14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Cryptic has recently announced that it plans to add a new Shadow Hunter class to its MMO Neverwinter via a Shadowmantle expansion that’s supposed to be delivered before the end of the year.
Andy Velasquez, a producer working on the new content, tells Polygon that his team worked hard to make sure that the new character was different from all those already available to players, especially the Trickster Rogue.
Cryptic has decided that a good Shadow Hunter needs to constantly switch between two modes, a range one based on a bow and another melee one focused on dual blades.
Each power has two modes with different effects and different cooldowns and that means gamers will need to constantly decide how they approach a battle and how they can move around the battlefield to have the greatest effect on a fight.
Cryptic also says that the new Paragon class for the Great Weapon Fighter and Guardian Fighter will allow each character access to the abilities of the other.
Velasquez states, “We wanted to cross-pollinate those two. That's always been the intention for us, but we couldn't just offer that for the two fighters, because then the three other classes would have felt pretty bummed about it.”
He also explains that the decision to add the Shadow Hunter to Neverwinter was based on extensive player data.
The developer adds, “We went through a lot of Wizards of the Coast player data, who had metrics on when players make characters in D&D, what race, class and gender combinations do they make.”
With Shadowmantle, gamers will also get access to better companions, a new set of Artifact items that level up along them and a reworked user interface.
They will also be able to explore a new area of the game world, filled with high-level enemies that will test their skills in battle.