I’m just going to come out and say it…combat in this game gets really stale.
Yeah, we all know it and have talked about it. Many of us have even put up repeated ideas on how to make combat more enjoyable over the years. We have new mobs in the works, we have new shields coming, and hopefully more weapons some time down the road…so let’s do a little brainstorming.
Let us pretend combat classes suddenly become separate from normal classes, and every combat class gets around four skills. Pick a weapon type, create your skills and let us know how it would play. Would you pick a spear and have different types of thrusts and knockbacks? Bows with multishot? Staves that allowed you to cast healing waves or amplifying magics? Dual shields and become a bastion for the party with your scathing verbal taunts?
Please toss out some ideas, and don’t worry about if it fits into the game or would be impossible to do. Think of this exercise as being more for entertainment than a game request since it would be a very large undertaking.
I’ll start it off with the necromancer type class. Its a lower health pool class that uses an ancient oortstone dagger with a primary stabbing skill that accumulates life essence. Once the essence builds up enough, it can be used to cast a life steal buff on melee allies, cast an AoE debuff that would lower down enemy movement speed, or can be used to raise a skeletal spitter!
As the class develops, skill points can be placed into a skill tree that allows you to either develop your own damage, your buffs/debuffs or your minion. I’m picturing ways to add bleeds to your main attack or make it so your minion gets random elements, or even give your buff or debuff for another minion. Make it so your buff can add additional crit chance or speed instead of just life steal.
Bomber class! One that lets you choose between a bard-style buff-bomber or a danger-bomber.
Bard-bomber skill tree would let you add skills to improve or maybe add venerable and special bomb effects. Maybe a revive bomb epic, liquid breaker epic, glow bomb, etc.
danger-bomber adds elemental effects and special slingbow boon debuffs. Epics like choosing between crowd-control or high damage bombs.
Edit: and sticky bombs!
I’d like to see a mage class. Wielding a staff with a ranged attack like a magic missile. Different staffs would have different damage types and come with different utility spells. Could be things like mage armor, invisibility, nightvision, temporary portals, etc and use a different resource (ie mana). Killing many enemies would build up a charge that would enable the mage to summon a meteor.
Ability to infuse spark into grapples to cause one of the following: electrification, gravity distortion, or mass absorption. Mainly targeted at cuttletrunks.
When grapple is attached to cuttletrunk it causes that cuttletrunk to do the following:
Electrification – applies eletrical damage and stuns enemy causes paralysis while engaged.
Gravity distortion – negates all plantary gravity applying to creature and redirects it randomly , causing enemy to fly erratically and taking magnified impact damage due to collisions with objects.
Mass absorption – multiplies mass of creature so they fall out of the sky and movement is impaired. But creature is not stunned, still able to attack and flop around.
Possible other forgings -
Anti-gravity – creatures float and are unable to move due to no friction with ground.
Collider – grapple enemy A and grapple enemy B, then click third time to cause creatures A and B to collide.
Viper’s strike – when latched onto enemy inflicts poison damage over time as long as it is attached.
Blazing grip – causes burning damage to enemy over time as long as grapple is attached to enemy.
Controlled algorithm – if attached to enemy then enemy becomes ally and attacks other enemies as long as it remained attached. Able to control 2 enemies, one with each hand if 2 grapples are equipped
One of my best IRL friends doesn’t enjoy hunting in this game because he just wants to hit things with a huge hammer all the time. He’d be all over your berserker class, though he would want a huge hammer for each hand lol.
I can see a lot of ways to allow a fast shadowy stabby stabby develop to allow them to be unique. Like a shadow charge once they get so many hits in a row that would let them move behind a target up to 10 blocks away and take reduced fall damage. It would honestly probably be what I would play if it was an option.
There are so many ways mages could be built in this game. Ice mages with ice auras for slowing enemies, a magic missle spell of different elements that builds up “rift energy” to be able to call in a finishing aoe. Even being able to use corrosion magic would be cool.
Grapples use to glitch cuttles where they wouldn’t attack you and you could reel them in and beat them to death with a hammer lol. I would love to see some combat crowd control uses for them again. They are a universal tool, why not make them into a weapon as well? It would be cool to add some of these in as augments to add flare to the current hunting styles.
I wrote this in Dec, 2018 lol. Adventure Content Class
Bow Hunter
( Range type, with current bow skill like rapid fire, charge… etc )
Hammer / axe / shovel hunters
( With the close combat gear + some unique close combat skills)
Grapple hunters
( In group fight , they can use grapple to control the enemy, can shot area effect and pull monsters to the current location.)
