Welcome back to another hero spotlight.  Before we get into the usual details though, I’d like to give a brief update on the game’s overall progress.  The past month has been spent building the first boss, and doing a lot of testing and tuning of the initial experience.  We’ve been examining and tweaking things like how quickly you get gold, how quickly the difficulty increases, and the relative power of different characters.  Along the way, we’ve found and fixed a lot of little issues and bugs too.  We’re feeling really confident in where the game is at, and hope to rapidly cruise through the remaining bosses as we prepare for a Spring launch.  Now, let’s talk about our third and final ranged damage dealer…

Odette, Bloodweaver

Bio: Daughter of the immortal witch Wynter.  She’s lived in isolation much of her life, studying forbidden magic and watching the cycle of prosperity and ruin that plagues the kingdom with dispassionate curiosity.

Odette is a ranged damage dealer that draws ideas from both the Battleheart and Battleheart Legacy “witch” classes to provide strong single-target damage and utility.  Her unique ability to fuel her attacks with her own health gives her great potential, but also adds some risk.  She employs the following abilities:

Drain Life:  Attacks a single target, extracting their health in order to heal the most wounded member of your party.  This gives Odette some great group utility, and also synergizes with her Soul Crush ability (described below).  If you want to emphasize Odette’s supporting role, you can enhance the healing of this spell significantly, and even have it heal two allies at once.

Soul Crush:  Unleashes a massive blast of dark energy on your current target.  This is one of the hardest hitting abilities in the game, and has almost no cooldown at all, but has the downside of consuming a large part of Odette’s health.  This cost can be mitigated by healing Odette directly or through her own Drain Life spell, but if you’re careless you can end up destroying yourself.  Talents can increase the damage and reduce the health cost.  A notable talent causes critical hits with Soul Crush to immediately reset Drain Life’s cooldown, allowing for a cycle of destruction when the dice roll your way.

Horror:  Odette’s primary target is paralyzed in fear, and nearby enemies are also struck with terror, forcing them to run around helplessly.  This is a handy crowd-control skill which players of previous Battleheart games will recognize, although it no longer emits from the caster, but from her target, making it easier to capitalize on clumps of enemies regardless of Odette’s position.  Talents can also increase all of Odette’s damage against crowd-controlled targets, making her able to horrify and then obliterate her enemies, or take advantage of control effects provided by her team. Another fun one gives a small random chance for Horror to not only paralyze, but also deal extreme damage to its primary target.