Elemental Attacks with Totems

Suggestions
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I wanted to make this thread to outline my idea for how an elemental ranged attack system could work, specifically using totems.

Totem Attack Augments
First of all, the attacks would come in the form of augments for totems. There would be one augment for each element: burn, shock, blast, corrosion, toxic, and chill. Each augment equipped to a totem would last for multiple attacks, similar to other weapon augments. The augments would allow the player to perform a ranged attack of that element to a single enemy (or multiple with the forged aoe trait) and would have a chance to place the corresponding debuff for that element on the enemy.

Player Stats and Skill Builds for Totems
Elemental attacks with totems would be dependent on Intelligence, which would allow players with a healing build (high int and revive epics etc) to do some good damage in a group without putting a lot of skill points into other types of combat damage. Totem damage would be added to the Bomb Mastery and Epic skill choices to support this.

New Totem Crafting
To go along with this, new totem recipes would be added, including copper, iron, silver, gold, titanium and gem totems. Recipes would be unlocked with the weapon crafting and epic skills. This would increase damage and attack speed in higher tiers, like with other tools and weapons.

Edit: Changed thread title and post wording to no longer include “magic” since the devs don’t want the game to be about that.

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Mega strong sticky bomb augment! Let’s do it!

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I was just thinking on the drive to see family, how could magic be added into Boundless? And here’s the answer. Gem totems would have higher spell power etc.

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As a magic user in other games, I fully encourage this as an idea! Love it

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Yes please. And add Lances back too.

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6

from the sound of this there will probably not be magic added to boundless.

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7

Lava laser gun you say? :stuck_out_tongue:

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8

“Magic’s just science that we don’t understand yet.”

― Arthur C. Clarke

So there’s plenty of wiggle room to add magic like qualities to the game that can be explained away by Oortian science…

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9

Whether there is wiggy room or not is sort of irrelevant. If it isn’t something that fits into the game like Boundless and what the developers have for its vision, then there’s no reason to add it.

Jump jets powered by Spark Batteries is something that would fit in the theme of Boundless more than someone shooting a Chain Lightning spell from a totem. I would say, reserve this sort of thing for modded servers when rental servers are released.

If the game starts just having a ton of mix-mash ideas thrown into it without actually asking the question if it’s relevant enough with any of the suggested “lore” the game provides through what the items are, then I think it’s pretty obvious that magic isn’t something that really fits. Technology ideas, yes, casting magical spells that harness the elements of nature or some other mythical source of energy like in D&D, then probably not so much.

I’ll take a customizable vehicle over spellcasting 100% of the time in this game. There are plenty of other games where you can get your fantasy and spellcaster fix. This game doesn’t need it.

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Okay, we can just call it elemental ranged attacks then.

11

We already have that with slingbows.

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Do slingbow augments allow you to give the same debuffs that elemental enemies give?

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You beat me to it!

I love magic and D&D style settings, but I agree this is not a game for magic.

There’s nothing to say you can’t use science and technology to harness the elements though.

Flamethrower, explosives (which we have), electric rod, water wheel, wind turbines, solar panels, fridges, grills, lighting,… Lots of things, not necessarily weapons, but useful and still harnessing the elements.

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No. The Slingbows themselves have an element attached to them. Certain slingbows do bonus damage to certain element types on mobs while other element types have resists towards other element damage types.

But as far as I am aware there are no debuffs you can directly place on mobs.

IMO, combat in the game isn’t exactly polished up to that point or even really that well developed. That will most likely be changed 1 year from now. It’s just inevitable that combat will get some tweaks and changes over the next 12-18 months as other content is introduced.

Now, I can say this though. It is possible to expand on the Centraforge type of thing and add Quirks or Boons that provide debuffs or other types of status effects to hostile enemies. Whether or not that is going to be a thing or not is still yet to be seen.

However, the other side of that is why not just create from scratch new items from the ground up. Like MysticPandora brought up: a flamethrower.

I’d love to have one of those and even a firearm to replace slingbows as they look like stone age cave man weapons. I would think that if Oortians are meant to be salvaging the ancient remains of lost technology and backwards engineering it into something useful, then I think rifles, pistols, shotguns, etc. would be far better weapon choices to have been made than a slingbow that shoots a pebble shaped projectile.

I think in this sort of point of view of having actual firearms in a science and technology based sandbox MMO is more aligned with the idea of “discovering ancient lost technology”.

Not trying to say that the slingbow is a bad weapon design, I just think it should have stopped some where around Iron or Copper tier and then moved into other things, such as a basic firearm that requires ammunition to be able to attack something.

Same goes for vehicles, it would be pretty â– â– â– â– â– â– â–  awesome if we could have customizable battle mechs some time after Titans are released and we start getting air ships. Hopefully those air ships are customizable too.

I do think if we have air, land, and naval vehicles that can fight and are customizable, along with fire arms and other sci-fi militaristic weapons, we definitely would need a tweak with the AI of creatures and enemies to make them fight a lot better.

I also wouldn’t mind seeing some sort of slow Spark generation source, such as wind turbines or solar panels. Those types of things would be pretty awesome to work with and would function rather well for my building projects.

Anyways, I am a D&D 5e DM and I would absolutely hate this game having magic in it. I want to be able to have my sci-fi fix since I have a plethora of fantasy games in my online video game libraries.

I just wish that the developers would move faster at releasing content. In fact, I would like them to release a lot of different content components all at once instead of trickling it in slowly. There’s probably some technical reasons behind that but I think people can overall understand that if we’re seeing a huge spike in active player numbers because of massive content patches, then it’s well worth it… IMO the end result justifies any temporary playability issues.

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Dear Father Oortmas, please, remove out slingbows, hammers, spanners and other useless stuff. We need only totems and magic :laughing:

Lances are actually never exist.

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You can add bleeding, slow and weak debuffs via the forge…

They dont cover all the elements but they are pretty close

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Again, since quite a few things in this game are impossible in the real world it is certainly possible to come up with new tech based items that do fit into the game. I don’t need to be casting spells and whatnot, I will just pull a trigger!

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Why, this is not magic; it’s merely my TeslaTotem™!

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I would rather have a new item than expand on an existing one. Part of the problem in this game is a lack of items. The game launched with actually very few items for a MMO of this nature. It still hasn’t grown up beyond being a baby yet.

Landmines, tesla guns, firearms, body armor, vehicles of all kinds, etc. all would be in the proper direction to pull this game out of the gutter that it seems to be in with its player population… At least I think it would be. Still a fun game for a new player to get into and play. Just not a lot of worth while stuff to keep around in a personal warehouse. When you really think about it, there’s only a handful of stuff that anyone really uses in this game.

More stuff in general means better gameplay for everyone.

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Games not about magic yet we craft wooden staffs and throw Crystal’s on top to teleport and rez people?

I think adding more augments that allowed shooting elemental attacks would be great (need more use for the totem)

I do agree we should refer to it as magic, but you know most players will lol

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