A few ability ideas

(SirSwag) #1

I’ve been thinking about future mercs and new abilities they could have lately and this is what I came up with:

A merc that can put down a teleporter. Q for one, E for the other. It could give a serious advantage if the attacking team could set this up and cut down travelling time between spawns. The cool down for both would be about 20 seconds and the teleporters would be easily destroyed so would need to be hidden well.

Another ability is a healing grenade with a similar radius of Fragger’s pineapples. They would heal all friendlies in the radius and revive anyone downed. The healing potential and cool down would be determined by the charge up time much like Phoenix’s healing pulse.

I’ve always liked the idea of support characters that aren’t purely medics. My idea would be an ability that is like a transparent smoke grenade that only heals team mates 10hp per second, but can also extend their health by another 30hp. On top of this, the cloud grants an increase to speed and repair/C4 plant time for 20 seconds.

I like the sound of an objective specialist that can remotely complete objectives. A device like a healing station that can remotely repair and plant/defuse c4 from up to 10 metres away. It will do this at a slow pace but will need to be destroyed before it will stop working.

Anyway these are just some ideas I’ve had. Any thoughts or opinions would be welcome.

(incisiveDetour) #2

Nice ideas !

(ProfPlump) #3

[quote=“SirSwag;23638”]I’ve been thinking about future mercs and new abilities they could have lately and this is what I came up with:

A merc that can put down a teleporter. Q for one, E for the other. It could give a serious advantage if the attacking team could set this up and cut down travelling time between spawns. The cool down for both would be about 20 seconds and the teleporters would be easily destroyed so would need to be hidden well.

Another ability is a healing grenade with a similar radius of Fragger’s pineapples. They would heal all friendlies in the radius and revive anyone downed. The healing potential and cool down would be determined by the charge up time much like Phoenix’s healing pulse.

I’ve always liked the idea of support characters that aren’t purely medics. My idea would be an ability that is like a transparent smoke grenade that only heals team mates 10hp per second, but can also extend their health by another 30hp. On top of this, the cloud grants an increase to speed and repair/C4 plant time for 20 seconds.

I like the sound of an objective specialist that can remotely complete objectives. A device like a healing station that can remotely repair and plant/defuse c4 from up to 10 metres away. It will do this at a slow pace but will need to be destroyed before it will stop working.

Anyway these are just some ideas I’ve had. Any thoughts or opinions would be welcome.[/quote]

Teleporter sounds very interesting… Would have to have some limitations obviously or it would be incredibly gamebreaking, but would be nice to have for a smaller Recon class so that they can help out their team substantially by moving them across the map in seconds.

Healing grenade sounds a bit interesting as long as the medic can’t heal him/herself with it - because otherwise it would completely outclass Phoenix’s healing pulse.

Extending the HP of characters is incredibly strong, and 30HP would be FAR too much - we’ve had a bug recently where characters that have Tryhard do not lose their HP buffs after they die, and it becomes INCREDIBLY effective to use a Proxy on 120HP. I would not put that in the game.

Remote obj specialists sounds like a really bad idea in my opinion… It would break a lot of games (such as arming the barricade generator on Bridge from outside the room, or just generally arming objectives through walls).

(SirSwag) #4

@ProfPlump The teleporter would need some balance for sure. But I’m confident that done right it would feel fair and rewarding.

I don’t don’t think the healing grenade should be able to revive themselves, but certainly be able to heal themselves.

I feel that extending a merc’s hp by 30 wouldn’t be so bad. I think if they were damaged past that 30 point mark then they would only regenerate to their regular hp level. It’s only meant as a temporary buff. Healing rate wise it would still be the slowest medic to heal.

And I do agree with you that a remote objective specialist could be game breaking. I just wanted to think of an objective specialist that’s not like the others. The way that sparks is for the medics.

Anyway thanks for the feedback Plump :slight_smile:

(BananaSlug) #5

the healing grenades seems to be very cool !
mix of sparks and phoenix.
i think the grenades should explode on contact with merc, wall or just the ground

(Your worst knifemare.) #6

Another cool idea could be something like a toxic gas, right?

(ProfPlump) #7

[quote=“SirSwag;143745”]@ProfPlump The teleporter would need some balance for sure. But I’m confident that done right it would feel fair and rewarding.

I don’t don’t think the healing grenade should be able to revive themselves, but certainly be able to heal themselves.

I feel that extending a merc’s hp by 30 wouldn’t be so bad. I think if they were damaged past that 30 point mark then they would only regenerate to their regular hp level. It’s only meant as a temporary buff. Healing rate wise it would still be the slowest medic to heal.

And I do agree with you that a remote objective specialist could be game breaking. I just wanted to think of an objective specialist that’s not like the others. The way that sparks is for the medics.

Anyway thanks for the feedback Plump :)[/quote]

Thing is - Phoenix’s self-revive isn’t actually very good at all. He ALWAYS gets gibbed before he can revive (unless his teammates are all around him and can bodyblock the bullets or deal with the guy who shot the Phoenix down (I’m talking in competitive here - not pubs). So essentially he relies on his healing pulse far more when he’s trying to be effective.

Which is why giving another medic the ability to do the EXACT same thing he can do except at long range would put him completely out of the picture in terms of viability.

