Pseudogenesis
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
1106
   |
Posted - 2014.12.21 15:51:00 -
[1] - Quote
A while back when Dust's creative director was rattling off empty promises left right and center, he suggested a few new suits/roles: Scavenger, pilot, and war reporter. Scavenger never really materialized and as far as I know the pilot suit is still up in the air, but the war reporter role was intended for an entirely different type of gameplay that Dust never really got. However, the idea of the role is definitely something that could still be implemented today.
TL;DR a non-racial post-level 5 suit with zero (or very limited) offensive capability that is granted exceptional capacity for ewar.
The idea is that the war reporter is like a T2 type of scout: Very fast, very fragile, little-to-no offensive capability, and excellent at relaying information to their team. The suit would ideally be around minmatar scout levels of speed, health and frame size, but would lack weapon slots and be granted very large bonuses to passive and active scanning. High shield and stamina regen are also mandatory. The goal of the war reporter would be to scout in the purest sense of the word: avoiding combat at all costs, they would utilize dampeners, precision mods, range extenders, cloaking and active scanners in order to remain close to the enemy, constantly relaying new information on enemy positions to their team.
The bonuses I envision being best for the war reporter are a very large cooldown bonus to active scanners, and a medium bonus to range extender efficacy, on top of the cloak bonus that all scouts get. The reason for giving them a cooldown bonus to scanners as opposed to a precision or radius bonus is twofold: to encourage war reporters to use cloaking (as opposed to simply running dual scanners), and to ensure that they're capable of using this playstyle as a full-on viable profession as opposed to just a thing you do to help your team. I'm really big on non-combat roles in FPS games and Dust is one of the only games I know of in which stuff like this is possible. In order for the war reporter to be a viable profession, they need to be able to earn lots of WP from active scanning, and the only way they can do that is if they almost always have people scanned. I had considered possibly doubling the amount of WP a person in the war reporter suit gets from active scan assists, but since that's probably impossible and is an inelegant solution, I don't think that it is feasible.
In my opinion the war reporter suit shouldn't have a light weapon, sidearm OR grenade slot, but considering they can use equipment they could just run REs anyway, meaning that regardless of the slot layout they will probably have some sort of offensive capability. The only way this could be circumvented is if a lock were implemented that prevented them from using any kind of equipment other than cloak and scanner, but that probably isn't possible. Sidearm only is probably the best way to go, although I can see people abusing this already.
For this to be a viable profession I think that a) war points need to be given if ANY teammate kills a person you scanned (not just those in your squad) and b) the number of war points awarded for a scan assist needs to be increased. This change and the whole idea of this kind of role might be a little contentious considering how strong active scanners are in the meta currently, so feedback would be appreciated.
Stabby-stabber extraordinaire
I stabbed Rattati once, you know.
|