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An archived Hellgate: London feature. See the Hellgate Archives for more.

Feature: Flux's E3 2006 Templar Report
Date: May 18, 2006
Source: The Unofficial HGL Site

Contents 1 Templar Report 1.1 Combat Style 1.2 Templar Skills 1.3 INVOCATION 1.4 HOLY AURAS 1.5 ASSAULT

Templar Report

My first play experience at E3 was with a Templar. The starting equipment in the E3 build was better than usual; a Firebrand sword and a Peacemaker pistol. This equipment gave my templar plenty of killing might to scythe right through anything encountered early in the game, and allowed him to play melee swordsman, or sniper, since the peacemaker had medium range and good damage.

The default set up had the peace maker pistol in the left hand and the sword in the right. So when you left clicked you shot the gun, and when you right clicked you swung the sword. You could do either at any time, or both at once, though the sword was obviously useless at a distance. The gun was useful from a distance and also at point blank range, but I found myself forgetting to use it when I was in melee range and busy slashing away. Remembering to actually use your full arsenal is definitely a good idea in Hellgate: London.

To shoot things you simply pointed yourself towards them (by using the mouse), and advanced into range (by using the WASD arrow keys). When a monster was close enough to target, your crosshairs dot appeared. It would remain red when you were out of range (range depended on your weapon, and there were huge range differences between gun types), and turn green when you were in range. Monsters had widely-differing ranges of awareness to, and while some guns let you shoot at them before they could "see" you, with other weapons (swords, especially) they would see you and charge at you before you were close enough to hit the with your fire.

The general play style was to spot a pack of monsters, zombies for instance, and advance on them with your target showing red. It would automatically target the closest one near the center of your screen, and you'd walk in, firing (without effect) if you wanted to, until suddenly the target went green and your shots would start hitting. The monster would then notice you, if it hadn't already, and would come at you. If you wanted to keep shooting, you'd retreat, firing as the monster advanced, and in most cases you'd kill the demon before it ever got within biting range.

Most monsters didn't have much AI in the E3 build, and it was quite easy to pick off the zombies one or two at a time, while the other 8 or 10 of them didn't react to two of their fellows being shot and then led off to die. AI might well change before the final game, and zombies are stupider than other, higher level monsters, but I'm just saying how it was.

If you wanted to melee, you'd just run into range, or let the monsters come to you, while swinging your sword or other melee weapon. Melee was effective, but it felt imprecise. I tended to move past the monsters and then had to spin around or back past them to get them into hitting range, and sometimes monsters would move a little bit out of range and leave me swinging and missing. It also felt weird that my character could keep walking in any direction while I had my target locked onto a given monster, and even while I was swinging a melee weapon.

I'm used to the combat in Diablo II, where your character is locked in place while engaging at melee range (with most skills, at least), and compared to that, HGL felt sort of drifty, like my characters and the monsters were on treadmills or something, and floating around each other a bit. Also, most of the melee attacks are sweeping, continuous swings, where your weapon appears to be repeatedly passing straight through the enemy. Most of those type of attacks in Diablo II were chop, chop, chop movements, which looked like you were hitting something, and felt more viscerally-pleasing. In HGL all the waving around felt sort of fake; like I was swinging the handle of a sword without any blade, or chopping up a column of smoke.

I think HGL needs clearer hit animations, with sounds for each impact, some swing animations that visually hit and then pull the weapon back instead of always just sweeping it through, and maybe some sort of "stand still while hitting" control, whether passive or active. Or perhaps I just needed to play a bit more and get used to how it is now, at which point it would have ceased to bother me.

Combat Style

As for fighting with the Templar, I found myself using guns more than melee, since with the low monster damage and high weapon damage, melee almost felt like cheating. It was too easy, to run in and cut up a dozen monsters with just one or two swings each, while the entire pack of them hardly scratched my armor. Using a pistol (or two) felt more tactical and precise, and I greatly enjoyed shooting them down and experimenting with different weapon ranges. Unfortunately, the Templar didn't have any skills for gunplay in the E3 build. Some of his auras helped, but there were no specific "make your shooting more accurate/deadly/rapid/add explosions to it/fire two shells at once/etc" skills. I held guns and shot them, and things died, but there wasn't much style to it.

The Templar had several skills that worked with melee weapons, but since his regular attack skill worked so well and killed so quickly, hardly anyone but the Flagship guys were bothering with them. (More on that below.) It also helped that the FSSers were familiar enough with the interface to switch between skills during combat without looking down at the keyboard, etc.

Dual wielding was always fun, but going with two swords almost felt like cheating. The game was absurdly easy with just one sword, but with two, you could kill anything in a blink, almost as quickly as you ran up to it. You'd take some damage, but with health injectors plentiful, that didn't mean much. Not using a pistol felt sort of wasteful; since you always had the chance to get off several shots between the time monsters saw you advancing and when you were actually in melee range, but it hardly mattered, as quickly as they died once you were chopping at them.

