Greetings, Champions! The review to Forms and Auras brought up a few questions, so we’re taking a few minutes to review the review. This will include some information about why these changes were made, and how they work with other content to make Champions Online more fun.


Why make these changes?

With the Gravitar 10 man fight, we felt that taking a look at player build diversity and player power choice was a good idea, to properly balance these fights. A few trends popped out as being extremely prevalent, the first of which was the use of Enrage as a ranged damage booster, and the second was the use of Aura of Primal Majesty to fill out every part of a build without much penalty. Both of these things were causing otherwise good builds to be clearly overshadowed and ignored.


Ok, then why Forms?

One of the changes we had had in discussion for quite a while was making Enrage a toggled Form. Toggled Forms present an interesting power tax on players in that you can trade some energy efficiency and a power slot to boost your damage significantly. They also allow you to have a little more dynamic combat, such as Form of the Tempest being driven by Critical hits, or Form of the Master being driven by dodges, or Aspect of the Infernal feeding off of Poison. These kinds of stacking powers felt good when they were getting stacked up, and felt really rewarding once you got to that point of being fully stacked.

This style of rewarding a player for doing something really well felt good, and we decided that toggled forms needed to cover more possible builds. This meant creating new forms to fill out some build types that were not yet represented by forms, and bringing a little more parity to remove some of the more confusing parts of existing forms.

With all that in mind, we changed Enrage to a form and introduced three new forms; Concentration, Compassion, and Manipulator. In addition, Aspect of the Bestial and Aspect of the Infernal lost their multiplicative damage buff in favor of the more simple scaling that the other forms have, which makes them easier for players to understand at a glance. We removed Aspect of the Ethereal because it functioned identically to the new Enrage.

This all leads to new and interesting ways to fill out builds that didn’t have a form, without forcing you to pick up a stat that didn’t match your build or your theme.


Alright, what about Auras?

Auras hadn’t been in an interesting place for a long time, with most people only ever using Aura of Primal Majesty or Aura of Runic Protection. In addition, it really felt like people weren’t using the Auras as they were really intended to be used. The intent of these Auras was to provide a powerful buff to your team. After a lot of feedback from players we made some a change that let players Auras provide both a solid team buff while still retaining the ability to perform well solo.   Auras now behave uniquely based on what role you are in while they are active. 

After making these changes we felt that some powers were still not performing well enough so we made a few more changes. We added new effects to Aura of Ebon Destruction and Aura of Arcane Clarity and we looked at a few other passives that we felt just weren’t in a good place yet; we made significant improvements to Regeneration, Personal Force Field, and Medical Nanites.


How does this work in boss fights?

Well, we have been hearing the community would like more varied and dynamic fights. So, with that in mind, we have been building up 10-man Rampage Alerts, that test player reflexes and coordination and will require teamwork and solidarity to overcome! The first of these new fights was Gravitar.

Don’t think we have forgotten other new content however, with new custom Alerts and Events in the works. We are really excited about these changes and the direction the game is moving, and we hope you are too!


I hope this has helped clarify some of the reasoning behind these changes and look forward to helping stop some of these villains with you!

Chris “Gentleman_Crush” Meyer



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