Amaya wasn’t my hero, I only touched her up at the end and designed/implemented her block mechanic (well, “the” block mechanic for all tanks). So really I’m just making this post to talk about tanks, defensive abilities, and how her resource works since that was my main contribution to her kit.

Amaya was the primary tank that players were given immediate access to, so we positioned her to be fairly straight-forward and provide a clear experience of what tanks bring to the table. Narratively, she was a leader in the army, fought with a massive shield, and was quick to deliver the beat-down.

For her resource, we mostly wanted to equally reward her aggression and successful defensive action, promoting that players learn to continuously attack between blocking, which was important for tanks for holding aggro. So for her resource, while keeping her straightforward, she builds up a meter to buff her shield, and once maxed, she can use any of her abilities immediately with empowered bonuses.

Defenses and Aggro

As part of the combat system design, I gave each role a different defensive ability, shared among members of that role. The game was designed to be played in solo, duo, or trio, with no healing role. The limitations of these defensive abilities, as well as other details like availability of staggering moves and other CC in kits, were a big part of how the game was “enjoyable in solo and unbalanced parties, but teammates with different strengths are appreciated”

• Block (Tanks) – Blocking a hit drains stamina based on the amount of damage the hit would’ve dealt (post-mitigation). If you don’t have enough stamina to block the whole hit, the remainder is dealt to you with a flat % reduction for a “partial block.” However, if you block with perfect timing, you get a Perfect Block, and the hit is fully blocked without any stamina loss. It’s also a keyword, so abilities and items can trigger off of a Perfect Block. Elites and bosses also take some stagger damage when Perfect Blocked.
  • This promotes active tanking and rewards players for learning the precise timing of enemy attacks, in some cases leading to a sort of rhythm game to perfect block combo attacks.
  • It also prevents players from simply holding block on high-difficulty content, as they’ll run out of stamina and start taking damage. But against low-difficulty content, they can pretty safely hide behind their shield and take it slowly, as lighter hits won’t break through stamina or tank sturdiness behind partial blocks.
• Dodge (Melee DPS) – Dodge in the desired direction. Has iframes, costs a large chunk of stamina per use. Players have directional control for the last portion of the animation, after the iframes have ended. Stamina recovers relatively quickly.
  • This provided melee dps with a pretty regularly usable defensive option, but with limitations to prevent spam-dodging, a slightly strict iframe window, and of course downtime where they aren’t doing damage, wasting cooldown time, etc.
• Backstep (Ranged DPS) – Dodge away from the current facing direction. Has iframes, costs a large(r) chunk of stamina per use. Players don’t have directional control during the last portion of the animation. Stamina recovers slightly more slowly than for Dodge.
  • This gives ranged dps an easy way to kite, and skilled players can basically “aim backwards” (or sideways) to do advanced backsteps towards the target or sideways. For newer players, it helps teach kiting. Overall, it provides a defensive measure that’s slightly more restricted and less flexible, balancing out ranged capabilities of killing enemies before they pose an active threat.

I’ll probably strip that out and make a combat systems design section on the portfolio, but for now it’ll live here. Here’s a video of Amaya’s tooltips

And here’s a video of Amaya’s abilities in a controlled environment (training dummy)

And here’s a video of Amaya in a mission, albeit solo. Tanks were balanced to support solo play well, as their “training dummy DPS” was nearly 70% of the DPS of others, but in a solo scenario, other classes are losing DPS uptime during dodges moreso than tanks are losing DPS from blocking. (Though highly skilled DPS players will minimize that uptime loss by clever use of abilities and CC)