Recon Merc of Deployables Bluff

(I-Fell-Tower) #1

Name: James

Role: Recon

Primary Ability; Fake-out: James can deploy some sort of station, some sort of pack, turret, sticky, mine or a censor. When he has chosen the deployable it will be set and to an enemy’s eye it is slightly purple. The deployable behaves normally from the perspective of the enemy but it’s possible to realize the deployable isn’t friendly in some ways:

  1. Shooting it may not display the regular red cross-hair but after taking 90 damage the deployable gets destroyed.
  2. The slight shade of purple might be seen.
  3. Picked up ammo from packs / stations disappears when reloading and health from packs / stations disappears when getting actually healed / hurt.
    Well, what does this Fake-out (FO) then do? It spots enemies for your team without letting them know they’re detected. The FO also displays the merc type of a detected merc. The FO can be reclaimed, you can carry and have deployed only one FO at a time and the cooldown duration for the FO’s one minute.

Secondary ability; Chaos Rifle: James can take out a rifle that holds 5 shots at it’s maximum. Once the shots are used the cooldown of 50s will start. The rifle fires 120 RPM and deals 10 damage on bodyshot. It has pretty much no recoil, perfect accuracy and almost perfect range. On headshot the hit enemy will be tracked by turrets and mines of his / her team for the next 10 seconds.

HP: 110

Speed: 410

Arsenal: James’ default primary is the Thomas Cannon. It’s a SMG very similiar to Blishlok but it fires only 120 RPM, has far superior range and a scope. He can also carry Blishlok and the SMG9.
As for the secondaries he can carry the Deagle (his default), M9 and Gaulden.
For melee weapons he carries Cricket Bat as his default but the Combat Knife and the Kukri are also available for him.

About James: James wanted to be a movie director but his style was so hipster that his family became actually scared of his mental health and they got him to therapy. Everything was tried out but he still had huge problems trying to understand that filming wasn’t his thing. Unfortunately the therapist went insane and James needed a new one. The new one (who had a questionable past) suggested murder therapy. At this point the family had no idea what to do anymore so they accepted the offer. Well, in the end the new therapist (a recruiter) took James to a shooting range (London) and James learned to destroy some practice dummies (mercs with actual lives).
James looks hipster, acts hipster and is completely devoid of hearing any criticism he receives.

Uses: James is good at undercover recon. His FO spots enemies leaving them vilnerable and uninformed and his Chaos Rifle can truly wreck down enemy lines.

Weaknesses: Not the most lethal weapons, has a little bit lower HP than 120, long cooldown periods.

(PoisonBoost) #2

The Fake Out needs to be worked out a bit more, its just a heartbeat censor that is modified.

(I-Fell-Tower) #3

Changes (28th of February 2016)
Primary Ability Changes:

  • Decided that the FO won’t spot anymore enemies without them knowing.
  • Maybe if the FO had a meter that drains when enemies are near it (the more enemies and the closer they are the faster the draining happens) causing a red EMP blast once the meter’s empty that slows down enemies, destroys the FO and spots the nearby enemies for a long time.
  • If an enemy is right next to the FO the blast will be triggered immediately. Because of this, things like packs and stations would trigger quite often.

New Uses:

  • Now James can create artificial security in the enemy lines. His FO can make the enemies easy to harvest and his Chaos Rifle does what you think it does; chaos!

The Reasons for the Made Changes:

  • The changes were made based on the feedback I have received regarding the merc. Now his primary recon ability is little bit more different than the Heartbeat Censor and it could be now more lethal.
(Naonna) #4

Keep in mind how an opponent would fight back or change their strategy to combat this ability. List problems and counterattack options: decide which classes this directly counters and which are counters to this merc. While Dirty bomb isn’t a rock-paper-scissors based game, it IS class based.

(I-Fell-Tower) #5

OK, gonna keep that in mind…

(I-Fell-Tower) #6

@ Naonna It took a while but came up with these:

Countering James

  • James doesn’t have that lethal weapons so many mercs should be able to out-damage him before he takes you out.
  • If you think there’s James in the enemy team you should keep a distance from your team’s deployables. That way his Chaos Rifle won’t be that big of a problem.
  • Good mercs against James could be some of the lethal mercs like Fragger and Thunder. Their high health and good guns should make good counters.