Bomb Hunter
(Use bomb to crowd control enemy, with frozen, aoe knock back, burning effect…etc)
Healer
( Able to have some skill to boost healing ability, for example mass healing, or apply the buff to teammates by totem)
Atlas writers
( Able to have some skills to run faster in the world, and predict the next exo planet type, open portal to next close area of meteor spawn location)
Treasure Hunters
( 25% chance to increase the drop from meteors, 5% chance to re-activate the finish meteor)
Utility Content class
Block source gathers
( skills to deal more damage to the block type resource, like gems / metals / wood /gleam …etc. + lighting skills, tool durability skills…etc)
Vendor
(skills to minus the tax, increase the footfal, minus the cost of portal fuel…etc)
Oh man you got me all hyped up for my own ideas lol. Not good with naming so feel free to rename and extract ideas and further refine them into something that better fits the game. Also these classes can further have more relative skills under them so no 2 builds within the same class are the same - more variety.
Attackers / defenders:
Oortians are close to nature, at least some of them. So Class 1 is inspired by nature.
Class 2 is all about utilizing ancient energy and Oort power.
Class 3 is about being adept with hands - the skilled Oortians who use typical tools.
Class 1: (low attack/ high defense power)
Attackers: Has the ability to utilize elements of nature such as water and lava by shooting streams of them (just like how spitters and cuttles shoot projectiles). Lava kills normal animals (spitters for example) and water kills the burning animals (hopper for example).
Defenders: Can erect temporary mini wall shields of water and lava to stop electric (cuttle) / melee (wildstock) attacks respectively (depending on the animal attacking). Can place timed bombs (under portals) and can build strategic amber walls to control animal movements.
Class 2: (High attack low defense) Something of a mage that utilizes Oortpower.
Attackers: Has a scepter totem that accepts stacks of oort shards. Highly powerful and can turn the tides in mega battles but cant hunt alone due to their low health. Shoots arcs of oortenergy (far range lower power) or circles (because the word b-a-l-l-s is censored) of oort energy (need time to accumulate, consumes more oort, but blows enemies in a radius, close range). Has the ability to “shift” location (warp 5m away from danger with some cooldown).
Defender: Ever felt happy when seeing a stack of Oorts? Exactly, this guy heals with an aura of Oort energy. Has no attacks but heals others instantly and applies strong defensive buffs to everyone in a 50m radius. When his healing aura is activated, every dead citizen is resurrected and meteor portals close temporarily.
Class 3: Imagine batman but in Boundless.
Attackers: The typical sling or lance-weilding fellows but they have more freedom to jump higher and move faster to dodge attacks. Insert more stuff because i gotta go lol.
Greatly unbalanced, can be further tweaked for even better and more creative classes, etc but i ran out of ideas. At least the idea is there for inspiration :D:D:D
I’ve talked to a few people about increasing the role of healing and support, and at higher ends people seem to instantly die, dodge everything, or instakill the mobs. I know it may slow down the fights, but scaling back damage output from both the players and the mobs and balancing armor values to provide a smother fight may be a way we can really see tactical combat and create a real need for supportive roles in boundless.
Agreed, I suggested an alternative solution before were every 10 levels instead of getting skill points the player gets 1 point added to all base stats, so that by level 50 he has the equivalent of 5 points in health so he wont insta die to strong wildstock, and to balance it the new skill cap per page would be 90.
However, your suggestion could also work just as well for the same outcome.
I still remember when I brought up the class idea, there was a lot of people against it lol.
But I really think class system will bring even more freedom and possibility for players to build their own character. Otherwise, current skill system just make everybody looks extremely similar.
In my opinion, the healthy skill system is not just open every skill for player to choose.
Forcing players to choose between 1 to 3 powerful skill in same category, can bring up more teamwork and fun in a lot of contents. The example for current system is charge / rapid fire. Both performing well, but you can only get one of them.
Current skill system is kind of telling people to focus in the profession, and most people will do it because it is the most efficient way to achieve your goal. For example, If I want to focusing on mining, my character set will all choose mining relative skills, but those not a lot of choice for mining skill, and it turn out everybody’s miners has similar skill setup.
Yeah, quite a few ideas have been tossed up, and most of us have roughly the same end state, just different ways of getting there. I just think its going to be increasingly difficult tuning new combat features with the way the skill trees are set up. However they decide to do it, I’ll be happy as long as it allows them to add and tune new content without creating a constant power creep.
I agree with you on the skill tree part, and it better separate the status point to other UI. ( power / dex…etc) , So we can have more skill points to use for actual skills.
But changing the skill system is not the only way to improving the combat system, the short cut is bring more effect to the forge system. For example aoe crowd control bomb or grapple can bring the Crowd control role to the combat. Aoe burning / blooding can bring condition damage to the combat. Aoe healing, revive, buffing bomb can bring healer role to the combat. Personally I prefer they improve the skill tree, but forge system can change the combat as well.
