Burning Weapon Type Idea

I always felt like something was missing from UT2004PRG - Fire. How about a weapon modifier with the prefix 'Burning.' It can be applied to any weapon whatsoever and what it does is similar to that of posion, but has a special twist. Burning will infect any enemy and "light it on fire" by creating a hitflame and attach it to the enemy. The target then takes damage every second for however many '+' there are. For each '+', is each second the effect will last. For instance a +4 will light enemies on fire for 4 seconds. The enemy will take damage like poison, but here is the twist. If another enemy comes into close contact with an enemy that is on fire, there is a chance that that enemy will catch on fire as well, but will only last as long as everything else is. Say an enemy is caught on fire with a modifier of 5 seconds. Then 2 seconds later the enemy catches another on fire, the enemy now infected will only be on fire for 3 seconds instead of 5.

could be exclusive to the WM as well.

Thoughts:

I agree with you that having a "Fire" condition makes sense. However, the question that has always made this a bad idea to me is -- What differentiates "Fire" from "Poison"?

First off, lets make sure we're on the same page. I think it's perfectly reasonable for monsters to have "Fire" or "Poison" effects, and it's no problem at all if these two effects do the same thing for monsters. It's a fluffy difference, but that's all.

So what we must talk about is players. And the issue here has been players don't have a "need" for two weapons that apply Damage Over Time (DOT) effects. Poison and Fire need to be distinct enough effects for players that there is a legitimate difference between the two.

How can this be done?

-Well, one aspect is to build monsters with this in mind. If you've got a whole slew of monsters immune to poison but weak to fire, or weak to poison and immune to fire, there's an incentive there.

-You can also differentiate the effects themselves as you suggest. The idea of fire spreading is a good idea, although I personally find it a little silly with respect to how much fire already exists in the game but doesn't spread. I would probably go the opposite angle and rename Poison to "Disease" and allow it to spread, whereas Fire would be single-target only.

There's also differentiation in how the effects are applied. Currently, once you "Poison" something, it's poisoned. Hitting a poisoned target won't strengthen the poison or extend its duration, it's either on or off. Similarly, a 7 damage Minigun bullet poisons just as much as a 90 damage rocket. I think some changes to either of these behaviors I describe could be good, although I have not spent too much time thinking seriously about balancing questions that would arise. Changing either behavior could allow for further differentiation between Poison and Fire effects.

-The last thing that comes to mind is how two similar-but-different effects interact with other things in DruidsRPG. There's certainly room for expansion to the magic weapons available through Druids - The modification/extension that I've been working on (DWRPG) currently has ~10 new, unique weapon types, and plenty more to follow. However it seems like DruidsRPG isn't really interested in expanding weapon choices much beyond the current set even for new effects, so I don't expect that we'd see near-duplicate weapon effects in Druids.

Not that I see this as a problem either - Adding new weapon types is tricky because it impacts the effectiveness of existing abilities, so you can't just plop things in the game (at least - not with an established and active playerbase) without compensating in other areas. Sometimes that can of worms is best left closed. In DWRPG we are moving in a different direction that will allow characters some more selective (but not guaranteed) control over the types of weapons they create. This can keep things manageable for players while still allowing a wide variety of weapons, even accommodating multiple weapon magics that fill the same role.

yeah i think that could be a problem because it wouldn't be different enough from poison. on the subject of weapons and weapon mods though, it would be cool if the AM could give vehicles and sents "magic weapons". so you could have like a minigun turret of knockback for example. then the AM could get say 5% of the xp from the vehicle or sentinel he had modded.

Wail pointed out the main reason to have elemental damage on weapons in RPG: resistance/weakness on the part of monsters. If we had monsters that were weak to fire, then it would make perfect sense to have that type of damage.

F8_AL wrote:

yeah i think that could be a problem because it wouldn't be different enough from poison. on the subject of weapons and weapon mods though, it would be cool if the AM could give vehicles and sents "magic weapons". so you could have like a minigun turret of knockback for example. then the AM could get say 5% of the xp from the vehicle or sentinel he had modded.

This would be kinda weird unless Druid Vehicles have their own dummy weapon. All turrets in UT2004 have a dummy weapon, which isn't supposed to show its name, rather the vehicle shows its name. Getting a weapon modifier applied to a vehicle dummy weapon would be kinda hard, and unnecessary, because it would either not show what kind of modifier it is, or display the name of the modifier with "Dummy Weapon" at the end with the modifer number and asteric if there is one.

yeah it probs would be hard to do i just ment that say if the turret was "of poison" it would have the same effect as a flack cannon of poison.

Not only that, but you would get in the turret reading "Poisoned Minigun Turret Weapon +3 *"

ok fair enough it wouldnt work but i just thought it would be something to make the AM more of a team player.