This post is for fun! As a person who loves boundless it is fun to speculate on lore and other aspects of Boundless. I have been thinking about Combat and what I would do. I had so much fun that I wanted to put out to share! 
TL:DR - Give players agency in hunts via summoning meteors and other objectives. Change around the mechs for combat to streamline the experience and allow people to really ‘feel’ their role.
Remove Bomb Healing/Buffing and move it to another item or the Totem
I play a healer in most games that I play and can understand it is tough to balance the ‘feel’ of a healer without making it boring. Healing can be a passive process and not everyone likes that. I can also understand by putting healing on bombs it makes things easier and there are less mechanics involved.
My main problems with Bomb Healing / Buffing:
- Healing with a Bomb is hard to target due to your movement or your targets.
- Any lag issues are multiplied due to server/computer communication of ‘where’ the target and you are when the bomb goes off (which is why you may heal someone with a bomb and their life goes up, then goes right back down)
- It is very difficult to work together with a team to heal because of the way healing bombs can bounce (if you don’t hit a person for the instant explosion.
- Often you end up spamming bombs to heal which removes the ‘fun’ of being a healer in keeping folks alive due to your actions.
- Because of the AOE randomness of bombs it also means players don’t know when they are going to benefit from the buffs. They are so short lived that you need to know they are coming,
I am going to go into detail below about role identity and how it should be clear, but in this section I want to just talk about the Healer.
If you spend your points to be a healer it should allow you to focus on a player and see their HP and heal them as long as they are within X distance (which should be pretty far).
It would look something like this:
(Photo from @Nezhno in the Screen shots thread - masterfully edited)
The system would be as follows:
- Totem with healing augment in one hand and it can hold X HP of healing.
- The player can USE the totem and it will channel healing to the focused targets (healing equally to all focused targets)
- Once the healing is depleted the Totem NATURALLY refills very slowly.
- If the player wants to refill healing faster they can do DPS. As they hurt monsters a % goes into the healing totem.
This game play mechanic allows for healers to feel like their role has impact. They would be able to use strategy to determine who to focus (since the more they focus the more spread out the healing would be - say max focus of 6?) and would allow players to know a healer has their back. Lag would play less of a role since there would be less computer / server communication problems
The Totem Augment/New Healer item (whichever) would be able to be forged with:
- Increase Healing Capacity ( can hold more healing pts, increasing the cap)
- Increase speed of Healing ( how fast it sends it out to people )
- Increase % healing pts gained from doing DPS (this could be broken out by weapon type)
- Add Buff Effect - Would add a Buff effect when applying healing or just the buff effect if the person was at full. Would use healing points to buff the targets.
A small change, but I think it would make the healing interesting and fun.
Next Up…
Then what do Bombs do?
Bombs could be CRAFTED as either:
- Attack Bombs
- Land Destruction Charges
Attack Bombs are just as they are now - they do damage to enemies and you can forge them to boom bigger and do more damage. You throw them and they go all wonky but don’t hurt terrain. Good fun. They also generate HUGE aggro and are the ‘tank’ weapon (more on that below)
Land Destruction Charges - These bombs are not thrown, they are placed. If the goal is to use bombs to clear away terrain then that means you are NOT getting the resources. That is the down side, so having to ‘throw’ them all over and hope they hit an area you want blown up is silly.
You place these bombs down, they blink for awhile then explode exactly where placed. This would make them GREAT at clearing out land. Downside is you get no drops.
You can forge them to make them boom bigger and have a larger AOE.
Okay okay, that sounds cool…but what else…tanks?
Role Identity in Combat, what is it?
Before we can add more to combat we need the roles to work together. Above I talked about healer and giving them the right tools…but what about DPS and Tank?
If you are in a fight then your weapons should be:
Tank:
Bombs/Shield
DPS:
Slingbow/Sword
Healer:
Totem/Slingbow
I did not include the fist weapons because they are not for all tiers and are only craftable by some so they shouldn’t be a default strat. But Healers and DPS can use them.
Tanks - Bombs do big AOE which allows you to get aggro on a large crowd easy. The shield should reduce your damage as you block with it once you have aggro. Toss your bombs as you can while you tank/kite to try and keep enemies in front of you.
DPS - Slingbow or Sword. DPS should be able to take down fliers and melee enemies with easy. With bombs grabbing aggro, pick your target and DPS it down.
Healer- Slingbow should be the weapon of choice since it will keep you safe while getting healing points. But as I said above you should be able to forge the tool based in weapon. So sling bows should get you the lowest % but are the safest. Swords/fists should get you a better % but can be dangerous as they put you IN the fight.
This has lead us to an obvious place…so I will address it next
Umm Tagris, I have been to a Meteor fight...what you are saying doesn't make sense. Just shotgun spam and BAM, easy.
I agree that low level meteors can be spammed easily. I also think that by helping round out these roles then it can take a fun experience and make it even better 
Also, as harder content is added, this is a good backbone to build off from.
So that leads me to…
Allow us to summon normal Meteors
The gleambow meteor summon is cool. Lets add it to the main Meteor experience.
Groups gather a resource that drops from meteors, craft it into a summon augment and BAM summon a meteor.
This crafting require you to hunt meteors of the Tier you want to summon…and use it on those planets. So T3 Meteors can summon a meteor on T3.
Ideally this would just be a handcraft, so that while groups are out on a hunt they can end it with some summoned meteors.(summoned meteors obviously don’t drop the stuff that is used to craft the augment to summon them)
I feel these changes would make combat more interesting! WIth the upcoming skill page changes people should not be 1 hit as easily which makes it so the healer role can really come forward.
I have other ideas about Dungeon planets and Titans that I will save for another thread!
I have played Boundless for over 4k hours and share the above only with <3 for the game. Feel free to comment/like and happy to answer any questions about the silliness of daydreaming about what could be hehe
