Crisis zones as well.
• Powerhouse Target Dummies that fight back – This is what they really need IMHO to fully test new powers.
• Team Questing – They’re changing the group UI so everyone on the team can see the objectives of the current quest, plus all team members will get rewards / exp. Sounds a lot like the way City of Heroes worked for groups and exactly what Champions needs for better group play while leveling.
• More Content for Monster Island – The description for the new content sounds a lot like instances that WoW players are accustomed to: Dungeon-like places that players will return to.

Most of the changes sound like they’ll be coming in the next few weeks. Things are moving quickly in Champions.

Two things I note that are missing from the State of the Game but have been mentioned by CMs and devs on the forums and again in the recent dev chat:

• More zones will come later – A Space / Moon zone has been mentioned now and then, but it was also stated that they’ll be first adding more City-based content (by popular demand).
• Aggro / Threat needs work – Cryptic doesn’t want another “holy trinity” tank-and-spank clone, but they’ve also acknowledged that their threat model is somewhat broken, or at least hasn’t worked out how they’d planned. As it is right now, mobs seem to love healers far too much. I know for me, it’s odd when a mob will run off to chase my healing drones that are stuck two rooms away (my drones are infatuated with healing each other and prefer to lag behind so they can do so privately).

  Obviously the easy fix would be to fall back on tank-and-spank + scripted encounters ala WoW, but I for one am really hoping Cryptic comes up with a more inventive solution to the threat problem.