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(POWER BALANCE) Force

bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
in Suggestions Box
Force has historically been one of the worst powersets during the lifetime of the game - which is saying a lot because it has been around since launch. Its attacks, aside from Force Cascade, lack impact for the amount of knockback they do. It's never had any options for powerful single-target attack. Its support gimmick of shield-strengthened holds and protection have been under-utilized in the meta and get wildly overshadowed by pure healing power. And finally, Personal Force Field has, and is still is, the worst defensive passive.

So, let's make some changes to all that.

Main goals:
Force as DPS - Crushing Forces
What makes force wonderful already as a DPS set is that it has its own unique approach to combat; immense, crushing damage to huge groups of enemies using slow charges. This is a characterization of the set I want to keep while improving the set's competence as a DPS dealer. Much like with Electricity and Fire the overhaul will aim to accomplish this task by utilizing attacks with extreme energy costs, combining this with set-specific mechanics that meld with the stats to facilitate this.
  • Superstat Focuses: REC, END
  • Primary Defense Debuff: Demolish
  • Other Debuff: Dampened - The target's movements are severely dampened, causing them to deal 10% less damage and rendering them immune to knocks and push effects. It stacks multiple times, and Dampening can be violently removed by some attacks.

Force as Tank - Mighty Shields
PFF, for all its shortcomings, has its own unique approach to the question of defense. It's just a matter of making that approach gel better with other sets, and to allow it to fit or contend with rival defenses. A lot of this fixing would also tie into how it could be possible to make forcefields more competent as a support set.

Force as Support - Maximum Protection
It says a lot when the best forcefield power in the game (that isn't a device) is not even from the powerset that focuses on forcefields, and also isn't even used primarily for its forcefield properties... And then on top of that isn't even relevant to the meta anymore because of how much damage gets pumped out by cosmic and elite foes. Combine this with the fact that a lot more stats, specializations, and mechanics scale and combine with healing, and it's pretty easy to see why forcefields, as a whole, have fallen to the wayside. Force should seek a way to provide allies with buffs that should eliminate, or at least greatly reduce the need for healing.
  • Superstat Focuses: PRE, INT - Very important to note is that many of the buffs featured in this playstyle still should scale with the right stats for support.
  • Mechanic: Forcefields - Compared to their current incarnation, Forcefields should feature a much longer duration, much higher health (to compensate for a lack of mitigation), and better on-hit effects. With a longer duration, forcefields could perhaps also afford to feature cooldowns or AoE effects, tying into the INT statting's usefulness in a force support build.
  • Buff: Aegis - Currently this buff is only utilized by a single advantage on a Single Blade move. Could easily make a cameo here as well.
  • Buff: Protection - A 5% defense buff that renders the target as 'blocking', allowing them to survive certain attacks such as Mega-Destroid energy waves without having to stop attacking. Note this only helps minutely with actually reducing damage, so for some attacks, and on some targets, it'll still be a good idea to block to get the much greater 300+% damage mitigation. Intended use is on high-health tanks.


Rebalances of Existing Powers
Force Bolts
  • Knocks target down instead of back on first hit.
  • Energy Refraction now will recover some of the health on your forcefields instead of applying a weak one (note, the Energy Form mechanic will cease to exist, optimally, after this rehaul).

Force Blast
  • Higher power to compensate for a forced knock.
  • Field Inversion likely replaced with more useful advantages like...
  • New Advantage - Full charges apply Demolish.
  • New Advantage - The knock effect is removed when this advantage is taken, and is replaced instead by building Dampening stacks.

Force Snap
  • Knocks more reliably

Force Eruption
  • Advanced to a Tier 2 attack and hits proportionally much harder.
  • Has a 25 foot radius
  • Increased maximum charge time, for greater potential damage.
  • Gravitational Polarity advantage will last as long as you stay in its hotspot, compensating for longer charge.
  • New Advantage - If under the effect of Protection, Force Eruption ends the effect to deal 30% extra damage to all targets.

Personal Force Field
  • Provides extremely large amount of forcefield over default health - again, compensating for lack of mitigation. Talking in excess of 20k here.
  • Shield naturally regenerates a bit of health every 10 seconds.
  • Blocking immediately causes the shield to start regenerating at a high rate.
  • No damage bleed-through to underlying health unless shield is fully depleted.

Kinetic Manipulation
  • Provides knock resistance scaling with superstats
  • Scales all physical damage - both melee and ranged.
  • Provides light protection from all physical damage.
  • Increases damage dealt to knock resistant targets with ranged knock attacks.

