Engineer Merc of Mag Cover


(I-Fell-Tower) #1

Name: Mage

Primary Ability; Mag CVR / Deactivation: When Mage is just regularly going around places the ability’s name’s Mag CVR (MC). Once activated Mage stops as he’s covered in magnetic yellow-brown triangles. Once the triangles have formed the cover on him after a 3.5-second animation he now has the MC active and the primary ability is now called Deactivation. Before we get to that I’ll explain the pros and cons of having the MC active:

  • The MC covers almost all of your body and if the enemies want the cover away they have to deal a massive amount of 500 damage to it. It doesn’t regen it’s health while it’s active.
  • While the MC’s active all enemies will slowly turn towards you. This is caused by the MC drawing metal weapons towards it. The closer the enemy is the faster the turning happens.
  • You move at a 15% of your normal movement speed.
  • As stated, your MC won’t regen health while it’s active. If it reaches zero all of your non-passive abilities will have a 2-minute cool-down.
    As Mage you’ll be able to see your MC health at all times like Phantom can see his cloak. While the MC’s not active it will regen 5 health a second.
    Then to the Deactivation. Once it’s activated it will take (again) 3.5 seconds for the animation of Mage undressing from the MC to occur. Mage is immobile during this.

Secondary ability; Fast Blast / Evac Blast: First for the Fast Blast (FB). If you’re out of the MC you can perform this ability. The idea is that upon activation the magnetic triangles will start to spin around you. Seek cover because of the next step. 2.25 seconds after the activation the triangles will launch themselves to all directions at impressing speed. They will cause lethal damage to anyone poor enough to be in the way of them but this effect also effects you. Once all the shards have hit something a 2-minute cooldown will start to all of your non-passive abilities.
Let’s talk about the Evac Blast then. If you have the MC active this is your secondary ability. Once activated pretty much the same things happen as with the Fast Blast but this time the shards take 3.25 seconds to take off. This time the cool-down’s little bit nicer though; 1min40s.

Passive Ability; Objective Specialist: I bet pretty much everyone knows this one already, does objectives better and faster.

HP: 100

Speed: 410

Arsenal: Mage’s default primary is Fishbarrel SMG. It’s two most interesting attributes are the facts that it deals brutally damage but it’s spread is horrible when fired fully auto. He can also carry the Blish and the SMG9.
His default secondary is the Gaulden. Though, Simeon and the .40 are also available to him.
Melees? The Bat as his default and both of the knives as options.

About Mage: Mage never considered himself a bad person doing drugs. Well, would you if you were extremely high? He was sent to the most high-tech prison in all world; located 20 kilometres below London. He wasn’t some dumb druggie though. He pulled out an act of being in other worlds and by that could build a Mag CVR for himself. Once he got out London had gone to H. E. L. L. He thought that the guards would most likely search him from outside the city. That’s why he stayed there. And stays. Even today.

Uses: Mage can tank huge amounts of damage on his way to the objective. Even though he’s little bit more from the defensive standpoint he can still bring that tanky offensive firepower to pushes. Good against low-damage mercs like Medics.

Weaknesses and countering: Break in the fire-support. Mage is most effective while slow giving you a perfect opportunity to use your low-accuracy weapons to deal damage. Take away the cover and he’ll be easy prey. Against him I would recommend mercs like Fragger, Nader and all of fire-support.


(Mr-Penguin) #2

If he can do objjectives with the shield active, it’s OP. Hell, if he can even shoot with it active, that’s even more OP.

In other words, this is the shield part of Phantom’s cloak with far less drawbacks and far more powerful.


(I-Fell-Tower) #3

@derpypenguinz19 Just wanted to present an idea of a tanky engineer. Well, I guess the idea could be nerfed in the following ways.

  • The max MC health could be 400 instead of 500. Doubled when compared to Rhino but as stated, slow as heck.
  • The inactive health regen would be 4 instead of 5. It seems like a minor change but it would lower the regen rate by a whopping 20%.
  • On top of these nerfs I would reduce the mouse sensitivity by 33% while the MC is active to discourage close-quarters combat and go for a more of a keeping-distance gunner.

