[left]My idea, of making Phantom more recon, would be to add him an ability to mark people.
Considering Phantoms style, he carries a katana and he looks like a samurai with more modern armor and a mask. Sticking to his style, I think it would be cool if he had a second ability:
Ability that would throw a Kunai or a Shuriken and would mark the target.
I would like if the ability would be extremely similiar to the nade launcher for it’s ammonition, rate of fire and projectile.
Options for what the ability would do:
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Mark a target with the projectile dealing 0 damage and not revealing the direction it was hit from and making target vulnerable and revealed for X seconds(between 5-10 seconds maybe?). Vulnerability would increase damage taken from all sources of damage by X amount. Any action from stealth will still break the stealth.
Reasoning: sneak around, mark key targets. Example 1, mark Rhino and either force him to take more damage because of the vulnerability or fall into cover and wait out the duration. Example 2, mark a Vassili revealing his position for your team and make him an easier target to assassinate. -
Mark a target with the projectile dealing x damage(maybe 40-60 damage), which is unable to headshot for double damage. Also applying vulnerability and revealed on the target for X seconds. And on top if it all, increase your movement speed by X amount while target is marked.
Reasoning: make the ability more fun by adding possibility to kill with it and not making it OP to only use the ability for killing. Movement speed buff, while not being logical to gain movement speed from hitting an enemy with a throwing knife, would make him more versatile, at first I only thought of it to increase movement speed towards the marked target, which would be great if you throw a knife and run straight up for the kill, but if it deals damage and you reveal the direction of which it was thrown, I find it much more interesting to mark a target and then quickly flank around for the kill. Of course it would also make it a decent escape tool if you manage to get behind corners.
(3.) In addition to one or the other option from above, make the throwing knives disable deployables in 1? hit.(turret, health/ammo station, disable mines without exploding maybe?)
With this ability, I don’t want to add him lots of power, but Refractive armor by itself more than often feels lacking against better players, and it wouldn’t be near as great as Naders nade launcher, as the damage wouldn’t be that high nor would it have area of effect damage. (Maybe still allow the ability projectile to bounce off walls, but at the penalty of reduced damage?)
Now, I’ll try to balance Phantoms loadouts to fit the ability more into his kit.
First of all, I’ll try to balance the Chopper augment around his melee weapons.
To make his melee attacks feel impactful with every melee weapon and not only aim for the katana loadouts, I believe the best choice would be to remove Chopper augment from any katana loadout and only add the Chopper augment to the Beckhill Combat Knife and Stilnotto Stiletto loadouts. And even then there should be only 1 loadout for each knife with the Chopper augment.
As for which loadouts should have the Chopper augment, I’m not sure, as I hope the Blishlock will still get some love at some point and becomes a little bit more on par with the other guns.
To add some “strength” to the knife throwing ability, Quick Draw would seem a rather good pick, to mark and stab/shoot.
Also with more recon mercs hopefully in the future with probably more “revealing” abilities, I think Enigma would actually become more important when trying to sneak around. And another augment that I believe could be rather strong would be Sneaky, because sound plays an extremely big role especially to some back line merc that would like to stay a bit more stationary, such as the more unmobile type of Vassili and Sparks players.
His Undercover ability should be removed from the loadouts and the 40% should/could be added to him by default, which I do believe he could greatly use.
I don’t really have any other notable augment for Phantom I would like to mention.
Thoughts on all this? or the ability only?[/left]
