After shipping one of our most difficult characters in Reina, we wanted our next character to land firmly end of the difficulty spectrum. The Torment would be a character that casual or new players could enjoy without considerable execution requirements or a deep understanding of game systems.
This kind of character is often fairly problematic in the platform fighter genre (and in PvP games in general, perhaps to a lesser extent). A character that can be played comfortably at lower skill levels can often be played very close to perfectly at the top level. This results in a character whose success ends up being more a factor of how over-tuned or under-tuned their moveset is, and less dependent on the individual skill of the player behind the controller.
In order to mitigate this effect, we devised a mechanic called "Evolution". Over the course of the game, The Torment's gains a small qualitative improvement to each of its moves. While these improvements will have little impact on a new player's experience, the slight differences between evolved moves and their un-evolved counterpart add a bit more room for an experienced player to flex their mastery of the character.