Dual pistols was a lot more fun, for me at least. I enjoyed the slower-firing, more visible guns personally; pea-shooters like Plagueblasters and Spark Rifles were noisy and quick killing, but the E3 build did not have much in the way of impact graphics for those guns, so you just saw monsters dying, without seeing what you were shooting at them. Peace Makers were a lot more fun, with their big purple orbs that splashed on impact, even if they weren't necessarily as quick to kill.

For a time one of my templars was armed with dual peace makers, and I had some fun with their firing rate. Both shot at the same pace, slightly faster then one shot per second, and one was usually enough to kill the level 2 and 3 zombies I was facing at the time. For that reason, it was a waste to shoot both guns at the same time, since both shots would hit the same zombie when just one would have killed it. I therefore shot one gun, then the other half a second later, and after that I just held down the mouse buttons to keep them both shooting. In this way I had one gun or the other firing every half second, and never wasted two shots on the same target, if one was enough to kill it.

It was also fun to synchronize the guns and obliterate single targets, and I'd often end battles by delaying one gun a second, then shooting them both at the same time, sending the last monster down like it had been low bridged, with a big splash of purple (spectral) energy left over its falling corpse. Combining different types of guns was also a lot of fun, with a Firestarter spewing a jet of flame in one hand, and a Flash Banger Grenadier throwing short-ranged grenades in the other.

No matter what gun I found and used though, melee seemed to do more damage. It would take me 10 or 12 shots to take down a big monster from a distance, as I circled and retreated and dodged, but just 4 or 5 sword slashes in close; and with the monster damage nerfed as it was in the E3 build, the best strategy was generally just to rush in and chop away. You might need a health injector hit to keep your red full, but there were plenty of those dropping anyway.

As for strategy, there wasn't much needed in the early levels we got to in the E3 build. The game difficulty was nerfed (monsters did 50% less damage than usual), and with lots of healing health injectors you could pretty well run through anything without pausing to worry about death. Templars were fun and had decent variety in style, but a more challenging game build is required to really put them through their paces.

Templar Skills

The Templar's and Cabalist's skills were divided up into three menus at E3. They weren't really skill trees, since there weren't any branching dependencies. Just 3 groupings of 4 or 5 skills, any of which you could select once you reached the level requirement to do so. The skills as presented in the E3 build were not anything like they'll be in the final game. As far as I could tell, the Hellgate team took a bunch of skills that were working fairly well and stuck them into three skill menus so players could experiment with them.

We've got those listed here, but don't get too attached to the skill names or values or menu arrangement, since they're all very likely to change.

Furthermore, skills were wacky in terms of multiple points. Some allowed you to add more than 1 point, others did not, and there wasn't any clear rhyme or reason to it. Flagship guys told me it would likely be this way in the final game too; some skills might only allow you to add 1 point, or 5 points, while others might take 10 or 20 or more. This seems sort of wacky to me, like a very half-assed way of balancing things, and it's not clear if you'll find equipment to add +1 to all of your skills, skills from a given tree, or just individual skills. They're still working on the limitations and balances, it seems, and have yet to arrive at anything like a final solution. Skill trees might even return, with skill dependencies (you must put a point into skills A and B before you can enable skill C) and synergies (points in skills A and B will boost the damage of skill C) and all the rest. It's still very much up in the air.

Also note that these skills aren't anywhere near their final display form. None list the level required to use them, few list the damage they deal, and their display in the game wasn't real great either. Your icon would change, if you set it to the right or left click, but since skills can be activated from the 1-10 keys, it wasn't always clear what skill was being used, or that a skill was being used.

INVOCATION

The (level) listed is the level required to enable this skill. These values did not display in the E3 build, so they're taken from my memory, and are approximate. (And will surely change in the final game anyway.)

Flurry Boost (level 2)

This chant conveys a boost to the Templar's melee attack speed.

• Effect: Speed increased for 5 seconds by 30% [plus 10% per level]
• Power Cost: 40

Challenge (level 3)

This command draws enemies within the Templar's Holy Aura into melee range and decreases the damage that they do.

• Effect: 25% damage per level
• Power Cost: 25

Whirlwind (level 5)

The Templar unleashes his righteous fury and becomes a spinning whirlwind of doom for 4 seconds.

• Requires: Sword
• Power Cost: 40
• Shift Skill: Press shift when a target is in range.

Shield of Faith (level 5)

This prayer grants a 15 second boost to the Templar's total amount of shields.

• Effect: +50 shields [+25 shields per level]
• Power Cost: 40

Of these skills, the only one I saw used was Whirlwind, which basically let your Templar spin in circle while swinging his swords around. (And really should have been in the Assault skill tree.) I'd say it was maybe a double-attack at best, though it might have increased the damage as well. With all of the monsters dying so quickly in the E3 build, it was hard to see if this really made any difference or not.

The others seem to be designed for a more difficult game as well. There was no reason to ever cast Challenge or Shield of Faith at E3, since things died so quickly. In a more difficult build, you'd want to use those and Flurry Boost constantly to give yourself an edge when dealing with individual monsters, or perhaps a nasty boss pack (we saw very few of those).

At this point there are no plans to include any sort of power leeching equipment, other than perhaps some very few rare/unique items, so if you're going to use a lot of special Templar skills, you're going to need a fair amount of power, or should plan on drinking lots of power potions.