James Countering

  • As stated, James can put FOs inside the enemy lines if he wants to be subtle and put ammo pack / station FOs behind corners to surprise spot enemies. This can also be used to booby-trap flank routes for mercs like Proxy, Aura and other fast flankers.
  • Finally, the Chaos Rifle punishes enemy mercs in extremely well-protected areas weakening their defense drastically.
  • I also thought that the Chaos Rifle (CR) could also turn more friendly deployables against you while you have been hit by the CR recently. Ammo packs would take 25% maximum ammo capacity ammo away from you reserves, Ammo Stations would drain your ammo, Healing Stations would drain health, Small Health Packs would take 30 HP away from you, Sawbonez’ packs would drain your HP until you were at one HP, stickies would explode on you like mines and the Heartbeat Censor would detect you for the enemy team.

Thanks for all the feedback!

(HunterAssassin5) #7

Funny how I just came across this one.

I’ll try to summarize the abilities first, if I’m wrong, I can be ignored, though I dont think I’ll be.

Fake Out: the player can drop a deployable, any deployable, and have it appear as an enemy deployable. This deployable detects enemies in a radius and after a certain amount of time(or when an enemy comes within a certain distance of it) will explode, while dealing no damage, will slow enemies down and keep them marked for detection for a certain amount of time.

Chaos Rifle: does minor damage on a bodyshot and, on a headshot, causes friendly deployable a to react faster to the target for 10 seconds. Unclear if the headshot inflicts any damage.

First question, if the fake out is a turret, will it shoot at friendlies/enemies?

Second question, why would I want to try to disguise it as anything other than a tiny stickybomb? I can probably throw it, unlike the ammo station or turret, it’s basically a direct upgrade of the heartbeat sensor, and can cause an explosion of slowdown effect. Why use vassie at all?

Third question, does the chaos rifle make it so turrets shoot at the marked enemy from outside its range?

Fourth question, does that also make stickies auto-detonate?

Fifth question, does a headshot with the chaos rifle do damage?

Sixth question, so a bodyshot with the chaos rifle, for the purposes of marking, is completely useless?

Also, a recon without a rifle?

(I-Fell-Tower) #8

@TheRyderShotgun You made some points that made me change my min at least regarding some aspects of the merc. I’ll also answer some of your questions in this post.

You were asking about how the FO functions and you got it pretty much right. The FO has a timer that ticks down while it has a enemy within it’s red EMP blast area. The closer the enemy is the quicker the ticking goes resulting in instant blast when being right next to the FO. The FO looks to the enemy like their deployable but it has a thin layer of purple covering it up. And yeah, the blast deals no damage, just the ddetection and the slow-down.

Then about the Chaos Rifle (CR). Yes, it deals double damage on headshots but no, it doesn’t make James’ teammates’ automated defenses react faster to enemies, it makes the enemies shot with the CR have their own teammates’ automated defenses turn against them, damaging and doing other harmful things to them (I listed them out in my previous post in this thread) for 10 seconds after being shot.

You asked if the FO shoots James’ teammates. No, it doesn’t. It does nothing to them and they are notified of it being a FO by a more noticable layer of purple on it than what the enemies see. Only things the FO does is blast enemies.

Your second question had me thinking. You were right. If the FO would function always like that there would be no reason to use any other FO type than a stickie. So, first of all no, you wouldn’t be able to throw the FO like you could with a stickie. Second of all, I think having the red EMP blast (REMPB) having an AoE that is bigger the bigger the FO is. What this would mean is that small FOs would be harder to notice but the bigger ones could blast more people at a time within a bigger radius.
Why would you want to use Vassili anymore?

  1. Vassili is better at range with his Sniper Rifles.
  2. His ability is far more spammier.
  3. Vassili can have a Machine Pistol as his secondary. James just an ordinary one.

Answer to your 3rd question: No, the turret would still be able to shoot only enemies in it’s range.

Answer to the 4th one: Yes, it would make the stickies auto-detonate if a marked enemy is in it’s blast area.

I already answered your 5th question.

6th question: Maybe it could be so that you could simply mark enemies with whatever-like shot. Body or head. Gotta admit. The body shots would be kinda useless without the marking.

