Narratively, Soren was a skilled swordsman and captain of the guard, though also young and often in-over-his head, trying a little too hard to show off his skill and fumbling in the process.

Soren was an unfinished hero that I picked up and drove across the finish line, primarily adjusting his resource and his primary ability, along with smaller adjustments to the rest of his kit.

The most significant change and “A-ha!” moment was to change his primary ability, which empowered his next attack and gave brief Block frames, to have its usability refreshed every time his combo meter passed a marked threshold. This meant he had 1 free “you can block while attacking (and benefit from the empowered attack)” per X hits, and would waste it if you didn’t use it within those hits. This made his optimal play care a lot about when the enemy would hit, and exactly when you’d hit your next combo threshold (note: most empowered abilities had more hits, growing the combo meter faster).

Additionally, his ultimate was stronger based on what combo tier he was in, reset his combo meter, could be empowered itself, AND its hits counted for the new combo meter, to where a max combo empowered ult would hit enough to immediately grant another use of his primary ability. The original designer wanted Soren to be a combo fighter that really wanted to stay in the fight to get to max combo and hit a max-combo ultimate, and these changes really brought that to life in a dynamic way that could loop through a whole fight, where each loop was different based on enemy behavior.
– Note: His ultimate had no cooldown, it just required that he was at least into his second tier of his combo meter. But a Tier 2 ultimate wasn’t much stronger than a normal Ability, so it was mostly only useful for finishing fights or getting some extra AoE.

This desire to stay in and do fancy things, but getting punished when you mis-time the block by getting bonked on the head and dropping your combo — this really captured the “play like Soren” that we were driving for. All in all, he was intended to have a high skill ceiling that was really dynamic and rewarding to pull off, and we pulled that off! He was a blast to play in all content.

Here’s a video of Soren’s tooltips for his abilities, resource, and level-up bonuses

Here’s a video of Soren’s abilities in a controlled environment (training dummy)