Lore

“The most difficult decisions test even the strongest of wills, but his will has never wavered, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. He is Corvus, The Magistrate’s Blade. He is the son of Karne, the powerful leader of the Magistrate, but it is by his own merit that he has earned the absolute loyalty of his men and instilled fear in his enemies.

A charismatic leader and brilliant tactician, Corvus will stop at nothing to see his goals realized: a peace to surpass that of the Golden Age, under the Magistrate’s rule. With the near-limitless energy of the Abyss, bent to his iron will, and those soldiers still loyal to his vision of peace, he did what no other was capable of.”

Description

Corvus is a support character and the first character I worked on for Paladins. His “too long;didn’t read” (tl;dr) is “mark-juggling, fast-paced support”. The file below is, I believe, the very first Game Design Document (GDD) I wrote for Paladins. Does it show?

My goal with Corvus (an, in general, all heroes I design) was to provide players with a fun, complete experience regardless of the individual’s desire for complexity while also allowing players who like digging deep and getting the most out of their gameplay to excel beyond the baseline. “Plug and play” heroes, if you will, with a “high skill ceiling”.

For Corvus and his mark mechanic, this meant some failsafes to ensure players would always gain benefit from it and some extra little choices players could make if they wanted to min-max their playstyle. For example, healing a non-marked ally heals any marked allies for a percentage of the direct heal, while directly healing a marked ally increases the healing given and reduces the cooldown of the heal. If I just slap a mark on anyone, I gain benefits when healing. If I want to make a conscious decision, I can do that too.

GDD

Here’s one of my favorite voice lines. It is an attempt to capture how I often feel playing support for my team.

Below is the ability breakdown for Corvus.

Lore

“Her entire life was once devoted to Io, the Moon Goddess. She was a member of a martial order tasked with protecting ancient seals, but even they did not know the extent of the chaos beneath. Betrayed by her Goddess and alone in an uncaring world, she has chosen to embrace that chaos. The Realm is on the path of self-destruction, and if that is what it desires, she is more than happy to oblige. Those who dread her coming are those who have any knowledge of the workings of the world beyond their own lives, for she is Vora, Harbinger of the End of the Realm, and they are not prepared.”

Description

Vora is a flank character. My goal with her was to try to play around with mechanics that relied on Damage-Over-Time (DOT), a stack resource, and high mobility to create a unique-to-Paladins experience. Her short summary would be something along the lines of: “high mobility; high sustained damage, stack management”.

One of my favorite aspects of each champion is the complexity of the narrative we are creating. Part of that is also lore, and Vora was particularly rich in lore. Shoutout to Stephanie Panisello for doing a great job with her, by the way. I really enjoyed working with amazing voice talent when creating these characters. Vora is the titular Harbinger of a world-ending threat, later to be revealed as the massive worm, Yagorath. Vora also had a dancing theme that animation and I agreed upon. This is reflected in a number of places, including her animations/emotes, voice lines, and visual design.

With Vora, the largest challenge was in finding the balance between up-front damage and the DOT damage she deals, as most players find that it feels uncanny to deal little or no damage up front when hitting an enemy, even if more damage is dealt later as a result of the hit(s). A bit part of that is delivering that information, of course, but it was still relevant when developing her kit.

Vora is slightly more difficult to get full value without a bit of finesse, but I wanted to make sure her baseline experience was relatively straightforward so that it became how the players uses the mobility and stacks (in her vine, ultimate, and offhand) that dictates effectiveness. A strong flavor of vining around the map and dealing sustained DOT damage with a pinch of conditional immunity and a dash of The Maw execute makes a fun flanking experience. Using stacks always provides benefits to Vora, but proper stack management provides even more.

Abilities

Here’s the featured voice line for Vora.

Below is the ability breakdown for Vora.

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