(SirSwag) #8

@ProfPlump I feel that Phoenix is somewhat inferior in a competitive setting to Sawbones. Especially if his self revive is rarely used. It’s hard to determine whether this is really such a bad thing though. The balance for the top 1% is always going to be different from the other 99%. I mean Fragger is an obvious choice for competitive teams and there aren’t many people that wouldn’t choose him over Phantom or Thunder. I’d say the problem with healing grenades isn’t the concept itself, but that the developers would probably have a hard time implementing it in a way that feels good to use, and feels like fair play for the opposing team.

I’m not a developer in any sense, but I think the thought process behind creating a merc would be to start with their signature ability and then balance them from there. Skyhammer would be extremely OP if the airstike cool down wasn’t so long, just like Aura would feel OP if her health wasn’t so low. There’s always going to be a way to balance this ability and by extension the merc themselves. The cool down could be altered, the amount of grenades carried at once could be altered, the radius and effectiveness of the grenades could be altered they could be given better or worse weapons and they could have lower or high hp. I was thinking that they probably wouldn’t have defibrillators so they would need to more wisely use their grenades. Anyway that’s the idea that I’d like to see, and I believe it can be balanced perfectly with enough time.

(LifeupOmega) #9

1 and 2 sound good. Hell, remove the Revivr and use 2 instead. I’d love SD forever :smiley:

(Tanker_Ray) #10

Teleport might be way too OP if it doesn’t have any limit of distance.

Instead, I would love to see ‘haste’ buffs that makes team mates move faster and jump higher, or some kind of temporary shield/armor provided to team mates.

(Reddeadcap) #11

Don’t see how a teleport would really fit the game’s aesthetics but I’ve brought up a merc that tosses rez grenades and a healing rifle in a merc suggestion thread.

(LifeupOmega) #12

We have aura stations that heal people through nanite tech, same with Phoenix’s built in pulse. Would it be so far fetched to assume that this same tech could teleport people short distances?

(sgtCrookyGrin) #13

We have aura stations that heal people through nanite tech, same with Phoenix’s built in pulse. Would it be so far fetched to assume that this same tech could teleport people short distances?[/quote]

We also have cloak armor that can protect you from external damage, we also have mini sentry turrets that set up in seconds, we also have Drones flying all over the place armed with explosive bombardments, we also have fire Molotovs all in a small hand held easily primed grenade, we also have giant anus lazers from fucking speis!, we also have compact light weight ammo stations that set up automatically and have unlimited ammo, we also have hand held sensors that are as small as baseballs and can sense the heart beats of anyone in wide areas, We also have a special EMP/Concussion/Flashbang grenade all in one, and we also have a REVIVR gun that can kill and revive people from across all ranges because technology. Do you need more proof that this game’s technology is “far fetched”?

(blisteringOwlNest) #14

I love the healing grenade idea, in fact made a merc entered around it in the fan creation section called Lazarus.

With my idea, the grenade could heal more / revive with more health with a longer cook, similar to defibs.

I would love this in the game, and the other ideas sound pretty neat too. But healing grenade is a must have :3

(Naonna) #15

Nade revives would be broken: means you can revive people out of your line of sight without any risk of injury.

While teleporters are great in TF2, the scale of the maps are much different: Dirty bomb maps (for the majority) already give the attacking team an advantage. - Also, we know full well, people would end up being cruel to their own team by sending them back to the last point when at first: it’s inevitable.

Armor-buffing seems nice, but when dropped on top of a rhino already with a healing station, things could become annoying. - Also, our current ‘armor’ wearer, phantom, Has a rather useless mechanic: I’d rather see him fixed before implementing anything similar.
(Either make phantom sneak-y-er or tank-y-er: Pick one and make him good at it.)

Also, outside of being used on a full-hp merc, how is the armor-buff proposed any different than spark’s small health packs? - Maybe I’m missing some level of understanding.

(SirSwag) #16

@Naonna I believe the healing grenades would feel very fair in all but the situations where they happen to revive 5 people at once. It would feel less powerful than the reviver in most cases. I think the issue of reviving around corners would be balanced by its cool down and skill needed to do this consistently.
Teleporters would need to be hidden to be effective and would be easily destroyed with less than half a magazine. If trolls want to teleport their team to the back of the map, then they can simply step into the other end and go back.
The healing smoke could be dispersed with explosives much like Redeye’s smoke. Nader and Fragger would still be a hard counter to a camping Rhino.
And the use of the smoke would be to create a large area of effect zone that buffs all team mates within. The buffs wouldn’t be superior to any other healing merc, (especially during a fire fight) but just enough to provide a big enough bonus to make a push to repair the EV, or plant a C4.

(Naonna) #17

Honestly, I’d like to see the armor-giving ability on a turtle: would fit his name. - Still disagree about the revive-nade: throwing something the size of Fletcher’s sticky into a room full of teammates to heal or revive anyone in the aoe makes phoenix useless - sparks too for a similar reason. (Sparks may be better at ranged revives and more revives per minute, but in competitive play… i dunno.

(PleasantWheat) #18

If the revive nades revived at the speed it takes pheonix to self revive i think they would balance out nicely

(SirSwag) #19

@PleasantWheat That’s a fair point. A delay would give it a nice balance.

(PleasantWheat) #20

I imagine it working like a small smoke cloud, anyone in it gets healed for half aura station rate and if you die in it or it gets tossed on you while you are down you get that little progress bar pheonix has to show that you are being revived. Obviously this cloud would be able to be dissipated by explosives and such but thats just my 5 cents on the concept