Lastly, there is already a Recon without a rifle; Phantom.

Well, I hope I answered your questions and made the idea better. You are welcome!

(HunterAssassin5) #9

Pretty sure phantie’s an assault. He can’t mark enemies, so technically he’s not a recon.

Either way, I guess it doesn’t really matter. With an ability that can’t be thrown, it’s probably better to have mid-short range weapons.

With one recent change, though, I’d like to ask another question, now that the FO can’t be thrown, why would I want to use a stickie? It could be a trade off between ability to throw and difficulty to notice for smaller blast radius or something. Also, if you decide to make that change, probably a good idea to reduce the throw distance.

One last thing, so the chaos rifle basically makes it so friendly and enemy deployable a focus on the target, right? Personally I think it’s better if you dazzler this thing and split up the abilities between 2 mercs, and add a marking ability on the rifle. That’s just what I think though, feel free to ignore me.

Other than that, it seems okay, except maybe trying to make a new weapon. I’m not a weapon expert here, so I don’t know what to say about it.

(I-Fell-Tower) #10

@TheRyderShotgun Well, let’s keep the discussion going on then, shall we?

In the game Phantom’s considered a Recon merc. He might not be able to mark up enemies (an ability I would highly like to be combined with his katana) but he can sneak past those enemies and tell about their positions to his team via the voice chat. He is good at the sense of the word. Doing investigating.

Then…
Why is it so that if a merc doesn’t have a throwing ability he has to have a short-mid range weapons? Bush is exactly like that; he has an ability that cannot be thrown BUT he can carry out the Blishlok. If I understood you wrong correct me.

Why would you want to use FO stickies? They are less easy to spot. I thought that they maybe could result in a smaller cooldown than usually but in the end I scratched the thought.

I’m a little bit surprised that I actually managed to make the idea of the CR so confusing. Well, let’s put it this way: If you’re marked by the CR all, I mean ALL, deployables on the field are against you in their own ways I have mentioned.
Didn’t really wanna make a highlight-recon styled rifle because it seems like too cliche of an idea. It has been floating around for so long already and I bet many people have already used the idea. And of course, having that many recon abilities on one merc seems kinda too generous.

Finally about the Thomas Cannon. When I mentioned that it had superior range when compared to Blishlok I REALLY meant that. It has good enough range to be considered pretty much as good as Blishlok in their own areas of play.

(Naonna) #11

sits this one out: letting someone else point out the flaws: brain hurting

(HunterAssassin5) #12

No, don’t talk to me about new weapons, I have difficulties wrapping my head around weapons and stats, let’s just stick to abilities with me, I just have some worries is all, if you have confidence in it, I have nothing to say.

First of all, yes, you did misunderstand me. Assuming you made it so stickies and mines have no throw arc, and just drop straight dowanwards, wouldn’t it be better for me to use something like a ammo station with larger area of effects across the board?

As for the chaos rifle, I wasn’t misunderstanding anything(I don’t think so anyway), I was suggesting you seperate this merc ability-wise into 2 mercs.

What do I think about the CR? I think it might be a little OP, but mostly if the targeted enemy is surrounded by deployables, and if the enemy team happens to be running all-bushwankers or something, well, f-em up, this might be the one ability to negate the effects of rotation spam a little.

(I-Fell-Tower) #13

@TheRyderShotgun Why would one want to use an Ammo Station FO instead of a Sticky FO or another way around?
Ammo Station:

  • Has a larger AoE --> Spots more enemies in some situations.
  • Is very noticable --> Highly aware playes can spot the purple vibe.

Sticky:

  • Is small --> Not that noticable.
  • Has a small AoE.

I wouldn’t split James into 2 mercs. At the moment his abilities are good IMO in a sense that he can be good in defense and offense.

About the whole-enemy-team-has-only-bush thing: Keep your distance. There are already ways to kinda troll your team in the game. My friends actually tried out having Fletcher in team A and Proxy in team B. They made it so that Fletcher stuck 3 stickies on the Proxy and then the Proxy ran to her lines, the Proxy’s player said “Detonate!” and the Fletcher detonated the bombs resulting in this cycle repeating itself multiple times and in multiple kick-outs.

So as you can see trolling like that is already possible.