Protection Field
  • Upped to Tier 2.
  • Charge ability now. Charging creates an AoE radius onto which protection fields are applied to allies.
  • Self-Cast also has this charge, and works as a PBAoE.
  • Similar to PFF, very high amounts of extra health provided
  • Duration of Protection Field is increased to 40 seconds
  • Duration of field refreshes constantly while target is in combat
  • Extensive Cooldown (40+ seconds?)
  • Expel Impurity instantly stops all debuffs/DoTs if the target is out of combat.

Force Shield
  • New Advantage: Repairs forcefields if you take damage while blocking.

Force Geyser
  • New Advantage: Enemy hit by the geyser gets held after landing in a zero-gravity field.
  • New Advantage: Refreshes Dampening stacks on the target.

Crushing Wave
  • Tier 1
  • Demolishes all targets hit on a full maintain.
  • New Advantage: Knocks targets inwards at random while maintaining

Containment Field
  • Expanding AoE hold similar to Ego Sleep. This means a tap of Containment Field operates similar to how it does now - just much faster obviously.
  • The shield is only applied to hold-vulnerable targets (master villain or below), and is much stronger.
  • Intent is to make it a fast way to instantly hold mobs at a cosmic, but ineffective as a PvP/general tactic due to its damage shielding.

Field Surge
  • Applies a large amount of damage mitigation (100% or so) to the user instead of a forcefield. This mitigation, unlike most, layers over forcefields.
  • If the user has PFF, the Field Surge still repairs its durability.

Redirected Force
  • Visual change: Please have this ability project a single, very large bubble instead of a ton of small bubbles on each individual target.
  • Has a maximum duration of 5 seconds
  • Redirected Force buff lasts longer.
  • New Advantage: trades out redirected force damage buff for applying Protection to all targets while the Redirected Force is maintained.
  • New Advantage: fully-maintaining redirected force repairs all forcefield effects within its reach.
  • New Advantage: First tick of Redirected Force repels all enemies within its area, and afflicts them with Dependency.

Force Cascade
  • Doesn't eat energy forms, since they don't exist as a concept anymore.
  • Instead, using Force Cascade applies the Kinetic Exhaustion debuff to you, which raises Force Cascade's energy cost for 10 seconds.
  • Containment Blast is replaced with a better advantage.
  • New Advantage: Dampened targets get the effect ruptured and take an extra burst of crushing damage. This does not cause FC to knock however.
  • New Advantage: Fully charging will apply and refresh a stack of Stagger.

Force Detonation
  • Deals more damage
  • Primary target is knocked vertically, all others are knocked outward from primary target as usual.
  • Primary target has Dampening ended when this is utilized, forcing the knock to occur on them and taking more damage.
  • Force Spate is altered so that it deals higher damage to any targets under the effect of a hold.
  • New Advantage: If the primary target is demolished, the target is also Jynxed.

Inertial Dampening Field
  • Tier 1
  • Stacks! Each stack provides small amounts of damage mitigation (that goes over forcefields) and damage absorption.
  • Stacks whenever one of the forcefield effects you've applied has taken damage.
  • Provides a smaller amount of damage boost.
  • Stack strength scales best with Endurance and Presence.


New Powers

Kinetic Battery
To you, all beings around you are loaded with potential energy, ready to be utilized.
  • The Tier 1 Force Energy Unlock.
  • Activates whenever you knock an enemy with a ranged attack, or hit a dampened target with any physical attack.
  • Energy flow is 2 large bursts of energy over 10 seconds.
  • Scales best with END, and also with REC.

Potential Energy
Your body is a battery for potential energy. The longer you spend time waiting for your attacks to power up, the stronger they become.
  • The Tier 1 Force DPS Toggle
  • Stacks automatically once every 3 seconds. Ranking up increases the speed at which the buff stacks.
  • As with other toggles, Potential Energy caps out at 8 stacks.
  • When making an attack, one stack is removed.
  • Applies a large damage boost to all attacks (melee and ranged) with a smaller buff to shield strength.
  • Scales best with REC, also scales with EGO.

Barrier Warrior
Your specialty is both combat and protection.
  • Support passive
  • Increases physical damage dealt
  • Provides you with fair damage resistance
  • Strengthens the power of your forcefields considerably, and heals to a lesser degree
  • You regain some energy whenever you take damage, with more gained when hit with physical damage.

