NecroRogIcon the character
NecroRogIcon is the remnant of a soul that should have escaped this plane. A body torn apart long ago, its fragile parts still somehow clinging together. Contained within a suit of metal, leather and bone.
His power emanates from a force of will. Mind manipulating matter. Yet not without limits: With every exercise and exertion of physical energy, his soul dives deeper and deeper into the recesses of his own personal void. His skin is cold and clammy, external evidence of his internal spiral into a dark abyss where warmth has been lost.
Vengeance holds him together, without it he would blow away on the wind. Vengeance brings energy up out of the dark and externalizes it, abrupt as it reaches the surface of reality, it literally explodes on contact. Vengeance made tangible and real. Painfully real.
. . .
NecroRogIcon has become my main character in Champions Online. At first I created him as a throwaway character, I hadn’t really planned on playing my blog’s namesake but I fell in love with his appearance. Once I’d started playing with the Force Powerset, I was hooked.
The above outline sunk in, the idea of a character paradoxically cold-hearted and explosive, projecting his turmoil into forceful powers. Inside he is just ether, a gust of smoke covered in a thin layer of skin and the thicker layer of his suit. Sooner or later he will literally stretch himself thin and dissipate.
His costume also works well in alternative colour schemes, convenient for different roles (Green when I’m healing, Red for balanced, Yellow for DPS):
I’m having a blast (literally) with Force. All of my attacks have knockbacks, it’s craaazy. It’s a hoot to toss mobs every-which-way, often flying them off cliffs and rooftops. I do wish it had a full set of abilities tho: Force has 10 powers, compared to say Munitions which has 17. So I’m already picking up a few options from other Powersets, knowing I’ll accumulate a total of 14 powers by the time I reach level 40.
I’m dipping a little into healing, with the premise that he’d have to be at least a little adept at keeping his worn-torn body alive inside that suit.
The Powerhouse is a trap!
The Powerhouse is indisputably a great feature of Champions Online. The ability to freely try various powers before settling on the ones you would like to stick with, is just fantastic. It’s almost necessary even, considering the way players can pick and choose from any Powersets.
But it’s also a trap! People go in there and never return. It’s a big black hole where Superheroes disappear, only to reappear eons later when the memory of them has almost faded.
It’s so insidious, it couldn’t even be a creation of Dr. Destroyer himself. Foxbat must be involved somehow.
Respec limits
Cryptic has locked down respecs to the last 10 abilities chosen, which has already kicked up a fuss amongst the beta-testers. Now it looks like that will be the system to go Live for launch. For a short while you could respec as much as you wanted to, right down to your energy building Power.
I like the change. I was worried this was going to become a build-of-the-month game with unlimited respecs. If it’s too easy to completely revamp your entire character at any point, it’d be wide open for exploits.
Character progression IMHO should have some choices that impact you for the rest of the game. Especially in a game where there are no enforced classes.
As it is now, anyone can test out Powers for free before locking them in via the Powerhouse. That alone would be more than enough for me. The whole Powerhouse thing is a big win. The additional previous-abilities respec is just a good safeguard: If you really decide you don’t like X Power, you can still exchange it for Y within a reasonable amount of time. They even allow the very last Power / ability to be respec’d for free.
I should note as you can see in the screenshot, that only 5 undos show up for my character, so I’m not sure about the 10 announced. This is a character artificially elevated to level 40 for the end-of-Beta event, so it might not be typical.
I am hoping however that this lockdown indicates Cryptic won’t be playing the balancing metagame so much. Oh I’m sure there will be quite a bit of Powerset re-balancing after launch (they’ve already started to disassemble Sorcery), but in the long run I’m crossing my fingers that they won’t re-balance every single patch, which has become the norm in most MMORPGs.
If they do make significant continual changes to Powersets and don’t allow for players to re-choose to compensate, they should expect a shitstorm.
