Canari Elphus wrote:Then I would have to side with the opposition to it as the idea stands right now.
The main issues I have with a shield/armor/ehp vamp are that it would have to be an active module to begin with and would need to be AOE to not run into issues of clunkiness with lock/activation versus just shooting the guy in the first place. It would then need to be powerful enough to justify its use which, agian, is direct competition for just using a weapon.
The only real way that drains/vamps would work is in the case of vehicles which have a much longer engagement time than infantry. An infantry battle lasts a handful of seconds at most which would make some sort of drain hard to balance between being useful and extremely overpowered.
I like that people are trying to adapt EWAR ideas to Dust but I just dont think it would work well enough in this case.
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This is a well-reasoned argument against the idea.
The mechanics as currently proposed are a pretty rough idea, to be sure.
While discussing this, I've been thinking about ways in which some kind of shield siphoning item could work in DUST.
The most obvious option - if you're assuming infantry - is an equipment item like a Repair Tool. You hold the trigger and just have to swipe your crosshair over an enemy to lock and start draining their shields. A suit with low shield HP like a Gallente Assault could use something like this against a shield-tanked Caldari Heavy suit as a way to bridge the HP gap between the two suits, but only if the drain rate was at least 75% of the DPS of the enemy's weapon. Against a Heavy running HMG, that would mean something like 800 HP/s shield drain, which would basically result in both the Heavy and the Assault losing all their shields in a matter of seconds, and probably let a small amount of damage through onto the Assault while doing so.
Another option - which would be great as a Gallente weapon, would be to use the Grenade slot for a deployable shield siphon drone that drains HP from nearby enemy shields and pours a reduced amount of that energy into its user. This would work well because it's a shield-focused weapon, which Gallente are good at thanks to their experience fighting Caldari, and because Drones are one of Gallente's specialties. Also, by not getting in the way of shooting, it allows for the device to be much less powerful while still remaining useful. It would also be possible to have a similar system scaled up to work with vehicles. Something like this could also have potential as an area denial weapon if it was capable of targeting multiple opponents in range, because that would simultaneously strengthen the user and weaken any attackers when they get into close quarters.
A deployable shield siphon equipment item could also work. Place it down and it takes shields SLOWLY from enemies in the area while projecting the HP into nearby friendly units. It could be set up so it only works when there are both friendly and enemy units in the radius, or it could siphon HP from enemies whenever they're in range, but only replenish the shields of a friendly unit who's in range while an enemy is being drained. As with the previous proposal, this would be useful without needing to be as powerful as a handheld option, but without being as much of a Gallente-specific concept.
Regardless of if this is implemented or how, I think it's an interesting idea and one that's well worth discussing. Not many online games have anything like this (there was a "drain" ability in a couple of the Transformers games made by High Moon Studios, but that's the only recent example I can think of).