Mag Ideas

[Psycomet]

To get right to the point, I've always wondered about the utility of pull as it is in the game right now:

 

Ragdolling enemies: Fine.

But pulling enemies towards you? Mag isn't a melee frame. Plus pulling enemies like heavy gunners or bombards so close to you almost begs the question: You trying to kill yourself sista? In this light, I would like to suggest some reworks to her powers.

 

Pull

 

Make it like you showed it in the Profit video, where with one push of the button, all enemies in the cone will be levitated. On pressing the button next, depending on where you're aiming, all levitating enemies will be flung in the direction of the crosshair. This way you could bring enemies (and pickups) towards you by pointing at your feet and pressing 1, or fling enemies to a faraway location to create some distance. This will hopefully make it interesting and not just a power to spam.

 

Shield Polarise

 

I don't really have beef with this power except that it only works against one faction. If in some way it could work equally well against other factions, it would certainly be a bonus.

 

Bullet Attractor

 

This power is also very passive and unidimensional. I don't see mag players using it much. And the reason is that it doesn’t bring that much to the table. What I mean is that it's more show than utility. Why?

 

Let's assume you're trying to stop a really high damage enemy from shooting at you. In this case, pull does the job better than bullet attractor but at lower cost and also with the bonus of multiple enemies immobilised.

 

On most battlefields, there may be multiple heavy units scattered across the map. But bullet attractor can only be cast on one. The others kill you anyway.

 

-          Call the power magnetic chasm/field and allow multiple ones to be casted. Make their range smaller and also unaffected by range mods.

 

-          Allow casting of bullet attractor on allies and companions. It will have the reverse effect—making mini shields on them which repel projectiles in a small radius around them and last until they have absorbed a certain amount of damage. My idea is that this will increase survivability of fragile frames and the mag herself can take cover behind her teammates. She will also become a prime choice for all game modes and foster staying close together of squad mates.

 

So those are my ideas. Maybe I'm wrong but whenever I play with a mag player, all I hear is the sound of Pull every few seconds. When I played with mag myself, I found pull to be very effective but eventually requiring little skill.

[LifeNine]

That's an interesting idea for Pull. It makes it like a gravity gun. I would like to try that out if possible.

 

I've posted before about Mag's Bullet Attractor (BA). Basically it has very limited use and people don't know to play with it in some circumstances. Example: I cast BA on enemies, so I can stop the bullets while revive someone, and they just pop the bubble and let all the bullets hit me instead.

 

If BA remains a single target cast, I think it will still see very limited use because 75 energy per enemy is a lot. Especially since they will die almost instantly when you shoot them. It's not until you get into high boss level armour and health before you start seeing uses for BA. With the slow cast time, you can never get multiple bubbles out if you were playing with other people. In public matches, I sometimes cast BA, but it appears on the enemy after it died, so all I get for 75 energy is a small explosion that does not scale with range and does very little or no damage because most enemy run away after the enemy with BA cast on them dies. Even when playing solo, the Corpus can shoot me down from the other side of the hallway before BA can finish casting on them.

 

I was thinking of making BA explode instantly or with a short delay (not like how long it is right now), and enemies in the blast radius with have BA cast on them for the remaining duration instead of taking damage. The explosion never really did any damage or hit anyone anyways, so removing the damage is fine in my opinion.

 

75 energy for a one person buff that last 15 seconds might be a bit expensive. If numbers are tweaked, then it may be pretty good for team play.

[Thumper3]

I agree that Shield Polarize is really only useful against one faction and that needs to be fixed. But it does make playing Corpus levels so much fun LOL

The one thing I notice, I always find it funny when people drop the "no skill" argument in nerf/re-work threads (It is almost always mag and Mesa getting picked on). What exact 'skill' is used in Ember's WoF? Zephyr's Tornado? Equinoix's Maim? See where I am going? :)

And every Mag player uses Pull a lot? It's the #1.....by definition it should be the power used most.

Pull, I like the idea in theory except it sounds like Mag will be stationary for a while to enable the two step process of picking up and then throwing. Granted, most enemies will be ragdolled.....but not all (the area affected behind her is smaller than the front. Plus you then have to choose pulling energy and resources or throwing enemies if you use GPull.

What Mag really needs is a re-work of SP to make it more effective against all factions, and a fix on BA to make it useful and more versatile as well. That's pretty much it. BA suffers as it's too expensive to cast on Red Shirt #4 running in a group toward you and this game is about waves and mobs, you pretty much have to save it for someone big. I like the idea of having it re-castable/multiples at a time, that would really go a long way to boost it's use.

BTW I use BA a lot, in fact what I like to do is Pull when faced with multiple priority targets and then hit them with BA as they lay ragdolled. As soon as their buddies stand up and start firing it all goes into them as I bullet jump away to pick them off at range.