The year of frequent merc releases seems to be upon us and it has me wondering what type of direction the devs will start taking our abilities. I like that we’re getting more mercs with niche, sort of hybrid roles that bridge the gap between the typical cookie-cutter medic, engineer, or assault. I feel like this trend will become more common because in my opinion, they’ve run out of options and things will start to get very repetitive if we keep seeing more mercs with only one role or job like a Fragger 2.0 or Sawbones 2.0. With that said, I think the abilities are what’s going to really set everything apart (duh, right?) and I wonder how long it’ll last before they’ve exhausted most options in this area as well. I wonder - and fear - if we’ll start seeing a lot of things like below:
Disabling enemy abilities or altering friendly cooldowns and spawn timers.
A merc that can act as a spawn beacon for friendlies or spawn in on their own teammate.
Frost that freezes or slows enemies.
Other status effects like poison and damage over time.
Abilities that increase movement speed like dashing or teleporting.
More moving deployables and ranged healing or repairing.
Recons with cameras that can be planted to watch other areas of a map.
Temporary invincibility.
Sounds like Overwatch or something, right? A lot sounds interesting, a lot could possibly work, and a lot sounds downright awful. I should preface this by saying my background with shooters is very cut and dry. Call of Duty, CS, Quake, ET, Battlefield, Tribes, Killing Floor, L4D, etc. I’ve never played stuff like Overwatch, Paladins, not much of TF2 at all, and all of these other quirky, sort of MOBA or RPG-like hero shooters. Is that what you even call them? Hero shooters? Idk, but y’all know what I’m getting at. I’m starting to struggle to see which game or genre DB aims to be because I’m seeing elements of everything. Should we be concerned, assuming the rate of mercs being released stays consistent, that we’ll start to get a lot of obnoxious abilities that we see in various other games? Should we worry things will become too repetitive? Or do we trust that they’ll stop when the time is right and DB will stay the DB we know and love?
That’s all. A bit of an unstructured rant that I typed up real quick. I might edit it into a more coherent thread in a bit if it kicks off.