This article assumes the reader has some experience with Champions Online, especially the melee powers. At the time of writing, a balance pass is currently being worked for melee powers, which may alleviate some of the issues addressed here.

I am surprised that the melee powers in Champions Online lack any inspiration from fighting games.

A quick backtrack: when I first described Champions Online to my friend Paul, he exclaimed, “Buttons do things! That’s so awesome!” The response was essentially tied to the Active Blocking system, a progressive idea in the field of MMOs, to be sure. Unfortunately, Paul was expecting something like Blade and Soul, and I was expecting a much more epic, less static version of City of Heroes. We were both wrong.

Champions is much more mobile than any MMO I have played thus far (except maybe Dungeons & Dragons Online, which featured an attack button, dodging, and climbing mechanics), and many of the systems are original to be sure, but the epic-ness I was looking for was not present. Many of the powers themselves don’t feel very original at all; there’s no analogue in Champions to CoX’s Ice Slick, or Hurricane, or Fulcrum Shift, or Granite Armor, or Lightning Rod — powers that made you go ‘Oh shit!’ the first time you used them. Force Cascade and Gigabolt are really the only powers in Champions that make your jaw drop.

Then there is the issue with melee. It feels like the designers thought people would like to play melee just because it was melee, and didn’t put much thought into what needed to be balanced in terms of melee vs. ranged. It shows: right now, there is no point to playing a melee character in Champions unless conceptually you like melee more. Ranged characters can do much more damage for far less risk, especially since the open power system means ‘tank mages’ are no longer a taboo: they are normal.

Let’s take a large subsection of melee powers in Champions; how about Martial Arts? Some of the problems:

• There are 4 different Martial Arts ’sets,’ (unarmed, single blade, dual blade, claws) each of which only have 6 unique powers (including an energy builder, and a passive offense)
• There are 8 powers that are ‘cross-overs,’ which are unlocked by all martial arts powers, regardless of set (including a passive and active defense, and multiple utility powers)
• The unique passive offense powers are generally worthless, or very difficult to use to maximum benefit
• Compound issues with melee in general (charging melee powers vs. moving enemies, getting into range, etc.)
• All 4 of the martial arts sets seem to have been designed around or to synergize with the poorly implemented passive offense abilities

That last one is important, and is very easy to demonstrate. Take the unarmed martial arts power “Thundering Kicks.” It has a 2-point advantage called “Floating Lotus Blossom,” which provides a stacking Dodge chance buff every hit, and all stacks expire upon a successful dodge. Now, this certainly could work well in conjunction with “Lightning Reflexes” (the MA passive defense), but specifically it synergizes with “Focus of the Unfettered Warrior,” an odd passive offense that increases your dodge rating (not nearly as much as Lightning Reflexes), and gives you one instance of a short duration, stacking damage buff every time you dodge an attack. Parallels between this in-set synergy and the other MA sets can be easily drawn — Single Blade depends on bleeding, Dual Blade depends on critting, and Claws (the odd man out) depends on killing or being crit.

Here’s the beef: this in-set synergy is really cool in theory, but it falls flat inside Champions. The benefits are either so minimal or difficult to use that the synergy doesn’t function properly, and stacking all the other issues with melee on top of it makes the martial arts sets the bottom of the barrel (although Dual Blade isn’t too bad, it still doesn’t hold a candle to ranged sets).

What boggles my mind is: why were the MA sets designed this way to begin with? Champions was touted as having action packed game-play, but the MA sets are anything but action packed. Pressing one button makes you do the same kick, over and over again, with endless repetition. Considering Champions has “combo powers,” which continue the attack in different ways by pressing the same button (using the same power), I don’t understand why the MA powers are so static by comparison.

There’s so much inspiration to use for the MA sets, but it seems like the current implementation was inspired by a “frame by frame” comic book style, where each power represents a different comic frame. Why not mix it up, though? Champions is campy enough that you aren’t going to break the game by looking outside of comic books for inspiration. I think the best place to look for melee inspiration is the Fighting Game genre.

Before there are riots, I am not advocating replacing the current Champions control structure with a ‘twitch-based’ (i.e. skill-based or dexterity-based) version. Rather, I am saying look at Fighting Games for the types of movements and combos that can inspire some truly epic MMO combat. Having a spammable roundhouse that does lackluster damage and stacks a dodge buff on you is pretty vanilla. Having a roundhouse with a follow-up that teleports you behind your target is interesting and tactical. If mobility is supposed to be so important in Champions, why are there so few powers that leverage that mobility?

Let’s take my above quick example and expand on it. First, we have to do away with the idea that MA powers should be complimentary to their passive, and not the other way around. This is why the MA offensive passives fail, and the elemental ranged passives succeed: the passive enhances the powers, rather than the powers being necessary to get the most out of the passive. Now let’s take “Thundering Kicks.”

“Thundering Kicks”, the base power, doesn’t change at all. Instead, we are giving it a few extra 2-point advantages. These advantages turn the power into a combo-power, and each one is mutually exclusive. Essentially, we are giving melee versatility and adaptability as an advantage in exchange for some of the natural restrictions it has. Some example advantages:

• Shadow Stride: after the initial kick, the second immediate activation teleports you behind the target, delivering another, less powerful kick; power gains a 5 second cooldown
• Floating Lotus Blossom: after the initial kick, the combo causes you to roll towards and pop-up into the target, knocking them up a moderate distance; power gains a 10 second cooldown
• Soaring Dragon: after the initial kick, the combo allows you to follow up with a powerful kick that knocks your target back a moderate distance; power gains a 6 second cooldown

This lays the ground-work for advantage prototypes that can be applied to other powers. For instance, “Shadow Stride” is a perfect candidate for an advantage that could be applied to multiple powers, like Crippling Challenge.

Now for the problems. Implementing this suggestion as written probably won’t happen. The most glaring reason is all the extra animations that need to be created for each melee power that uses this advantage structure, especially when the Champions team is focused on creating more content for the game. The second reason would be technical hurdles. Turning a single-attack power into a combo-power, I am certain, is not as easy as ‘adding a move’ to the combo; I seriously doubt the powers are built this way. Buying the advantage would have to act like a power-replacer (which they DO have the technology for), and over-ride the base power with the specific combo power. The problem here is that each combo-power to replace the base with would have to be constructed individually, and therefor have to be adjusted separately during any balance passes (unless they get embedded into some awesome spreadsheets); essentially meaning if there is a minor slip up, the combo-power might over-ride the base power with a version that has some sort of damage disparity (more/less than the base power, different stat scaling, etc.). This would also artificially bloat their power database with custom-crafted power-replacers, which might not be too big of an issue, since power-replacers already exist, but it would probably double- or triple the amount of power-replacers in the game, easily.

This is just a quick design inspiration though. All these combo-power advantages were derived from some of the inherent capabilities in many fighting games, and there is no shortage of ideas. Essentially, we want to make melee more visceral and less clunky. The synergy in melee should be from stringing moves together and leveraging mobility, not effects-crunching. The attacks and actions are the meat and bones of Champions, and should be elegant in their own right. The systems inside the powers (buff/debuff stacking, etc.) are great as mental exercises, but don’t make the game exciting to play. We need to bring the melee back into melee, making it a tighter, more fluid experience. The base is already there, we just need to build on it.