#kill world

[that-house]

Glacier is one of my favorite KILL WORLD characters and I’m so glad I was finally convinced to buff her—people complained about her a lot in the game’s early days and so a character who ultimately did very little for her team wound up going unloved for a long time

Glacier is Bastion Overwatch. or Hudson Supervive. or… Saw from Vainglory? Is that the dude’s name? She has a minigun and she spins it up the more she shoots and gains ridiculous damage at the cost of mobility.

as the name suggests, she also has ice theming. I’m genuinely unsure of where that came from, since it’s a relic of KILL WORLD’s predecessor game which sucked. she’s a defrosted Otzi figure who was found holding an ancient minigun made of sticks and stones (though she’s since upgraded to a modern replacement).

her kit is really fun to me as far as simple straightforward characters go. she scales her rate of fire with Spin Up, makes a wall that creeps across the map with Avalanche Bulwark (and can ride it into battle to negate the loss of her speed), repositions herself and slows enemies with Shifting Snow, and gains regenerating shield from her Permafrost passive. her ultimate, Ice Age, stuns everyone near her, making stunned allies invincible and leaving stunned enemies open to getting shot one million times with a gating gun

Good times good times

[that-house]

gonna play KILL WORLD tonight. if KILL WORLD doesn't suck mad shit, you will soon learn what KILL WORLD is about. if it's terrible you may never hear about KILL WORLD again.

[that-house]

^ meet Magus Augur, the Artillery Mage

the KILL WORLD sniper hero Magus occupied a gross niche of being the second least strategy-intensive sniper, whose gameplay consisted entirely of flinging mortar shots at your opponents from across the map for tiny little amounts of damage until you hit enough of them to do a big burst of damage. he didn't feel much like a wizard, and he definitely didn't feel fun.

the thing about being really easy and boring but NOT the easiest, most boring sniper is that no one wanted to play him, and if you were looking for an easy, boring sniper you'd simply play Bodycount.

but obviously wizard flying around in an exosuit with broomstick boosters over his shoulders while calling in enchanted airstrikes and blowing people up with spells was too fun of a concept to just Abandon.

sort of like how Gandalf died and came back with even bigger breasts, Magus may be dead but Augur is what he was always meant to be, boasting the wordiest kit in the game (as befitting a wizard), a cool lil Magick Meter mechanic, and a unique playstyle that i like to refer to as Missile Shepherding: vomit out a billion Magic Missiles and guide them across the map to blow up your enemies no matter where they're hiding

no clue if he's balanced but he's so so so cool and i cant wait to try him out

[that-house]

quick lil KILL WORLD musing re: the following question

how valuable is 1 piece of terrain vs 1 damage vs 1 forced movement vs 1 charge

it’s pretty easy to place 1 damage as the least valuable. an ability that dealt 1 damage and did nothing else would not be worth using over charging your ultimate. mind you, adding 1 damage to a weapon can still change TTK breakpoints. obviously that’s exacerbated by higher RoF weapons, but even in the case of, say, Vigil’s Huge Iron gun, taking it from Headshot 8 to Headshot 9 was wayyyyy too good. Going from two-tapping the squishiest assassins to two-tapping the tankier assassins made him disgustingly strong (though IMO Vigil has always been filthy disgusting bullshit and might always be filthy disgusting bullshit)

i thiiiink i’d rate charging a cooldown by 1 as the next least impactful, though it’s much more contextual and the long-term effect is perhaps the most subtle. getting a big ult off a turn faster or having access to a movement ability when needed can be huge. but i’m not really cautious about tossing a random little charge 1 into a character who’s feeling awkward to play. Mind you, Thicket’s passive handing out free charge to allies is pretty nasty and potentially gamebreaking.

as for the most valuable, i’m really not sure. It’s a bit of a toss-up IMO.

forced movement wins games. a lot of things add up to make for a win, but many matches i’ve played lately have been decided in the end by a Hero suddenly not being where everyone expected them to be (Hearth’s Flame Coil is one of the best abilities in the game lol). suddenly creating or denying a sightline or melee engagement is, unsurprisingly, really good. I also just really love forced movement and movement support in tactical games, the way it opens up the decisionspace at every step of the world offers so much depth. Notably, though, a single space of forced movement is good, but nowhere near as valuable as, say, Flame Coil’s 4 spaces.

So I think I’m going to say that 1 space of generated terrain is often going to be the best. terrain manipulation is certainly the one that i hand out to heroes the least. barring edge cases, having the ability to create terrain means you can always block a sightline when you need to. The exact value of that differs depending on team comps, but I think it’s telling that access to terrain generation is often a more defining aspect of a character’s kit than access to forced movement.

[that-house]

KILL WORLD HERO SPOTLIGHT: SUPERSTAR

It’s hard being a Hero. Not because of the moral responsibility (in my tabletop hero shooter KILL WORLD, Heroes are generally just immortal assholes), but because of the challenges. The issue is that there are basically no challenges. You’re at the top of your game, the world is your oyster, and there’s nothing left to strive for. No mortal, living or dead, can match Superstar’s invincible martial arts, so he pits himself against armies, gods, and his fellow Heroes in search of an actual fight.

