Extra Artifacts

A while ago, I emailed Druid some extra artifacts which could be added to give AdrenalineMasters some extra options. Druid has got back to me and suggested I go through this forum. So, here is a list of the extra artifacts. What would be really useful is feedback that says "That one is no good so scrap it, but include this one and this one, and if you change this one like so, it would be good".

So, there are 9 of these artifacts. All of the values (damage, range, adrenaline etc) are as configurable in the RPG.ini file as I could make them.

The first two I did before Druid modified the Lightning Rod, as I felt the rod was too underpowered, and there was great potential for improvement. Since then, Druid has improved the Rod, so these two are not as relevant, but are different so perhaps worth considering.

Lightning Bolt - based on the lightning rod, but hits just one opponent for the maximum damage it can do. Automatic aiming, it hits the monster in range with the highest health, provided there is a direct line between you and the monster. Configuration determines the amount of damage per unit of adrenaline. If you have say 200 adrenaline, and the damage per adrenaline is configured as 4, it will try to do 800 damage against the monster. If the monster only has 400 health, it will only take 400/4 = 100 adrenaline, and will kill it. DB and DR apply when it works out the damage done, as it uses the TakeDamage function.

Lightning Beam - based on the lightning bolt, but has to be aimed rather than automatically hitting. So, give it a slightly higher damage per adrenaline. Line it up in the weapon sights, activate and bang. Longer range than the bolt.

The next few were along the lines of "why should the LW3s have all the fun?"

MegaBlast - Redeemer/Ultima style explosion a set distance in front of the player. Requires lots of adrenaline.

FreezeBomb - similar to MegaBlast, but does no damage, just Null Entropies opponents for a while. Doesn't affect flag carriers etc.

PoisonBlast - similar to MegaBlast, but damages like poison - taken away over 5 seconds. Doesn't kill. Great against a herd of titans.

Repulsion - throws enemies back from the player. I suppose matrix inspired. Great on maps with lots of lava.

Then I started thinking more about playing as a team. All the existing artifacts really just benefit the player. How about artifacts that benefit team members? So these artifacts create a large sphere around the point where the player activates it. The effect of the sphere applies to the instigator wherever he is, and to all team players within the sphere. Naturally, they have to eat up adrenaline fast.

Sphere of Invulnerability - creates a large sphere within which all players are invulnerable

Sphere of Healing - creates a large sphere within which all players are healed

Sphere of Damage - large sphere within which all players get double damage

So, the thought was that most of them go to Loaded Artifacts players - either on LA3 or a new LA4. The Sphere of Healing should go to medics, perhaps as a part of LoadedHealing.

I had problems trying to get the large sphere emitters to be dynamically sizeable, but it is possible to have the spheres in a number of sizes, if we want them to have a number of levels to them. E.g. LH1 gets a small healing sphere, LH3 a much larger sphere for the same adrenaline.

So, suggestions?

I'm torn on this one ... while I think it might be "neat" for AM's to have more things to play with, I also think it's a pretty powerful class already, and adding more would either add more power or add an artifact that really doesn't do much more than an existing artifact. These ideas aren't bad ... they just need to be implemented *very* carefully.

In a specific case, agree completely that the Sphere of Healing is not good for an AM - it steals thunder away from the M/MMs. If they could get it, fine.

The Extra Artifacts have now been put in cvs under DruidsRPGExperimental (not DruidsRPGcvs). (I hope I did it right, but my interface seemed to get confused about where DruidsRPGExperimental was?)

Basically build it as a separate module and include in your ServerPackages for evaluation purposes. Most things are configurable in the RPG.ini.

There is also a texture and staticmesh file.

Have a play, and then we can discuss:

which are worth having

who should have them, and as part of what ability

how the damage, range etc should be tweaked

Extra Artifact added. The Healing Blast. Another redeemer-like explosion, this time doing no damage to enemies but healing teammates. Amount of healing, radius and adrenaline required configurable. In cvs for review.

Key Binding updated to support the new artifact.

