Combat Movement Abilities

bluhman · October 2012

This was a while back, but the mechanics of Plasma Beam had me thinking: it's possible for the developers to make moves that operate in a specific direction, but do not require a target. This was also with the compound realization that there must be some sort of condition tree possible for moves with how the player is moving. For example, with the old thunderbolt lunge (around Q1 2010) caused you to backflip further from your enemy if you were standing still, and lunge towards them if you were mobile. Another example (a subtle one) is the animation of Holdout shot: you roll in the direction you last moved. If you activate Holdout Shot while moving, you will also roll in said direction; clearly some sort of conditional branch drives that.

So, I came to the realization that these conditional branches can be combined with the non-targeting mechanics to create Combat Movement Abilities. Here's a few samples of what I'm talking about.

Martial Arts: Martial Shift
Enables you to quickly leap out of the way of attacks!
+ Moves you quickly 25 feet in the direction you are currently moving.
+ If you have not moved within the last second, you will lunge backwards.
+ No recharge.
+ Energy cost is reduced by having higher Strength and Dexterity.
+ Ranking up will increase movement speed and reduce energy cost.
- No effects on current target or any targets around you. A running theme for these sorts of moves: might as well keep their use specific.
- Counts as a travel power: If affected by an ability that restricts Travel Powers (I.E, nailed to the ground), you will be unable to activate this maneuver.
- You are still affected by gravity while using this move. If you shift off a ledge, you will fall.

Power Armor: Combat Jets
Activates powerful jets in your armor to maintain or close distance.
+ Maintain: Moves you constantly in the direction you are currently moving.
+ Initial burst moves you quickly in a given direction.
+ Can use the movement keys to adjust your trajectory while jets are active.
+ Can be activated on top of other Power Armor attacks (no slot).
+ Maintains your current altitude; boosting off of a ledge maintains identical height.
+ No recharge.
+ Ranking up will increase movement speed and reduce energy cost.
- Counts as a travel power: If affected by an ability that restricts Travel Powers (I.E, nailed to the ground), you will be unable to activate this maneuver.
- Using WASD/Joystick to adjust your trajectory during boosting has low traction: you cannot turn on a dime using a single Combat Jets maintain.
- Energy cost to activate Combat Jets is higher than maintain cost.

Darkness: Phase Step
Take a step through dimensions temporarily to avoid foes and hazards.
+ Moves you 25 feet in the direction you are currently moving.
+ If you have not moved within the last second, you will lunge backwards.
+ No recharge.
+ Temporarily makes you invulnerable during short phasing duration.
+ Ignores gravity; can maintain your altitude if you fly off a ledge.
+ Ranking up will increase movement speed and reduce energy cost.
- Slower activation time than other combat movement abilities.
- Using rapidly increases Phase Step's energy cost. Energy cost resets after 3 seconds of not teleporting.
- Counts as a travel power: If affected by an ability that restricts Travel Powers (I.E, nailed to the ground), you will be unable to activate this maneuver.

Reasons for something like this? Plenty.
- There's the base reason for this: some travel powers (namely flight variants and teleport) get really slow or become downright unusable in combat. These moves bypass the combat slow effect while imposing more controlled costs on the players. This is also useful because it enables the player to move exactly when they need to move.
- If you've got a boss aiming an AoE at you, this will allow you to promptly get yourself away from the cluster of allies nearby you.
- The reverse also applies: if there's an ally you're next to that's about to explode.
- Finally is in the case there's more bosses like Gravitar, where your mobility means the difference between life and death.
So, yeah. Let's move it.

stmoth · October 2012

Almost like combat rolls? Yes please.

swedsandbro · October 2012

In all honesty, this might even be pretty groundbreaking in PvP as well.

As of now, melee is sorely lacking in ways of keeping up with ranged toons and deal actual damage, with these kind of maneuvers a skilled player might be able to stand a fair chance.

That said, it's also a double-edged sword since ranged characters would be able to leap away at a constant rate at the very same time, spewing fire while keeping out of range with ease. But it's all relative.
However, I'd like to see that the melee-based ones (Martial arts and Brick) had you lunge -Towards- Your target at default instead (It can be deceptively hard in PvP to run in your opponents direction when they move about all the time), while the ranged ones (Power armor, darkness) had still had you lunge away.

Next, I'd like to address the fact that these really would need a nigh-instant activation time to work properly. As of now, evasive maneuvers and breakaway shot lunge you away from enemies, but it takes such an amount of time that you rarely can throw these in before the boss fires his or her AoE.

But, a more radical and groundbreaking idea would be to have these powers replace Block.

Yes, you read that right. Instead of blocking, you simply move out of the way. If this would happen, then activating these movement powers would, during the timeframe you're actually moving (I'd guess about 0.5 seconds), up your dodge chance to 100%. You would not be able to block incoming blows but dodge them instead. Of course, to avoid abuse of this you would gain a stacking debuff that lowers the dodge buff if you use the move in quick succession, and at 2-3 stacks you wouldn't see any benefits to it at all, save for the movement.

This kind of defense mechanism would require much more pinpoint timing from the player, but they'd reap the benefits of quick movement in the place of damage reduction. If this would be the case, however, it's only be fair that it would be Crippling Challenge that removed to ability to dodge, instead of nailed to the ground.

Thoughts?

bluhman · October 2012

Those are some good points. I'd imagine these things should have a special property where they will automatically interrupt any other powers. In fact, I think blocks might have the same property.

The hackneyed way to make these maneuvers play into good/responsive defense mechanics is to give them this priority. In fact, give them higher priority than blocking; if the user activates the move while holding down block/shift, the block will immediately stop and they will move.

The absolute ideal way to work this is to make it so that you automatically do this sort of thing when you try to move while blocking. Of course, this would require substantial reworking of every block in the game, so I'm not holding out for that.

I'm a bit skeptical about their benefit to PvP, though. It only makes kiter's jobs easier. Mainly the reason why I added the travel power classification to them, so that NTTG (only used by PvPers at this point) can defeat the ranged kiting strategy.

lotar295 · October 2012

wow,these moves are amazing,both for themes and RPing,and combat,It would be downright awesome to see these implemented in game.It would also be A LOT easier to do things like gravitar and the mega D event,with all the 1 shot AOEs those bosses have,so it'd really halp out there,but can we rank them up to allow for farther distance and speed,that would also make it a bit easier

/signed

stmoth · October 2012

This would be great because practically every set could theoretically have it's own dodge roll with secondary effects. Possibilities are staggering.

Combat Movement Abilities

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