The Support (Utility!) Skills

Now, time to take a look at the support skills mentioned in yesterday's post! Keep in mind, all of the names are working names for now and the effects might differ slightly from the descriptions below, depending on how things work out in the prototyping stage.

First up, the offensive ones:

Challenge - A taunt of sorts, where you make one enemy focus his whole attention on you. This means that if the enemy is currently attacking someone else (in multiplayer for instance), it will immediately target you instead. Under this effect, you'll deal more damage against this enemy, but it will also deal more damage against you. So, a double edged sword, if you will.

The targeting works much like a projectile: your character will go into a shouting animation in the direction you're currently facing, and the debuff will apply to the nearest enemy inside the effect.

Death Mark - A debuff that uses a earth spike/meteor style target which you can move between enemies as you hold the skill button. Once you decide which enemy to target they will get a marker on them that will look like a meter of sorts. As you deal damage to this enemy, the meter will fill up and once it's full or a timer runs out, it'll deal a percentage of the damage you've already done to the enemy as bonus damage. It will also trigger immediately once the damage it'd deal is enough to kill the enemy.

Sleep - A skill that puts an enemy to sleep and makes it unable to attack. However, if you hit the enemy it will wake up and return to battle. The duration each enemy sleeps may vary on their type and level. There will probably be a global limit for this skill, where only one enemy can be asleep at the same time. This means that if you or any of your friends cast the skill on another enemy, the one currently sleeping will wake up as the new one falls asleep.

For the defensive skills, we have:

Meditate - A skill that you hold to regenerate EP at a greater speed. As we rebalance the skills it's likely we'll edit how EP works slightly, making it regenerate more slowly (among other things) - which means this skill will be more useful for more people than it might currently be. We also have an idea that if you charge x% of your EP and reach max using Meditate, the next spell will cast will be cast for free.

Shield - A shield you can cast around yourself or a friend that absorbs some damage. If the shield HP runs low and you get hit by an attack that finishes off the shield, you will take the remaining damage of the shield-breaking attack, so beware!

In single player, this shield is cast like a regular skill, while in multiplayer holding the button will bring you into a wheel (like when you control the Frosty Friend), which shows the faces of you and each of your friends characters. Press up to cast the shield on yourself, or right to cast it on player number two, etc.

The shield will also have some kind of perfect guard effect, if you manage to cast it right before you or your friend would get hit by an incoming attack, but we haven't decided exactly what this will be yet.

Blink - A short-range teleport ability that auto targets some distance away. This means that if you tap the skill you will blink across the screen, but if you hold the button down you can move the target around to change where you land.

Finally, there's the two buff spells:

Offense - Boosts damage, speed and crit.

Defense - Boosts defense, shield regeneration and EP regeneration.

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One important disclaimer in relation to these skills is that they're all subject to change depending on your feedback or our experience while testing them out! For now though, this is the lineup we're looking at and right now we all agree it's gonna make things much more interesting :)