How About Give Mesa Abilities That Scale

[DrBorris]

This is my personal view on what Mesa could be. I know that there are many people that think she is fine as is, but an example of something else is always nice. Also, being a pessimist, I am pretty sure none of these changes could ever come to Mesa because DE has a terrible track record when it comes to abilities.

 

First off I have to describe what I think a gunslingers is so that you can understand where I am coming from. A gunslinger should be, in general, a glass canon. A gunslinger needs no defenses because everyone is dead before they can get a shot off.

 

I am pretty much dropping Mesa’s 2, 3, and 4 to put in things that I believe would have her scale better with damage and scale better with player skill. (I like Ballistic Battery)

 

1.      Ballistic Battery: This is the ability I am stumped on. The concept of “charging” an ability based on your damage output scales extremely well in concept, but there must be some limitations. It would be awesome if Ballistic Battery had no damage cap, but that would turn any boss fight into a joke. The 1600 damage is great at lower level, but it falls off pretty quick. Thus, the stump. I have tried to think of things based on multipliers, but that just makes low rate of fire weapons (Opticor) gain an advantage over fast rate of fire weapons.

2.      Aim-Bot: First off, I have no talent in coming up with fancy names for ability, so they will be called as they are (thus the terrible ability name, aim-bot). Imagine an aim bot…. that is pretty much it. This ability has two different “modes” of sorts. The first is when you are moving or zoomed into crosshairs. When this ability is active while you are moving, there is an imaginary circle around you crosshair and the enemy closest to the reticule (as on your screen, not distance from you) will be the one that Mesa shoots when you fire (see spoiler below for example). The other “mode” is when Mesa is stationary. This is the current peacemaker. Mesa will just fire AT THE NEAREST (distance) enemy to you. TO clarify, this ability runs off of your weapons, so you can have an aim-bot Boltor Prime if you wish. Oh, accuracy does play a role, Mesa just aims for you, she does not increase the accuracy of your weapons. This would be an energy drain skill, probably 5 energy per second.

These show how aim-bot would work. When standing still (first picture) Aim-bot works as Peacemaker does now (except it now prioritizes the closest enemy to you).

The second picture shows the basics of how Aim-bot works when moving. Rather than shooting any enemy in the room, only enemies in the red circle be shot at.

The third picture has two enemies, A and B. B is closer to you as far as distance, bit A is closer to you crosshair. When firing with Aim-Bot, the projectile will go toward enemy A because it is closer to your crosshair.

3.      Something: This is Mesa’s pseudo defense ability. The first part is her whip thing from her current Shooting Gallery. However, the whip revolves around you in a radius of 5m that jams the guns of any enemy inside of it. No RNG on when it jams, just whenever an enemy enters your range. This is there to keep enemies out of Mesa’s volatile area (up close). The second part of this ability is a shadow of sorts. Someone on some thread suggested this, so I will not take credit for it. How it works is Mesa leaves a shadow behind her (mimics her movements a split second after) Thus, the faster Mesa is moving, the farther the shadow is from Mesa. When this ability is active, Mesa is complete invisible to enemies, enemies only fire at her shadow. So if you run through a group of Grineer, they will fire at Mesa’s shadow and be oblivious to Mesa herself. Oh, and to clarify, these effects stay with you. It does not switch to other players.

4.      Peacemaker: Mesa needs to use her guns right? All peacemaker does in this state is have her equip her Regulator pistols and uses them as an equipped weapon. You are free to move around wherever you wish, but the aim-bot from its current state is gone (and moved to her second ability). And now for the important part, her regulator pistol’s damage scales directly off of equipped weapons. How so you ask? Well, it is a simple matter of DPS. The damage of the Regulator pistols is the ((damage of your equipped weapon)/(its rate of fire))x2. That DPS is translated to about the rate of fire of AkLex (2 rounds a second). Then the critical chance, critical rate, and status chance is copied directly from the equipped weapon. But you cannot leave it there. Shotguns will make the regulator pistols act as shotguns, (with a spread of about Detron) and beam weapons will have massive damage falloff after their normal range (so Synoid Gammacor will not be the end-all-be-all after 25m). This would also be an energy drain ability, with a drain of about 10 energy per second. This turns Peacemaker into more of equipping the most OP guns in the game (which they should be) and encouraging the player to actually use some skill.

 

Ok, I assume you all noticed the 5 energy drain for aim-bot and 10 energy drain for Peacemaker. When you use both of these abilities together and stand still, the result is extremely similar to what we currently have for peacemaker. Her “something” (3) ability is capable of giving end-game defense in that it is practically invisibility when moving quickly with the added benefit of jamming weapons of enemies close to you. This ability scales with skill, and that is my favorite part about it. A gunslinger is not supposed to tank damage, they should just avoid it. And Peacemaker is… useful. Scaling off of equipped weapons allows it to not be as OP for low level and scale up to end-game damage. Now it is just a boring ability that eventually becomes just another wimpy damage ability.

 

Ok, that is it. Smile, it is a good day. 

[Jinryusai]

And a passive punch through ability or at the very least for one of her skills.

[LionPride]

I believe that would be the Over powered primed god tier Mesa but seriously having her secondary weapon/mods scale with peacemaker is enough 

Edited January 4, 2015 by LionPride

[Zero.No.Hikari]

I'm actually pretty ok with how she turned out, se has decent enough skills that allow her into the late game as well as a great 1 that deals quite a lot of damage if you use it to take down heavies.   I was doing a T4 surv and by min 35 my all might Vaykor was not killing heavies fast enough but with just a half charged Ballistic Battery I could dispatch a Bombard or a Gunner with a single shot,  or a whole group of enemies including MOAs and their shields with Hek at a full charge of it.   I honestly don't see the problem people have with it.

 

Shooting Gallery's Rope is a drawback if you needed it for disrupting melee around you if it switches to someone else, maybe having them gain one as it goes to a new person but at a smaller disarm radius?

 

Shatter Shield is perfect, but only for any form of ranged damage, melee you still take full damage which makes some sense, but I'd say maybe have a 50% Damage Rdux on melee along with the 95% Damage Redux on ranged.   Besides that fix it's perfect.   

 

Now The scaling would be great but would go how it went with Valkyr,  only using weapons that work perfectly with it,  meaning all you'd see on a Peacemaker Mesa is Synoid, Brakk(?), Vaykor Marelok, Pyrana(?) and that's it.  I myself love running AkVasto on her so much I added Forma on them to maximize their damage output.  (Yes I have a Synoid and it's ok but like most guns it can only deal with things one at a time.  I prefer having Pyrana or Mara Detron to deal with crowds when I have a rifle primary or Something that is fast if I have a shotgun primary but that's not the point here)

 

Overall Mesa is one decent not broken on arrival frame,  With her 2 and 3 needing a few tweaks and her 4 maybe if you really wanna stretch it.