Continuing with Dark Magic characters, Claudia is Viren’s daughter, a mage that’s been doing Dark Magic since she was quite young and carries a bunch of spell reagents with her in her purse. She’s quite resourceful, has a fairly playful attitude, and wasn’t as canonically villainous as her father (but still a Dark Magic user and aligned with Viren’s faction).

Given her narrative resourcefulness, I positioned her to be the most complex caster. As part of “playing like Claudia,” I wanted players to come to learn what each Dark Magic reagent would do, and play accordingly.

I designed her to have a pseudo-random reagent chosen, which would modify what her primary damage ability did. This was shown to the player with a Tetris-like UI of showing what the current reagent is, and what the upcoming one(s) will be. Additionally, her ultimate was to empower her next reagent, further rewarding players for understanding optimal reagent use and planning out their uses. That ultimate had no cooldown, but caused Corruption, so its usage was quite dynamic and up to the player to balance out.

Beyond that core mechanic, she had solid combos (e.g. “Put poison pool on the ground -> root them in it”), and had one rarely-appearing reagent that served as a sort of “ultimate reagent” so she still had big exciting power spike moments beyond her more regular reagent empowerment.

This video shows Claudia’s tooltips for her abilities, resource, and level-up bonuses

This video shows Claudia’s abilities in a controlled environment (training dummy)