Force Shell
Provides directed protection to a target within your reach.
  • T1 maintained forcefield, 50 feet. As you maintain, the forcefield becomes stronger.
  • Can be used on self, or on another target. If used on another target, the effect is mirrored on both of you.
  • While force shell's shield is up, Protection is applied to the targets.
  • Force Shell lingers for 5 seconds after you finish maintaining (keeping in mind that short maintains provide very small shields, and full maintains provide powerful shields).
  • Advantage - Applies Aegis to you and its target on its first tick. (or just you if it's a self-cast).
  • Advantage - Once every 15 seconds, starting a Force Shell ends all holds/stuns/roots on the target you choose, so long as it's a target other than yourself.

Refraction Field
Uses a series of forcefields to protect allies and refract light in the area, hiding them.
  • Tier 1, reskin of Sorcery's Sigils of Radiant Sanctuary.

Gravity Lock
Creates a field of immense gravity around you, preventing enemies from fighting effectively.
  • T2 PBAoE maintain with a 25 foot radius.
  • Targets inside its AoE take crushing damage and are slowed
  • Random chance to apply Dampening to targets.
  • Finishing Gravity Lock's maintain deals a final burst of damage to all targets and knocks them down (or more damage if they can't be knocked down).
  • Advantage - Enemies instead are pulled inwards to you. Instead of a random chance, Dampening only will be applied once the target is within melee range of you.
  • Advantage - Applies an escalating temporary shield to you while you maintain (similar to wall of bullets). 3 point adv.

Mass Root
Amplifies the weight of enemies in a given area, preventing them from moving temporarily
  • T2 click that roots all targets within a 20 foot radius sphere, up to 100 feet away.
  • Otherwise deals no damage/effect by default. Intended for use as utility/stacking for Manipulator stuff for non-disruptive situations.
  • Advantage - Primary target hit by Mass Root has Demolish refreshed on them.
  • Advantage - Refreshes Dampening on all targets hit.

Kinetic Well
Creates a hotspot of latent energy you can linger inside to gain power.
  • T2 click with recharge, creates a 10 foot radius energy cloud.
  • Similar to Neuroelectric pulse, but scales with both Endurance and Recovery. Also doesn't deal damage.
  • Otherwise, similar energy generation effects, root effect, recharge, etc.
  • Advantage - On application, targets within melee distance of you are repelled away as well as rooted.
  • Advantage - Allies who are nearby during the Kinetic Well's activation have their forcefields repaired.
  • Advantage - If the Kinetic Well is stacked together with a Gravitational Polarity hotspot, the two combine to provide a surge of energy to the user and remove the Kinetic Exhaustion debuff. 1 point adv.

G-Force
Uses a spurt of energy to amplify your power for a short duration
  • T2 active offense. Provides cursory damage boost and breakout power.
  • Provides protection while the effect is up.
  • Slowly generates energy as you deal and take damage.
  • Advantage - Creates a temporary forcefield over your health based on your max energy value. Dealing damage refills the shield, but if it's destroyed the shield will not be repaired. (HP value on this shield is fairly low, similar to current shields)
  • Advantage - While G-Force is active, Kinetic Exhaustion is automatically removed and cannot be applied for the duration of the AD's run.

Singularity
Flings out a slow-traveling singularity that draws in targets.
  • T3 Untargeted pet spawn click, 30 second recharge.
  • Singulary pet is an untargetable entity that flies in a straight line from your current facing at walking speed.
  • Enemies within 20 feet of the singularity are pulled inwards and take crushing damage every 0.5 seconds.
  • Singularity will pause for a couple seconds and then dissipate either after traveling 50 feet, or hitting a wall.
  • Can be activated a second time to knock all targets inwards and apply Dampening to the targets. This ends the Singularity immediately.
  • Advantage - Dampened enemies in the singularity's path get the effect ruptured for a burst of damage and are knocked violently towards its center.
  • Advantage - Upon dissipating naturally, the Singularity explodes and deals particle damage, knocking all targets vertically and applying plasma burn.

Implosive Force
Crushes a focused target from the outside in for extreme damage.
  • T3 Single-target charge, 100 foot range. this is Force's focused damage attack.
  • Knocks target back on a full charge. The knock causes the attack to do much more damage on knock-immune targets.
  • Final DPS goal is close to something that Defile in a Poison build would pump out.
  • Advantage: Causes targets within 15 feet of the primary target to be knocked inwards whenever this attack is used.
  • Advantage: Deals 30% bonus damage on Demolished targets.
  • Advantage: Has a 20% chance to apply Chi Flame.
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