Fire Storm Heartrune Secrets

newworld.com:

Greetings, Adventurers!

Create a tornado to burn any obstacle in your path when the Fire Storm Heartrune arrives alongside Season One — Fellowship & Fire on March 28. We joined Combat Designer Josh Hurley for a glimpse into Fire Storm’s inspiration, design, goals, and challenges. Discover the story behind this ability’s development to make the most of its power.

“The inspiration for Fire Storm came from the Empyrean Forge Expedition,” Josh said. “The entire theme of the release is Fellowship & Fire and we definitely wanted to lean into the fire portion of it. We initially started by examining various attacks performed by the enemies within the Expedition to see if any of them would be a good starting point for what we wanted to achieve. For this one though, many of the enemy attacks weren’t exactly what we were going for or felt too similar to attacks or abilities that players could already do, so we leaned into coming up with something a bit more unique while utilizing the theme of fire.“

“During the early prototype phases of its development, we were unsure what we wanted to do with the animation, but after discussions with animators the concept of ‘fire bending’ popped up. We really wanted to lean into something fun and unique to signify the casting animation, and that is when the spin kick was brought up and immediately shined as the perfect way to cast this ability.“

“All of the Heartrunes are themed around some sort of AI boss or event, so the first step is to review the upcoming expedition or events that will be released along with that update to gauge what we want to do to make it feel like obtaining the Heartrune ties into the event that the player is participating in. The first aspect of Heartrune development