Dev Diary - Blackwing Industries: On Wings of Hexagons & Chrome

[Blammo]

Coming back from a wee hiatus I see Blackwing and nearly had a stroke thinking I missed out on a collectible.

There must be a way to tie the amazing CoH to Blackwing pencils. 

[ZeeHero]

Plot Twist blackwing industries ARE the pencils, turned into humans by dark magic.

[Phytoplankton]

On 6/29/2025 at 4:40 AM, Max Firepower said:

I like the reverse taunt concept - but I was thinking you meant like a placate, so the buffer could buff.  This sounds more like SoA's Surveillance or Sentinel Vulnerability?  Is it a targeting mode that tells the other AI mobs to collectively target and really try to hammer that focused target?  

 

I am a fan of 'corner pull' work for aggro management as a longtime tanker fan-boi.  Maybe the player base will relearn this lost art because of this.  😉 

 

I think I need to check out KW.  I've been rolling the new sets and am just getting to KW range.  

 

Thanks for your work!  I like your projects a lot!

Yeah, I really get tired of running around, alpha striking a group mobs, then running to the next group. That's boring. I remember, back in the day, when players would have to coordinate and PULL! to fight groups of mobs or wait until the tank agros before attacking. The skill, and fun, seems to have gone out of the game without it. Remember when fighting Hamidon was a REAL project and took more than a few minutes?

[Dying Eagle]

Very unique concepts . Love it! Thank you for all your hard work. 

[MistressOhm]

I'm liking this concept quite a lot.  Especially the coordination aspect, figuring out that the tank is only as strong as their friends, and adopting tactics to take down support characters and leave the tanky builds vulnerable.  

 

The 'Defense in Place' doctrine also makes a lot of sense.  These guys are posted up to protect corporate assets and keep the peace.  They're not roaming around with some hero or villain's face on their smartphones, like Malta operatives.  Malta are very much kill squads, whereas BWI seem to be more "don't mess with us in our backyard" defensive ops.

 

I will say that my one encounter with the GM was a bit anticlimactic.  I saw the big robot fighting ... something... at the base of One Statesman Plaza, so I flew closer on my Stormfender to see what was up.  Oh.  There's a group of people beating on this thing.  Okay.   I debuffed it like I do all GM's - throw Snowstorm on it, spawn Freezing Rain, Tornado and Lightning Storm to get any adds flailing around in a panic instead of attacking, and then started zapping it with electrical bolts.  At that point?  The crew that had been beating on it pretty much dismantled it in short order.  No idea if my efforts helped, but they weren't shrugged off either, and nothing tried to swat me as an annoyance (Lusca seems to love doing that to flyers that get in close).

One thing I DID notice is that inside the tower at the penthouse level, are an entire crew of neutral (untargetable NPC) Controllers.  It would seem to me that IF the big Guardian robot should get attacked or aggro'd, those Controllers would dispatch entire task forces worth of adds into the plaza to 'restore order'.   Make it so that fighting the GM also requires fighting pretty much ALL of BWI, since it's their HQ that's the site of the battle.  Your typical 5-10 person monster hunter groups would find their hands full quickly, and some kind of strategy to hold off the BWI reinforcements would be needed, lest the group get overwhelmed and "taken into custody".

 

The OTHER thing to consider - what happens if you get laid out by BWI? They're the cops in Kallisti, right?  So... surely they have some kind of holding facility, like some of the older Council bases.  Set it up so that if BWI defeats you in KW, you don't go to the hospital, you go to a holding cell... which you have to break out of, escape the facility (oh noes, more BWI, and you're by yourself unless you wait around for your friends to be detailed also) and then get back to what you were doing.  And there's another tactical option - BWI are effectively neutral unless and until you attack them.  If a Coordinator sees you going up against BWI assets... the 'state' of all of the other BWI mobs in the zone flips to "hostile" for you, as they're advised of a disruptive meta, now you have to be careful not to get too close to any of them until the BOLO (Be On The Look Out) expires.