Superstar was designed to be an introduction to melee Fighter-class Heroes. He has phenomenal stats, and his kit is simple but effective, with low cooldowns and a flexible ultimate.

Superstar’s passive, Lightspeed Kata, boosts his Evasion, even if he’s not moving. He’s harder to shoot and harder to get a headshot against. When he really puts his ass into it, he’s practically impossible to shoot at all.

Superstar’s weapon, Nova Fist, offers him respectable damage and excellent mobility, allowing him to close gaps or dart behind cover.

Superstar’s first ability, Get Hyped!, gives him a Shield and empowers his next action: if he moves, he moves further. If he attacks, he can reposition his target on hit.

Superstar’s second ability, Spinning High Kick, comes out without warning, damaging and slowing an adjacent enemy before they can react.

Superstar’s third ability, Giga Beam, has no cooldown and does a ton of damage in a long line, but there’s a catch: he can only use it if he’s already dealt damage twice this round. There’s a few ways to achieve this, but the most common method is just landing Nova Fist’s two hits.

Superstar’s ultimate, Schmove On ‘Em, is really simple: copy the next ability you use. A double Get Hyped! offers a huge shield and ridiculous mobility, a double Spinning High Kick lets you easily prepare a Giga Beam, and a double Giga Beam offers you some of the best damage in the game.

Superstar’s job is pretty simple. He does damage. He has the HP, evasion, and shielding needed to stand in the middle of a fight and duel tanks, or he can try to dive the backline and beat enemy snipers to death. If you line it up right, you can even use the tank to stack your Giga Beam and then shoot them and the sniper with it.

Join the Astralcord and play KILL WORLD today!!

[that-house]

play my hit new tabletop hero shooter KILL WORLD we have:

sword-toting haunted doll who takes you to the fucking thunderdome

Bro’s Got Hustle

obligatory weirdly sexy sniper

prehistoric pagan god of nuclear mechanics

gunk (portmanteau of gunk + punk)

the victorious fighting buddha sun wukong, like every fucking MOBA for some reason

defrosted cavewoman with a natural affinity for rotary cannons

a wizard in power armor

big lesbian werewolf mob boss who puts a collar on you and then beats you to death, which is, as I understand it, essentially some of y’all’s ultimate sexual fantasy

reverse d.va (mech suit that, when broken, reveals a completely ordinary grizzly bear)

Check out the The Astralcord community on Discord - hang out with 100 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

[that-house]

KILL WORLD HERO SPOTLIGHT: STELE

Stele is the enigmatic leader of KILL MOON, a doomsday cult that seeks to crash the moon into KILL WORLD and KILL the WORLD. I know what you're thinking: "is KILL WORLD'S moon not called the KILL MOON?" No, it's not, and they're really fucking pissed about that.

With Stele at the head of the order, they might just succeed.

Stele is an infinitely-scaling marksman who starts the game squishy but through the unstoppable power of Lots of Fucking Meteors and a Big Fucking Railgun eventually becomes horrifically tanky while outputting ridiculous damage.

Stele has two passives. The first, Skull Taker, just boosts her hit and crit rate, and partially charges her ultimate whenever she gets a headshot.

Her second passive is the big one: Prophecy of Ruin. Once a round, she gets to mark a small area of the map. If you don't get out of there fast you take a little damage as she drops a meteor on that position. It's good for flushing enemies out of cover, burning their movement, or punishing enemies who already used up their move.

Her weapon, Apocalypse Rail, is a simple high damage long range gun with 1 rate of fire. She's not oneshotting anyone, but if she shoots you you'll feel it.

The magic happens in her first ability. Every other round, Overkiller lets her next shot with Apocalypse Rail hit in an infinite length line with no damage falloff, piercing all enemies and up to one space of terrain, destroying that terrain permanently. If it punches through something, all subsequent hits along the line are even more accurate and thus more likely to headshot for huge damage.

Ability two, Heavy Onyx Shotgun, lets her fire a short range shotgun blast that also knocks her backwards away from the direction she fired. The damage isn't incredible, but even just dealing damage an extra time is very important, because...

Every three times she deals damage, Stele gets to use her third ability: Litany. Litany gives her a Shield that gets bigger every time she uses it. After a few casts, she's gone from the squishiest marksman to the tankiest, and if the game really drags on she'll eventually be able to go toe-to-toe with the melee characters.

Of course, Stele's ultimate should hopefully bring games to a close long before it reaches that point. Fire and Brimstone is a very simple ability: it permanently gives her another meteor on her passive, allowing her to create practically inescapable bombardments of area damage that only grow more frequent and lethal the longer the game goes.

Wanna help turn the normal moon into KILL MOON? Come play my tabletop hero shooter wargame KILL WORLD and my deck-unbuilder card game Astral CG over on the Astralcord!