Specialist Abilities

Evening folks, thought I'd drop in with a little design update tonight. Specialist Special Abilities are now functional for the next build, and perhaps you may be wondering what exactly the special abilities are. While they will be described in missions, and probably eventually in codex entries, I thought it might be good to lay them all out in one place for folks. For starters, they all have a few things in common: they can all be used in one encounter per mission, and they modify your team's stats in some way. This may allow you to choose an encounter solution that would be otherwise blocked to you, or even to pass an encounter that would otherwise have you fleeing from the mission entirely. More specifically, the abilities (currently) are as follows:

• Hellfire - Combat Training:  Once per mission, raise all of your team's stats by 1.
• Grunt - Brute Force: Once per mission, can apply the team's COM skill to a CHA or INT challenge if it's twice the required value or higher. (ie, a 6 Combat skill can be used on a 3 Int challenge).
• Piledriver - Combat Suit: Once per mission, can swap the team's INT and COM skill levels.
• Sorority - One Woman Army: Once per mission, can swap the team's CHA and COM skill levels.
• Switch - Mindswap: Once per mission, can swap their stats to match those of their teammate.
• Double D - Experimental Serum: Once per mission, can add their INT skill to the team's CHA skill.
• Hummer - Silver Tongue: Once per mission, can apply the team's CHA skill to a COM or INT challenge if it's twice the required value or higher.
• Octopussy - Hands On: Once per mission, can double the team's COM skill.
• Princess - Royal Command: Once per mission, can add her partner's COM skill to the team's CHA skill.

It should be said as well that team abilities can stack in certain combos - for example, if you use Octo's Combat doubling ability, that will make it much easier to use Grunt's Brute Force ability towards an Int or Cha-based solution. These may be changed over time, but ultimately this is roughly what they will look like. Something to look forward to, and I'll see you next week with the next release!