Goonhub
05-18-2021, 10:00 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-18-2021, 10:10 AM by nefarious6th. Edited 3 times in total.)
It currently utilizes blobspawn points which are all internal to the station, just to explain the spawn locations thing.
Some other thoughts:
AoE stuff that I think contributes to part of the problem with SWORD:
There is no overlay for the AOE, and even though the SWORD looks like it takes up a 3x3 tile radius and you'd expect the AoE Gyrating Edge to be hitting, well, things at the edge of SWORD in a 1-tile extension around it, it's actually an extension from the center of the 3x3 by five tiles in every direction. You could be standing on the back side of the mob, five full tiles away from it, and still be hit with the full force of the attack.
I would certainly be okay with seeing that radius brought in a little and an overlay applied. Truthfully I'm not around on Classic when SWORD spawns to understand how 50 people in a round facilitate the best way to fight it. I think I discovered in my testing on it that winning the ground game against it really hinges on having both a Signifer and an Egun (preferably with a rechargable cell) at your/the crew's disposal, and I think that needs some consideration for balancing.
Second biggest observation is the pacing of everything:
SWORD can use a new attack every two seconds so long as it's not in the middle of an attack, which means it rolls from one into the other with very little signal time of what you need to do to prepare. Some of the individual attacks like linear purge also have embedded short timers; you have less than two seconds to get out of the way of Linear.
Again, I haven't seen this in action on Classic, and odn't know how frequent it is (it sounds like it's more frequent that people would like, which is surprising since the spawn restrictions are rather tight), but I am curious about people's general reception and strategy for it.
If you're thinking of SWORD as a pod-based battle, then I think timing becomes a more significant issue when it comes to the start-up and activation of it; it really might take people a while to find and get into pods, to put weapons in pods, repair pods, and potentially build new ones for fighting, and you only have two minutes between when it's pulled and when it activates (not to mention if anyone needs to seek it out, but I imagine AIs maybe do that?)
Certainly I could look into both of those. The spawning thing for me is a little harder to resolve and I think would need to rely on an agreement between people but especially devs to move the boss from being a ground-game boss to a dogfighting one. Not sure how that would shake out since there's similar pod-based bosses.
Edit: Sorry, just to be clear:I had never considered SWORD a pod-based boss before, but recognized a few related but separate points that might need balance consideration.
I would be interested to know if you/any other players are concerned about the attack power, the attack timing/patterns, the short wind-up from the event announcement, the massive destructiveness of certain abilities, the spawn locations, or the stylings of this as a foot battle versus a pod one, and which of these are the Most Significant. Not that you didn't bring up good points, just to know which ones of these to think more on and review again that are the most actionable and will bring about the most significant and positive change for this event (and it can be all of them too, or maybe it's none of these; who knows!).
Some other thoughts:
AoE stuff that I think contributes to part of the problem with SWORD:
There is no overlay for the AOE, and even though the SWORD looks like it takes up a 3x3 tile radius and you'd expect the AoE Gyrating Edge to be hitting, well, things at the edge of SWORD in a 1-tile extension around it, it's actually an extension from the center of the 3x3 by five tiles in every direction. You could be standing on the back side of the mob, five full tiles away from it, and still be hit with the full force of the attack.
I would certainly be okay with seeing that radius brought in a little and an overlay applied. Truthfully I'm not around on Classic when SWORD spawns to understand how 50 people in a round facilitate the best way to fight it. I think I discovered in my testing on it that winning the ground game against it really hinges on having both a Signifer and an Egun (preferably with a rechargable cell) at your/the crew's disposal, and I think that needs some consideration for balancing.
Second biggest observation is the pacing of everything:
SWORD can use a new attack every two seconds so long as it's not in the middle of an attack, which means it rolls from one into the other with very little signal time of what you need to do to prepare. Some of the individual attacks like linear purge also have embedded short timers; you have less than two seconds to get out of the way of Linear.
Again, I haven't seen this in action on Classic, and odn't know how frequent it is (it sounds like it's more frequent that people would like, which is surprising since the spawn restrictions are rather tight), but I am curious about people's general reception and strategy for it.
If you're thinking of SWORD as a pod-based battle, then I think timing becomes a more significant issue when it comes to the start-up and activation of it; it really might take people a while to find and get into pods, to put weapons in pods, repair pods, and potentially build new ones for fighting, and you only have two minutes between when it's pulled and when it activates (not to mention if anyone needs to seek it out, but I imagine AIs maybe do that?)
Certainly I could look into both of those. The spawning thing for me is a little harder to resolve and I think would need to rely on an agreement between people but especially devs to move the boss from being a ground-game boss to a dogfighting one. Not sure how that would shake out since there's similar pod-based bosses.
Edit: Sorry, just to be clear:I had never considered SWORD a pod-based boss before, but recognized a few related but separate points that might need balance consideration.
I would be interested to know if you/any other players are concerned about the attack power, the attack timing/patterns, the short wind-up from the event announcement, the massive destructiveness of certain abilities, the spawn locations, or the stylings of this as a foot battle versus a pod one, and which of these are the Most Significant. Not that you didn't bring up good points, just to know which ones of these to think more on and review again that are the most actionable and will bring about the most significant and positive change for this event (and it can be all of them too, or maybe it's none of these; who knows!).