New World Details Creation and Mechanics of the Sandwurm Devourer Heartrune
New World’ s next Heartrune, Devourer, is coming in Season 2, Blood of the Sands and the team is detailing how wielding the sandwurm will work.
Yes, they've already revealed that you will be able to unleash a sandwurm with thisnew Heartrune. Bringing it from a concept for the upcoming season into reality took a few turns. Combat Designer Josh Hurley says, “When we were asked to make a Heartrune for this release, we immediately wanted to include the Devourer”, but they had to figure out in what form this would take.
“We eventually landed on the 'summoning' aspect. Now it pops out of the ground.” During prototyping, they used emotes to set up the ability and figure out how to make it work and at one point they were using the wiggle dance emote as a placeholder when summoning the worm.
The concept needed even more work. “The method of chompy deployment was something that we couldn’t nail down initially. We went through a few different methods, including a ranged melee attack where you summon it out from under you, a projectile that would bait out the Devourer, and a simple summon along the ground similar to other spells. ”
One thing that is different this time is the idea of a backup attack. The initial knockback as the worm pops out of the ground is something you could potentially avoid using something like Grit, or other mechanisms. Most will just get knocked back and out of the radius of a followup attack, You did manage to avoid that initial knockback, and you are still in the radius of the second attack, it will deal more damage than the first.
The Devourer also can spawn where it can't realistically burrow, making the Heartrune flexible. Yet it doesn't instantly appear when you summon it so strategy should
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