(Also a couple of minor bug fixes/changes to the existing artifacts)

I'd like to consider adding a few of these to the next release to help beef up medics and AMs for the current difficulty.

If we had to pick and choose a few, which do you think would be best?

I'd really like to see the sphere of healing and repulsion

When the sphere of repulsion is activated, can we get a cool matrix like Whoosh sound? Like when Neo takes off?

TheDruidXpawX wrote:

When the sphere of repulsion is activated, can we get a cool matrix like Whoosh sound? Like when Neo takes off?

At the moment, the only sound is the standard knockback sound, which is given to any players that get repulsed.

If someone has a sound they want played, then I could add it, but I am no good at generating them.

Medics I think should get the sphere of healing and the Healing Blast - just to give them something to spend adrenaline on.

Is the best approach here to add them as part of Loaded Medic 3 ? Long term, if we think they are really useful, they could be split into LM 4, but it would be a bit cruel to get people to buy LM4, if then we decided they were no good and wanted to delete them.

As for the Lightning Beam and Bolt, I am not sure we need either of these. I did them before Druid improved the Rod.

Of the two, I would suggest giving AMs the Beam. This has to be aimed, so is different to the Rod. I did suggest 6 or 7 as the damage-to-adrenaline ratio. However, the rod is set to 15%, or 6.6 damage per adrenaline. Since the rod is not aimed, the Beam should have a better ratio than that - so possibly as high as 8. If you set to 9, then 100 adrenaline is guaranteed to take out a titan - which seems a bit too powerful.

Other ones for the AMs?

Repulsion is different, so it may be worth a try. Just need to tweak exactly how hard we want the repulsion to be.

Of the rest, well they are all different in a way.

The two spheres are team based, so might be nice to include to encourage team play. However, the difficulty will be balancing the adrenaline usage on the Invulnerability sphere so that it is costly enough so 4 AMs can't keep a sphere running between them for a whole wave, but cheap enough to make it not just a total waste of an individual's adrenaline.

The MegaBlast, PoisonBlast and FreezeBomb all do slightly different things. I suppose the MegaBlast has to be the one to try first.

Has anyone but me actually tested the new artifacts?

I will admit a "no" in answer to that question.

I looked, but many of them didn't appear to spawn when I added them. That might just be me, though. I like the medic artifacts. They were neat

Comment: with the bolt and beam, the logic seemed somewhat erratic.

Example with the beam: Me vs. a krall. I'm level 201. Hit lightning bolt with 50 adren, instagib.

Same deal. Hit it again, it takes it down to very low health, but doesn't kill it. It did that thing where they drop to the ground and keep firing their zapper sticks from there. Hit it again, instagib.

It seemed to use the proper amount of adrenaline, though I didn't write down the numbers. Is this just a thing with the kralls, where they do the two stage death?

Moof wrote:

Comment: with the bolt and beam, the logic seemed somewhat erratic.

Example with the beam: Me vs. a krall. I'm level 201. Hit lightning bolt with 50 adren, instagib.

Same deal. Hit it again, it takes it down to very low health, but doesn't kill it. It did that thing where they drop to the ground and keep firing their zapper sticks from there. Hit it again, instagib.

It seemed to use the proper amount of adrenaline, though I didn't write down the numbers. Is this just a thing with the kralls, where they do the two stage death?

Strange. I don't know of any special krall behaviour, that would stop it dying. I presume it was the same type of krall each time?
The Bolt and Beam call the TakeDamage function. So the artifact sets a certain amount of damage it wants to do, which then gets adjusted by DB,DR etc. It then checks how much health has actually been taken from the monster, and subtracts the appropriate adrenaline.

Under exactly the same circumstances, it should do exactly the same. However, the maximum damage you can do is based upon how much adrenaline you have. If in the two tests you had different amounts of adrenaline, then could explain it. If you get chance to check again, then it would be useful to know exactly how much adrenaline was used each time.

Also, was there any chance that in the first case the monster had already taken a bit of damage?