This way Phantom’s cloak would be better at mobility and close-quarters combat while also rendering the merc invisible. It has also a better cool-down.


(Naonna) #4

You created a monster. It’s an over shield which takes control away from enemies. If it influences their movement as you said, it will NEVER be balanced. Reducing mouse sensitivity while in the armor just means they need a bind to toggle their current sensitivity. People deeply hated the fact that Phantom was hard to kill at close range: it’s what got him dropped to the wimpy level he is now.

Overshields are strong enough on their own just for the temporary and always available health: People forget this.


(I-Fell-Tower) #5

@Naonna I have created a monster? Well, let’s think about that option.

  • There are already abilities in the game affecting enemy mercs’ movement cough Concussion Grenades cough. Well okay, an ability to be exact.
  • One balancing factor I came up with was to make it so that when your MC’s active all looking around would reduce your mouse sensitivity (the more you would look the more sensitivity reduced). This sensitivity lowerement could go to 100% disabling look-arounds. You would gain this sensitivity back though; 5% a second. Of course my previous statement about the sensitivity reduce already applying when the MC activates wouldn’t be true anymore.
  • I fear that if the MC health would be dropped too greatly it would make Mage just a slower version of Rhino.

(ASTOUNDINGSHELL) #6

@ForumArms You must think of counter play too.

Engineers in DB had a problem that they are annoying to fight against. This ones has that same Problem in SPARES, been able to tank down 300 of damage while instant defusing a charge would be Very frustrating to play against.


(I-Fell-Tower) #7

@astoundingShellfish Sorry for taking so long time to think this through but I think I got an idea how to improve the idea.

  1. Instead of the mouse sensitivity decreasing while you’re looking around it would decrease by 5% every second while the MC’s active. It would mean that 20 seconds after the MC’s activation you wouldn’t be able to look around anymore. When you would exit the MC your sensitivity would return to normal.
  2. While the MC’s active you wouldn’t be able to reload. This in the combination with the change #1 would make combat a hard one while in the MC.
  3. To make up to these idea nerfs the MC’s health would be 500 instead of 400.

(HunterAssassin5) #8

step 1: activate the MC
step 2: walk into group of enemies
step 3: activate secondary ability
step 4: bathe in salty tears


(I-Fell-Tower) #9

[quote=“TheRyderShotgun;170427”]step 1: activate the MC
step 2: walk into group of enemies
step 3: activate secondary ability
step 4: bathe in salty tears[/quote]

Yeah, maybe gotta rethink it through so that you cannot troll with the MC like a madman…


(I-Fell-Tower) #10

@TheRyderShotgun

Well, got this one for ya.

  • I was planning on doing this already when I was thinking the idea but now I’ll finally present it. First of all; the Fast Blast would function so that upon activation the triangle shards would start to spin around you preventing you from leaving from the middle of them.
    2 seconds after the activation you would be able to leave the shard tornado and 1 second after that’s available the shards would launch themselves.
  • The Evac Blast would function differently. You would be able to leave the shard storm 1s after the ability activation but the blast would trigger only after 4s have passed since the activation.
  • Both of these re-tweaked abilities would cause sound resulting in enemies knowing when to evac themselves.

Hope this made the idea seem little bit more reasonable!


(Naonna) #11

…no. ‘-’ … (I know: not exactly constructive.) - immobilizing and/or restricting the enemies movement should NOT be a part of this game - I’ve done a few rants about this in the past. - basically removes counter play. Even with concussion nades, you’re able to move around. When there was a mouse sensitivity effect on them, half the community had a riot.


(I-Fell-Tower) #12

@Naonna Sorry that this took a long time to write but I have been having account problems. I haven’t completely thought this through but I’ll try to explain my design choices again:
I haven’t mentioned this but the shards that would fly out due to the blasts would spread out; think it as a “spread” of sort. So yeah, they’ll fly fast and far but if you’re pretty far away from the MC when it’s about to blast itself I would say it would be kinda easy to avoid the shards.
Also, you were saying that “immobilizing and/or restricting the enemies movement should NOT be a part of this game”. OK but I think as it stands right now the MC wouldn’t restrict or immobilize enemies. It would be effective in making Mage more tanky and it would also act as area denial ability.

Did I miss out something?