lgbrokhoff
New member
Here is the finalized post for my hero concept, Sheretz, with a commission to finally show off her character design!
(Amazing art by Mia L. on Fiverr! https://www.fiverr.com/s/Ayajem4)
Her Playstyle:
Sheretz is designed to be a frontline support character, with emphasis on transporting teammates and herself in and out of team fights, and dealing large bursts of spirit damage or healing with her abilities. When not using her abilities, her melee benefits and powerful hand-cannon type gun would allow her to secure kills. Her stacking mechanic would reward both playing riskily on the front lines taking major damage to level up her abilities, as well as utilizing her support abilities to keep the damage that sustains her own offensive capabilities from destroying her. As an aside, I considered making the amount of damage required for a stack of Peel Away scale with boon level to keep the rate of stacks gained in a fight rather consistent throughout the length of a match.
Ability Utlization:
Ability One:
Starting with Bugs and Bandages. This ability obviously requires you to be within close range of your opponents, and while it may be complicated to read at first, you'll notice that this ability has two enhancements gained from Peel Away, in opposing directions. This means that while having less stacks will allow you to deal more burst damage, it will also speed up the cooldown of this ability, and in contrast, having more stacks will allow you to heal yourself and allies within the radius more, and this radius will also increase with more stacks, once again encouraging usage of support abilities, and providing an interesting ultimatum where the player must decide between aiming for more stacks during a fight, and being able to provide more healing at less frequent intervals, or dishing out more damage, at more common intervals. This may also mean that the spirit scaling of this ability may need some tweaking.
Ability Two:
Secondly, her textile transmission ability. This ability would mainly be used for engaging in fights, or simply expediting rotation around the map, as disengaging when in a non-optimal position for not taking damage would obviously get you stunned for a long time. This could, however, find interesting use as an escape tool if combined with Unstoppable. This also again provides an interesting choice for the player, as keeping stacks while preparing to engage a fight provides a much more likely chance of being able to severely stun and damage your opponents upon entry, but also opens up the possibility of being caught off your guard and killed very quickly.
Ability Three:
Thirdly, Peel Away. This ability is obviously the core of her kit that forces choices of how to utilize her skills in the moment upon the player. The active form of this ability obviously is a major player in that, providing the player with the option to keep or reduce their stacks depending on what they think best in the moment. It also allows for manual regeneration, however since stacks are acquired before their subsequent damage increase is calculated, the regeneration to damage taken ration of rewrapping 20 stacks will be exponentially less than that of rewrapping only one. This may pair well even with Blood Tribute, if one wishes to gain stacks on their own time in preparation of a fight. The silence and disarm effects caused by this ability also make it something that should be used with good timing in battle, so as to avoid being unable to secure a kill, or being caught unable to heal when in need. Whether rewrapping should actively slow, or speed up the player is debatable, and while I did grant an increase in speed and stamina regeneration in the ability description, I could see a case to be made for the exact opposite effect to be applied.
Ultimate Ability:
Fourthly and finally, her ultimate, Swarm. This ability has several main usages and possible ways to take advantage of it's mechanics. It's most blaringly obvious usage is to drag an enemy into her range for attack, this could prove useful for isolating a target from a teamfight, or even securing/forcefully engaging an opponent in a 1v1 scenario, in both of these scenarios it would benefit from being used in tandem with Slowing Hex. The other obvious use cases are to simply send out several swarms during a team fight to draw enemy fire, wreak havoc among them, heal allies, or pull allies from the fight back to safety. Less obviously, it can be combined with speedy transport options such as Majestic Leap, a Doorman's portals, or simply her own Textile Transmission, to move several enemies, or more likely, allies at once, as the swarm will follow Sheretz' location. The ultimate may require an additional effect to be granted to it that decreases the stamina regeneration of enemies within it in order to make it more viable, but I believe for now that it would be a well balanced ability.
Her Personality:
Sheretz loved her job at OSIC, and was infatuated with artifacts of all kinds, making her the skilled curator that she was.
She has always loved bugs, which is one of the main reasons she was able to come to terms with her transformation, and she is capable of naming the scientific name of every single bug that can be found within her swarm, the number of which she herself states to be several hundred.
She says that despite the immense pain she went through in her death, the hours that it lasted, and the humanity she lost, she prefers to look towards the future than dwell on the past. She purports to be as human as she needs, though she does harbor some despair about both the loss of her form.
She hopes to be one day able to return to the OSIC with greater control over her swarm, and even the ability to utilize it as an asset in her work. She is often ashamed and saddened by having been forced to leave the OSIC, and this hope of return is what drives her, making it also the driving factor behind her philosopher of focusing on the future and ignoring the past and what she's lost, even if the latter half isn't fully healthy.
