Senior Designer Floyd "Castle" Grubb talks with Massively.com about the coming new powersets included in Issue 13: Power and Responsibility - Shields and Pain Domination. This follows on the release of a new video and screenshots of these new powersets. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Can you explain the basic process for getting new powers like these into the game?

Our basic process is we come up with an idea for how we want the powerset to progress, then spec out individual powers as far as what we want them to do. We send that to the animation department, and they make things look cool, while we fiddle with numbers establishing an initial balance point. Once we have the final visual FX, we do another balance pass, and then send it off for testing.