Hi there! Long time no see!

Now that Valiant Horizon is nearing full release, this is #3 in our design series. We’re back with the Commander and Dark Knight.

As noted in #1, all role/sub-role talk is referring to Total//Effect’s role and sub-role concepts.

The Commander

To get the elephant out of the room, yes, I came at this starting with the 4E warlord by way of its less acclaimed distant cousin, the 13th Age commander. More specifically, I took a crack at this idea starting in 36th Way. 13th Age/36th Way’s Commander have two resource-generating class features indicating focus: Weigh the Odds, which lets you reliably generate the resource you need, but is purely non-offensive; or Fight from the Front, which is a melee attack that generates the resource on a hit. (More on Commander here.) So we had two concepts of:

• The “offensive support” character. (This is the Commander.)
• The “full support” character. (This is the Tactician, which we will get to eventually.)

They don’t fully diverge, of course, but they do have a slightly different focus that helped both figure out how to coexist: for instance, Commander is a high-durability character (12 Vigor, mid recovery Resist Weapon) while Tactician is the most vulnerable character in the game (10 Vigor, low recovery, no resistance).

The Commander’s roles are Supporter (Command, Boost) and Attacker (Exploit). Its abilities are mostly oriented around buffs while close to allies or ways to get close to allies: they work best when they’re in the same Location as an ally, meaning they work well as a co-frontliner or someone going back and forth. It also goes well with other buff abilities, other movement abilities (their trait buffs folks who start their turn at that location), or other offensive abilities.

Is it weird that the Commander isn’t primary for Command? Not really, honestly. They’re notional/descriptive categories, not prescriptive ones. Nominative determinism is a fake idea.

The Dark Knight

This is the one I used in all my promotional stuff! And for good reason. It gets attention, it’s got a callback people likely recognize, and it feels good. It’s also one of the first few I wrote.

The big influence for this one is FF4. The idea of high durability, high offense, spend your own Vigor sticks with you. Couple that with the “fragmented soul” idea and you get this odea of a character who frequently writes checks they can’t quite cash and is dealing with things that are very powerful but very dangerous.

I only intended to make one FF4 reference in the tale prompts but at some point I realized you could make a case for all of them. Oops. I’m not changing it though, they’re all good.

The Dark Knight’s roles are Attacker (Spike, Exploit) and Supporter (Boost). Exploit in this sense is less what I frequently use it for (mobility, though it does have one that’s good at that) and more “opportunist”: it has a lot of abilities that can be amplified by taking self-damage. All self-damage from the class is magical: this complements the class’s Resist Magical that it gets when winded, allowing it to take greater risks with self-damaging abilities when close to being downed. (This also makes those abilities worth taking by other “caster” classes who want to walk on the wild side, as they always have Resist Magical.) If you want to play around with those self-damaging abilities, you’ll want to either commit and accept your fate, pack healing, or pack defenses.

Dark Knight’s also one of few classes that can swap between physical and magical within its own power set! We’ll get to the others next time, when I cover Earthmagus and Frostmagus.

Until next time!