Spiral Knights - Charge Abilities on Shields

Charge Abilities on Shields

7 replies [Last post]

Tue, 04/19/2011 - 14:56

xienwolf

Legacy Username

Thought of this one while playing through T2 and starting to learn that using a shield is a good thing. But it is rather lackluster in my opinion, and only helps you very briefly.

My idea was to introduce "Charge Abilities" to shields.

These don't work like Weapon Charge abilities (hold button for a while, then release). Instead, it is based on the shield condition. If you release the shield key while the shield is RED, then the ability is activated. This requires some fairly precise timing if you are fighting lots of enemies who are decently strong, and insane patience if fighting only 1 enemy who is far weaker than yourself.

Some possible abilities:
Burst -- You basically act like a Bomb of one of the status types. So inflict everyone around you with Stun/freeze/sleep/burn/shock/poison.
Rampant Charge -- You run forward for a short distance, damaging all enemies along the path
Expulsion -- You throw all enemies back away from yourself.
Healing -- Grants you the equivalent of a health pill.
Blink -- Teleports you a short distance in a random direction
Mirror -- Grants you a unique status for 3 seconds that causes all missile type attacks which hit you to be reflected back at the attacker.

I think that some of these would be far more enjoyable than the current selection of shields where you are simply deciding which status resist to be immune to when blocking.

Tue, 04/19/2011 - 17:11

Metaknight

interesting concept. what

interesting concept. what about using the attack button to trigger instead (since you cant attack while shielding)... letting go seems odd. you'd trigger it by luck more often than on purpose i would imagine.

Tue, 04/19/2011 - 19:30

Barcs

Legacy Username

woah, this is one of the

woah, this is one of the first really original ideas i've seen in the suggestion things ...

cool idea, and then it might mean people vary up shields from the owlite series.

I doubt they'd do it any time soon, there must be sooo much stuff that need to be implemented but it'd be cool. Maybe if it was more of a timed thing (other than red shield, which u might not get between it weakening to breaking) ... you can use it once, but not that often, to get you out of situations where you're being swamped...

Yeah I like the attack button to trigger idea too...

Tue, 04/19/2011 - 19:40

King-Tinkinzar

Well right now all shields

Well right now all shields have a knock back ability lol

Tue, 04/19/2011 - 19:56

Softspoken

Legacy Username

Some suggestions on a very good idea.

Having a special ability on a shield could be really, really interesting. The red shield only criteria could be impossible to implement of in a boss fight though: shields can drop from yellow to broken in one solid hit. Maybe you could instead be rewarded with an effect proportional to how much health your shield has lost? In any case, you'd need to have a delay time between the effect occuring, otherwise people could spam the effect while their shield is at low health.

Alternatively, maybe to trigger the effect you sacrifice your shield's health, with more health causing a stronger effect? Then you need to wait for it to regenerate as usual, which causes the necessary delay.
Or, your effect will only occur if you're hit with an actual creature attack in a certain window of time after raising your shield? Such as half a second, centered aroud when the current knockback effect happens? It would introduce a serious timing element to the game. Too soon and nothing happens, too late and you take a heavy hit. Kind of a 'counter' mechanic.

Tue, 04/19/2011 - 20:40

Metaknight

i would make the shield regen

i would make the shield regen time longer when you sacrifice it for the special attack. i like the idea of it dealing more damage/whatever when the shield is low rather than full, so players would be tempted to absorb some damage in order to use the effect.

Thu, 04/21/2011 - 09:04

xienwolf

Legacy Username

Attack button to activate

Attack button to activate instead could be a good idea. And maybe instead of activation requiring that it is in the red, the power of the effect is based on how much health your shield has remaining, and it depletes the shield.

So then your choice is between USING the shield to defend, or SPENDING the shield for the ability. The problem with this approach of course is that a "healing shield" becomes insanely overpowered because you can just sit somewhere with no enemies and completely restore your health whenever you feel like it. But if you remove that ability from the list, then it isn't so bad. Instead of raising the shield and crawling through spikes/brambles to get coin/heat/materials you could charge up your dash ability and zip through the spikes. But then if enemies pop up on the other side you are in the middle of them without defense!

Another alternative would be a "power meter" which runs below your shield which fills and depletes, like those cannon launching flash games. Either hit a "sweet spot" to activate the ability, or the meter is simply a percentage score for the quality of the effect.

Softspoken's counter-attack type of activation also sounds quite nice. Though it is REALLY easy to "properly time" a block when you are surrounded by tons of enemies who are attacking non-stop. But that is kind of when you are intended to be able to rely on these effects, so that isn't a huge problem in my opinion.

Thu, 04/21/2011 - 10:57

LastElixir

Legacy Username

I was actually thinking of

I was actually thinking of some similar things today, except not quite the charge concept, but just random extra effects to make shields more varied.

Guardian Shield: While blocking with this shield, you create a small-medium circle around your knight where any time an ally is attack you will split damage with them, with the finer tier either splitting off into having a much larger AoE on the protective field, or allowing the shield to absorb the half of the damage you take for your partners. (High normal defense, low defense for another attack type, medium health)

Spiked Shield: Simple shield with a row of spikes on it, shield bashing an enemy would cause it to take normal damage equivalent to half of what your currently equipped weapon would deal, with final tier splitting off to either reduce the cooldown on shield bashing so you can use it more frequently, or making the enemy take 3/4-full attack damage from it. (Medium health, low defenses)

Charged Shield: Shield that carries an electric current through it, upon being broken would do a small amount of damage with a high chance to inflict shock in a very small area around you (Ideally such as to primarily affect things that are targeting you). Alternatively, the shield could just have a special effect that causes the enemies in a small area around you to convulse once immediately, without actually being inflicted with anything, and a final tier that either decreases the time that this shield needs to recover from being broken (normally it would stay broken for a but longer than most shields), or to put the shield at full health as soon as it recovers from being broken. (This shield would have rather low defenses and health, with a focus on being used offensively, and may also come with an ability that makes it so you don't take any damage from the attack that breaks your shield to compensate as well.)

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Charge Abilities on Shields