HOLY AURAS

Currently, there are no auras in Hellgate: London that boost the stats or abilities of other players. All work just for the Templar, and they're basically passive skill boosts, not that unlike his various "hit faster/harder for X seconds" type skills. Auras do not show with a glowing ring beneath the feet as they did in Diablo II (though it would be a nice addition, since it's often hard to tell if another Templar's got one active, or what it is). Instead they create a faint ring of purple that surrounds the Templar and shows how far your aura extends.

This can be a pretty nice graphic; I enjoyed it with Fire Aura, since the ring of purple sent up little flashes of flame every now and then, and when the ring passed over monsters it would briefly cover them in flame, or a bright glow.

Auras in Hellgate: London take a bite out of your total power (mana) while they are enabled. For instance, if you have 80 power, and you enable an aura that costs 25, your power will simply drop to 55. That's how much you'd have available to spend on other skills or auras, and at 55 your blue display would look full; you couldn't go back up to 80 until you turned off that particular aura.

Flagship guys told me they were considering allowing multiple auras at once, but that they might have to put some limits on it, depending on how it went in play testing. I didn't think the whole system was very clear at this point, with no obvious visible sign of what aura I had active under my feet, the activated aura not showing in my regular skill display box, and no clear visual indication how much power it was costing me to keep it enabled. The interface is still being worked on, obviously.

The (level) listed is the level required to enable this skill. These values did not display in the E3 build, so they're taken from my memory, and are approximate. (And will surely change in the final game anyway.)

Aura of Renewal (level 2)

Through meditation and the channeling of divine energy the natural healing abilities of the Templar are greatly increased.

• Regeneration rate changes based on the number of enemies within the Templar's Holy Aura.
• Upkeep cost: 30 Power (minus 5 per level)

Fire Aura (level 2)

By channeling the flames of eternal vigilance, the amount of Fire damage caused by the Templar increases. The amount is based on the number of enemies within the Templar's Holy Aura.

• Upkeep Cost: 20 Power

Grand Aura (level 5)

Vigilance in studying the tactics of the demons increases the radius of the Templar's Holy Aura by 15% per level.

Power Aura (level 8)

As a Templar places themselves in greater danger,their increasing faith fuels their power.

• Power regeneration rate changes based on the amount of enemies within the Templar's Holy Aura.
• Upkeep Cost: 30 power (minus 5 per level)

Aura of Sacred Winds (level 8)

This appeal calls upon the divine spirits to turn aside some ranged attacks that enter into the Templar's Holy Aura

• Upkeep Cost: 25 Power

A number of Templar skills increase in power based on the number of monsters in proximity. This is an interesting wrinkle that did not exist in Diablo II, and I saw several Flagship guys taking advantage of it. They'd activate Fire Aura, equip a Shockwave pistol (or a Flamewave, which looked just the same except for emitting a fire nova), and run around a pack of monsters, drawing them in closer. This would get them all in range of a single shot from the gun, while also upping the damage of that shot, based on the number of monsters in range. It was a successful strategy, but again, sort of unnecessary in the nerfed E3 build, since they could probably have just chopped up all of those monsters just as quickly.

As for the other auras, I never saw Renewal, Grand, Power, or Sacred Winds being used. I never saw a Templar high enough of a level to use Power or Sacred Winds, and even if they had been, it didn't seem like either would have been needed in the E3 build. Grand seems like a useful sort of Aura Mastery, in Diablo II terms, and Renewal might be useful long term, but was pointless at E3 with so many health injectors dropping.

ASSAULT

Sprint is not a skill that we'll see in this tree in the final game, since it's been made a universal skill. Like attack or fire both weapons, Sprint is something every character can do at any time, simply to move around the levels more quickly.

The (level) listed is the level required to enable this skill. These values did not display in the E3 build, so they're taken from my memory, and are approximate. (And will surely change in the final game anyway.)

Sprint (universal skill, no level requirement)

Spurred on by divine determination, the running speed of the Templar is greatly increased for a short amount of time.

• Power cost: 10 (minus 3 per level)

Slam (level 2)

The Templar rises high above the minions of darkness and brings down the heavy hand of the heavens.

• Effect: Overhand attacks does +200% damage [plus 10% per level]
• Requires: Sword
• Power cost: 5
• Shift Skill: Press shift when a target is in range.

Sweep (level 3)

The righteous vengeance of the Templar is channeled into a whirling attack that strikes any foes within melee range.

• Effect: +75% damage (plus 5%per level)
• Requires: Sword
  • Power cost: 5

Charge (level 8)

Calling upon the courage of his ancestors, the Templar charges headlong into battle!

• Requires: Sword
• Power cost: 25

Of these skills, I never saw a Templar level up enough to enable Charge, but Sweep seemed effective at melee, if not strictly necessary in the E3 build. Slam was fun though; with it your templar does a little leap, and brings down his weapon with both hands, like an exaggerated animation of a man hitting something with a hammer. Again, not needed at E3, but something that'll be fun to use in the final game.