New Skill Development - Vigilant Strike

We're making a number of changes to improve melee survivability and build diversity. During discussions about these changes, I suggested adding a buff called Fortify that reduced damage taken by 25%. Unlike other buffs, this would only be obtainable by attacking an enemy in melee.

The advantage of having a buff rather than a skill or keystone is that we could give melee characters a few options for obtaining the buff if they wanted it. We're introducing a new support gem and a new passive mechanic that grant the buff by performing melee hits, but we also wanted an active skill as the easy way to quickly add Fortify on a new character.

We started brainstorming simple skills that could be used to grant Fortify. We first discussed adding a small dash attack that melee characters could use when first engaging enemies. After discussion and theorycrafting, we were hard pressed to come up with a movement skill that would also behave nicely if you were already in melee because of client server location synchronization. It was also pointed out that most builds would be better off supporting an existing movement skill with the Fortify support gem.

With this realization, we had found a question that would shape the rest of the design discussion: Why would you sometimes chose to use this over the support gem? We discussed options, but in the end the simplest solution was the most popular: Damage. We made the skill the highest single hit damage of any weapon skill, at the cost of having a short cooldown. We made adjustments after testing the skill, like having Endurance Charges override the cooldown, making the skill unable to be evaded to make the buff more reliable, and having it require a melee weapon, as the damage was astronomical with unarmed builds. Don't worry, unarmed builds have got other toys coming!

During this process, Ivan was working on the effects for the skill. Here are the skill and buff effects that he created, giving the skill a radiant theme:




Once we had the effects and a working prototype, then came one of the surprisingly difficult parts of skill development - naming the skill. After feedback and discussion from developers across the company, the name Vigilant Strike was chosen.

I hope you've all enjoyed this look at Vigilant Strike! I'll leave you today with a screenshot of our current working version of the skill gem.