Early Access: Realm of the Titans Titan Skills
By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), OnRPG Editor-in-Chief
This is DizzyPW and I’m back with another look at the exciting features of Aeria Game’s upcoming MOBA, Realm of the Titans. In my last article I introduced what ROTT does well in terms of standard features among the MOBA genre. However now it’s time to go into the details of the Titan Skill System, a signature system that really sets ROTT apart from the competition.
A common issue in League of Legends and other MOBAs is the inability to properly plan out the use of your ‘summoner’ type skills for random match ups in the match making system. In these games you enter a match with 1 or 2 skills at your disposal and are stuck with them for the remainder of the arena battle.
Realm of the Titans reinvents this system by introducing exchangeable Titan Skills. Though you can only have one skill active at a time, you have the option of changing it out for one of 25 Titan Skills every 150 seconds. I really fell in love with this system as it allows you to change out your Titan Skill to adjust to an ever changing situation. I’ll explain more on potential tactics involved with this system after introducing you to all 25 Titan Skills!
Titan Skill List
Meditation- When marked as in a non-combat state, your passive mana regen increases.
Heal- Recover a portion of your personal hp over the course of 20 seconds.
Unstable Shield- Shields damage to a set limit. If this limit is reached during the duration, the shield explodes, causing aoe damage to all nearby enemies.
Iron Will- Increases Defense. Defense increases more as your hp gets closer to 0.
Logistics Master- This one requires a bit of explaining. There are neutral shops on both Omeka Divide and Titan’s Eye set in between the main lanes. Since you can’t ‘blue pill’ or teleport back to your core base without a scroll in this game, these shops become vital for upgrading your items while losing minimal experience from minion farming. However since both sides can access these shops, it tends to become a place of intense battle in higher skill level games. The Logistics Master skill makes these shops even more vital as it allows you to gain a massive increase to hp and mp regen while standing within range of neutral shops.
The Power Set (added passives to basic skills):
Thunder- Gives your skills a chance of causing aoe damage
Lifesteal- Adds hp lifesteal effects to your skills
Ice- Adds a slowing effect to all your skills
Sapping- Adds a mana burn effect to your skills. A portion of the mana burned from the enemy is converted into hp damage to the enemy as well.
Corrosive- Adds a defensive reduction hex to your skills. This hex can stack multiple times, excellent for rapid fire combo skills.
-End Power Set
Assault- Bonus Damage and adds a chance to stun when an enemy is stuck multiple times in rapid succession.
Fireball- Long Range sniping attack. Does less damage as it travels through enemies on the way to the target.
Teleport- After a short casting time, allows you to teleport to your team’s furthest controlled building on a given lane.
Frenzy- Increased attack speed and movement speed at the cost of defense.
Redemption- Reduces Revival Time.
Aura of Ruin- Reduces Magic Resistance of all enemies within 950 units. Does not stack with teammates using Aura of Ruin.
Group Heal- Instantly heals your teammates by a small amount.
Weak Point- Attacks cause additional damage to creeps (minions).
Marking Trap- Allows you to lay traps around the map. Enemies who step on them take noticeable damage over time and reveal their visibility to the enemy team for a short period.
Power Transfer- Steals enemy’s mana and converts it into your hero’s hp.
Stealth- Go invisible after a short ritual. When you exist stealth, movement speed is increased for half the duration that you were in stealth.
Purify- Defensively can be used to remove debuffs against your team. Offensively it can strip enemy’s buffs away.
Divine Blessing- 1.5s invincibility. However you are unable to move or attack for this duration.
Bulwork- Greatly reduces ranged physical damage
Insight- Gains vision of targets you attack for a short period of time. Useful for artillery champions trying to scout as well as blocking enemies from returning to stealth.
Tactics and Balance
While some Titan Skills seem stronger than others, there is much in place to make nearly every Titan Skill available useful at some point. The way this is done is with cooldowns and mana costs associated with each skill. Some very powerful skills like Divine Blessing have much longer cooldowns than others like the “Power Set” that are quite spammable. The high mana cost associated with skills make powerful Titan Skills like Fireball less viable on melee dps heroes but much more attractive on ranged magic heroes. Thankfully the Titan Skills are neatly organized into the categories of offense, defense, and utility to make them easier to find in the heat of battle. Although not currently implemented, the production team was very open to our idea of introducing a hotkey feature to quickly cycle between Titan Skills so hopefully we will see this in the near future following launch.
There were many tactics that we found to be quite useful during our hands on preview of the game. In long games tanky dps characters seemed to rule the battlefield. By taking the Ice Power on our support champions, we learned it became increasingly easy to shut these heroes down by blocking them from reaching their targets. This would force tanks to switch away from skills like Iron Will to Purify in order to maintain their effectiveness, which would at the same time lower their defense and make them much easier to harass in poking battles.
Stealth combined with the purchase of wards was also invaluable for gaining superior map awareness of the jungle. It also makes opponents weary of using the neutral shops to heal as stealthed champions could spot enemies on their way to the shop via wards and set up an invisible ambush for them while they were scrolling through the shop’s item list.
Aura of Ruin combined with Unstable Shield on our squishies provided an excellent counter measure to heavily melee dps focused teams. The decreased magic defense from Aura really made the unstable shield pack a punch when it went off, as well as giving our mages an edge in an otherwise unfair battle.
Sapping Power and Weak Point also proved to be very powerful early game Titan Skills. Sapping Power was great for disabling dangerous enemy carries by adding additional harass to not only their mana supply, but also their hp (which is quite low early game). Weak Point was an excellent skill for high damage heroes to bring as the creep waves in Realm of the Titans are formidable foes and last hitting them is a high skill based endeavor. The extra damage from Weak Point made this process much more accessible, particularly for heroes with attack animations you weren’t used to yet.
Amping
Although there is much I don’t have time to cover in the world of Titan Skills, this article would not be complete without a basic introduction into the process of Amping. For those familiar with League of Legends‘ Mastery System, this is probably the closest to an equivalent you will find in ROTT.
Amping is the process of increasing the utility or power of an individual Titan Skill. This is done through the acquisition of elemental stones acquired either through a treasure box reward given at the end of a ranked match or by purchase through battle points earned over the course of many arena battles.
There are 4 elements and 1 Core Element involved and 7 total slots available to amp each Titan Skill. Depending on the element you place into your Titan Skill, different results will occur! This is best demonstrated with a couple examples:
Thunder Power
Thunder Power, the Titan Skill associated with adding an aoe damage to your basic skills, has many utility buffs available if amped. The elemental stones can be used to grant it an increased aoe range, bonus damage to the aoe damage, or even an increased chance of activating when using a skill. If you slot the rare Core Element into Thunder Power, it will give the skill a 10% increased chance to activate following each failed activation while using a skill. Thus if you didn’t get your aoe effect to appear when using a skill 9 times in a row, it would be nearly a 100% bet that it will happen on the 10th skill.
Fireball
Fireball is a very offensive artillery focused Titan Skill and its amping options reflect that. Elemental stones can be used to increase the maximum damage of the fireball, increase the distance that the fireball can be fired from, or lower the cooldown following each use of the fireball. The Core Element allows the fireball to penetrate units and continue forward, though the total damage is reduced by half on each enemy impact.
I would love to talk more about ROTT but NuttyKitten and Platypus are demanding I go with them to Harry Potter right this instant. I guess my discussion of the different Heroes will have to wait until next time! Look forward to the conclusion and ColbyCheeze’s first impressions video later next week!
