Combat: Super Charged!

Our goal for combat in PRLW is to create fast, intuitive, and reactive online PvP. We want players making fast decisions, observing and adapting to their opponents, and searching and creating teams that fit their play styles.

Our first patches taught us a lot, and we’ve massed a lot of community feedback. Combat Super Charged is a huge step forward for PRLW. Here’s a rushdown of the changes!

## **Strikes**

A major part of Combat Super Charged is to fix the current state of Strikes. Currently, Strikes are too weak, especially when compared to their Breaker and Defensive counterparts. While a Breaker will clearly beat any Defensive move and Defensive moves easily interrupt & counter Strikes, a Strike vs. a Breaker has a flimsy at best chance of beating it. With Strikes being so weak against Blocks, it’s too risky to use them. What we’re going to do is give them a true immunity to Breakers. Now, when a Breaker hits a warrior in mid Strike, the Striking character will just go through the Breaker, uninterrupted. A flash of yellow will cover the warrior, indicating to both players that the Strikeout Clash has happened. The Striker will take no damage, and continue to damage the Breaking warrior.

 Strikes could be beaten by Breakers

In our office play tests, this has made for much more strategic, reactionary, and fun combat. No longer are you helpless in the corner or stuck with a bunch of Strikes when you know your opponent is going to Block and put you in Recovery, this is a great change for the game.

## **Assists**

Assists have been completely overhauled to better fit into the team and provide diverse support and reward smart team building. A lot has changed!

Invincibility frames on the dash-in entrance have been removed. Assists can now be hit while entering the arena, getting rid of the unintended “call in an Assist to dodge damage” exploit. This makes calling in Assists much more risky and strategic.

Also, we now transfer the hit reaction an Assist receives to the Leader. Before, when you landed a Stun, Launch, or any special type of hit, the Assist just dashed out of the Arena and the Leader spawned back in. This was exploitable, making Assists the safest way to start an attack. Now, when an Assist gets attacked, they fly out the arena and whatever type of
hit reaction knocked them out is applied to the Leader!

 Assists invincible on entrance
 Assists receive no punishment for getting hit
 All Assists cost 5 EP

Finally, with all these changes, we were able to relax the rule of all Assists costing 5 EP. This was originally put in place due to players being able to spam attacks like Yellow Movie Ranger’s Flurry (which was originally 3 EP!). Not too bad when you can’t spam it, but when it cost 3 EP, had huge amounts of invincible frames, and was super safe, even if blocked…well, yeah. Now, we can look at Assists as any other ability. All Assists have been changed, so make sure to take a look at the EP costs and damage output of your favorites in the patch notes.

## **Recovery**

One of the aspects of Strikes being so weak were the harsh punishment they received when Blocked. This is an animation state called Recovery that the player couldn’t dash, block, or cast abilities from. And it was way too long! Now, it’s much shorter. It still serves its purpose of being a punishment vs. block, but now, aggressive and risky play styles are more viable. The speed and back-and-forth of matches is much better as well.

 Recovery was ~3 seconds

## **Wrap Up**

So those are the major changes for Combat Super Charged. A lot of this was based off of community feedback from all the places the passionate PRLW fans post: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit…we’re always looking for great feedback on ways to make the game better. It almost feels like a collaboration. Keep it coming!

## **Additional Changes**

* Air Hits

Characters are now suspended for longer when hit in mid air. This makes air combos a more important strategy, as they can not be block interrupted. So launch before you combo!

* Classes

Changes – Attackers and Balanced have been made more viable by increasing their base damage and critical chance. Defense has remained the same.

## **3 Fun Facts**

* Warriors are designed and developed months ahead of their release. That means that by the time the public gets access to new Warriors, there are still several done and waiting to be released!

* Yellow Movie Trini really was the strongest and most used assist during soft launch, along with MMPR Red Jason.
* Jason David Frank visited our office during the production of Power Rangers: Legacy Wars.