IGN: What exactly are the battle cries used for?
Henry: The battle cries are active skills that each of the classes can earn throughout the progression of the game. Those are things that are unique to the class, but also work in the cooperative mode. So things like heals, increased attack speed, pulling agro and calling the enemies over to you - they're all kind of class-centric types of things and those are all things that you have to use your combo meter to pay for. You power up your combo meter, hit the button to activate it and your combo meter will slowly drain while you have it active, but you can continue to combo. So, basically, good players can activate the battle cry and keep it going even as they maintain their combo.
IGN: We see. So you could essentially be healing your party even as you're kicking ass in a combo.
Henry: Correct. And it's all instant power stuff, too, to highlight the twitch gameplay. It's not as though you hit a button and Baldur goes into a big healing animation or anything like that. So each of the classes has multiple branches down the skill trees and each of the skill trees have those battle cries at the end of them. You'll be making choices about what battle cries you want to buy, when you want to buy them, etcetera.
IGN: You gain advanced moves in the game, the Ruiners. We saw scenes in the demo where Baldur would unleash a giant bear spirit, for lack of a better description, that would tear through enemies. How do these work?
Henry: Those are other things that open up throughout the skill tree. The way those work is that each class and each alignment have different variations on the Ruiners and they also have different functionalities. Some might actually heal you. Some may destroy a super wide radius in the room but do very low damage to everything, kind of like a smart bomb. Some may be super concentrated on one enemy, but do devastating damage. They're all different things you buy and power up throughout the skill tree and in order to activate them you need to actually have different levels that you pay for with your combo meter.
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The idea is that as your combo meter fills you'll hit levels and certain classes can build up even more cap levels than others. For example, the Beserker is going to have like five more combo levels than everybody else. And then each of those combo levels are used to pay for the battle cries and the Ruiners.
IGN: So when you're playing the Champion class, you're able to use anti-gravitational technology to become airborne and attack enemies while hovering. How do you sustain a combo in mid-air? Henry: The Champion inherently has bonuses that give him hover and descent rate slowing speed abilities. So as you're shooting enemies with your guns, your descent rate will slow and you'll be able to power it up, effectively descending slower, slower and slower. Every time you kill an enemy in the air, you get a certain amount of hover time. Basically, it's a combo in the air. On the ground, as long as you keep hitting guys and chaining guys, you'll keep your combos going. In the air, as long as you keep hitting guys and chaining guys with your guns, you'll be able to keep that air time. And it'll be easier and easier to keep that air time based upon, like I said, the class you take. Other classes can do it, but the Champion will, by far, be the best at it. And what things you have powered up in your skill tree will have an affect on it. You'll be able to do better air damage, stay up longer with your guns, stay up longer with your melee attacks and different things like that.
One thing to keep in mind, too, is that different weapons have different juggle properties. So when you play things like coop, the hammers actually do a small radius juggle. If you're one of the guys with the hammer, you can serve up a whole bunch of guys for the Champion to jump up and ping-pong through them. You have one guy as the server and the other guy as the finisher. The sword juggles at about a medium height and juggles guys out in front of you; the staff juggles at a high rate, but it juggles them right above you; and the hammer just scatters everybody in a radius.
Then the guns have different properties as well. There is different ammunition that the guns can use. There is a laser beam, a plasma shell and slug shells. The slug shells will do rapid fire strikes that help keep the guys up there a little bit. The beam will actually lock guys in place. So you'll be able to juggle a guy up and another player can shoot him with the beam and hold him there while a third player air combos him and finishes him off.