Something like this would be awesome as well! But instead of abilities, how about support items? And I don't mean like the yellow debuff items. They'd have to be items that give small advantages to the whole team and have decently long cooldowns. Besides the sonar, I could easily think up a few other items that'd fall into the same category (points to slot):
- (1) Sonar - read original post
- (1) Alert Buoy - Another item to spot enemies. It deploys like a mine. When an enemy draws near it, it makes a sound and pings all friends' minimaps. It is visible to friends on the minimap, and it is destroy-able by unfriends.
- (1) Signal Flare - Not to be confused with the flare gun. Fires like a regular flare gun with longer range and a faster projectile. Causes its target to become visible for its duration. Great against speeders and fixers running to cover. Maybe to reduce confusion we could change the flare gun's name to the incendiary cannon or something like that.
- (2) Capture Marker - Fires like a mortar. Deals no damage, but has a huge "splash" that removes 50% capture progress (about the radius of a frost launcher's).
- (2) Smoke Screen - All players (including unfriends) have a smaller detectability range when inside (edit: or behind) the smoke (edit: all vision items, and maybe even the "burning" debuff, should counter this). Stacking more smokes on top of each other further decreases detectability range. Should last about 10 seconds.
- (2) EMP - Globally disables all unfriends' communications (minimap + commands + all ships only visible in direct line of sight) for a few seconds. Should give resistance on repeated use like with the tesla bolt.
- The 2 point items should have excessively long cooldowns, roughly a minute.
There's 6. That's how many yellow or blue items we have, so it's enough for a start. I'm thinking
purple items, and each ship gets 1 purple slot off to the side. Ever since the somewhat recent update buffing lower level ships (mk1-mk2), the jump to mk3 is now somewhat unsatisfying, so every ship should unlock the purple slot with 1 point at mk3, and then 2 points at mk4. Maybe this could create a window for a 6th boat? I'm thinking something like this for its upgrade stages:
- Mk1 - 22 1 2 - 0 (defense)
- Mk2 - 22 22 2 - 0
- Mk3 - 33 22 33 - 0
- Mk4 - 444 22 44 - 5
- Mk5 - 555 22 555 - 5
- Mk6 - 555 333 555 - 10
- Mk7 - 555 333 555 - 15
It's like a support shooter! We'll call it the
Spotter or the
Marker. Total 9 items at mk6-7, as with the addition of a single purple slot on every other ship they also have 9 items. I balanced the points to be 13 total (average between all boats with 2 purple points included).
Man, when you said "bigger new concept" I couldn't help but come up with a much, much bigger new concept LOL. Went from "sonar" to "new ship that specializes in vision".
Click to expand...