A Mag rework idea that makes her very powerful.

[Sir.X]

(repost from reddit where I originally posted it).

Usually this is a copy-paste of a document that I make. In my opinion, I believe that Excalibur should not be the best starter frame to choose from, and that each starter Frame should have its way of standing out to be chosen from. As always, I appreciate any form of feedback whatsoever, so feel free to give your opinion.

Pull:
* Mag can now pull downed allies to where she is standing, including pets.
* Mag can pull shards and cells to her, applying their respective buffs to herself, or to vastly increase the damage done by Magnetize.
Magnetize:
* Magnetize will always start out as a small sphere. As you pull in enemies, the sphere will begin to distort, growing out to a larger size for the time that it is active, before exploding and damaging enemies.
* More enemies pulled in will increase the speed that the sphere grows.
* Cells and Shards pulled in will add additional damage when it explodes, Cells causing small blasts, and Shards causing bleeding.
* For every enemy killed inside Magnetize, Mag will receive energy back.
Polarize:
* Polarize functions the same as before, spreading throughout the environment and depleting enemy shields and armor by a certain amount.
* Affected enemies will now drop small "Cells" and "Shards". Shards are pieces of enemy armor, and Cells are concentrated orbs of enemy shields.
* Mag can use Pull to apply these to herself. Cells will give Mag's shields superior regeneration speed. Shards will will apply a substantial amount of damage reduction to her health.
Crush:
* The damage is increased heavily when enemies are inside a sphere.
* Activating a Crush while there is a Magnetize sphere active will automatically cause it to explode.
* Enemies not inside a sphere when being affected by Crush will be pulled to one another as the animation ends.
* Enemy weapons will suffer a small downtime of being jammed, before being permanently affected by a severe accuracy debuff until they are killed.
* Cells and Shards not Pulled to Mag will function as normal, exploding and causing bleeding. They will be pulled to the nearest enemies during the animation.

[(XBOX)Knight Raime]

tbh the only thing I want from your ideas is the mag pulling allies/pets who are downed.

magnatize is good as is.  polarize is too. really.  crush imo is the only thing that needs changing.

Personally I think crush should just do the same damage to all factions.  and do increased damage with crush if the enemy was already hit with polarize.

But shards being able to have some kind of effect on mag when she's got them is an interesting idea.

I think mag will feel better once shield gating comes in.  but overall I find her to be very good at the moment.

[(PSN)thefallenloser]

Mag Rework thread number 10. Interesting ideas, however some of these fail to address the current problems with Mag. I am not @Thaylien. I cannot say the same freaking thing over and over and over again and still stay patient. How does he do it?! I need to change myself. I'll MAKE SACRIFICES!

[Birdframe_Prime]

15 minutes ago, (PS4)ArtPrince17 said:

Mag Rework thread number 10. Interesting ideas, however some of these fail to address the current problems with Mag. I am not @Thaylien. I cannot say the same freaking thing over and over and over again and still stay patient. How does he do it?! I need to change myself. I'll MAKE SACRIFICES!

What seems to be the problem, my student?

[(PSN)thefallenloser]

2 minutes ago, Thaylien said:

 

I can't do it! I'm only on number ten and I can't do it!!!

[MagPrime]

12 minutes ago, (PS4)ArtPrince17 said:

I can't do it! I'm only on number ten and I can't do it!!!

It takes years.

[(PSN)thefallenloser]

Just now, MagPrime said:

It takes years.

I don't have years! I just joined the forums 2 and half months ago, lol.

[MuscleBeach]

I really only want 1 thing changed on Mag. Crush deals Impact damage instead of magnetic. She crushes you with your own armor. Not by throwing magnets at your Hard drive. 

[Birdframe_Prime]

Okay, my silliness aside, let's take a look at this.

On 12/08/2017 at 10:09 PM, Sir.X said:

(repost from reddit where I originally posted it).

Usually this is a copy-paste of a document that I make. In my opinion, I believe that Excalibur should not be the best starter frame to choose from, and that each starter Frame should have its way of standing out to be chosen from. As always, I appreciate any form of feedback whatsoever, so feel free to give your opinion.

Pull:
* Mag can now pull downed allies to where she is standing, including pets.
* Mag can pull shards and cells to her, applying their respective buffs to herself, or to vastly increase the damage done by Magnetize.
Magnetize:
* Magnetize will always start out as a small sphere. As you pull in enemies, the sphere will begin to distort, growing out to a larger size for the time that it is active, before exploding and damaging enemies.
* More enemies pulled in will increase the speed that the sphere grows.
* Cells and Shards pulled in will add additional damage when it explodes, Cells causing small blasts, and Shards causing bleeding.
* For every enemy killed inside Magnetize, Mag will receive energy back.
Polarize:
* Polarize functions the same as before, spreading throughout the environment and depleting enemy shields and armor by a certain amount.
* Affected enemies will now drop small "Cells" and "Shards". Shards are pieces of enemy armor, and Cells are concentrated orbs of enemy shields.
* Mag can use Pull to apply these to herself. Cells will give Mag's shields superior regeneration speed. Shards will will apply a substantial amount of damage reduction to her health.
Crush:
* The damage is increased heavily when enemies are inside a sphere.
* Activating a Crush while there is a Magnetize sphere active will automatically cause it to explode.
* Enemies not inside a sphere when being affected by Crush will be pulled to one another as the animation ends.
* Enemy weapons will suffer a small downtime of being jammed, before being permanently affected by a severe accuracy debuff until they are killed.
* Cells and Shards not Pulled to Mag will function as normal, exploding and causing bleeding. They will be pulled to the nearest enemies during the animation.

Not bad, in terms of ideas, but let's break it apart and see where the actual gist of this goes.

As I see it, you've got some great ideas for interactions, some I like, some wouldn't work, some inter-ability synergy would really work well. Gara is a really good example of 'if you know it' buffs, and putting a few of those into Mag would be quite nice.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, Gara has a hidden mechanic; Anyone playing her would know that if you have Splinter Storm active, casting Vitrify will refresh the duration on you and any other Storm in range. But the coolest thing is that if you stand outside of Vitrify's wall and smash it while Splinter Storm is active, it stacks damage into Splinter Storm. And I mean, really, really stacks. With a very minor Strength build, two applications shreds level 30-40, multiple further applications can get it dealing around 30-40,000 damage per second. Now this is cool, right? You can become a bowling-ball of massive damage, with 90% damage reduction to yourself.

Okay, so some of your ideas remind me of this and I really like that.

So Pull, for example, the first idea wouldn't work. Positioning of allies is defined by their connection to the server, not to you, it's why the drops are able to sync from the server to the client, but abilities that move them for one person don't necessarily move them for the others (like Greedy Pull doesn't move things for anyone but Mag). So your own pet? Maybe. Allies? No, especially when other players could be attempting to reach them for revives, or if multiple Mags were in the same mission... they'd be pulling allies around like yoyos.

The second idea, though, collecting Shards? Now this gives me an interesting theory. More on that later.

Magnetise, your change speaks to me that you don't actually like this ability or use it to its full potential as it stands right now. People use the large-range Magnetise for high duration and low power strength in order to make areas of damage immunity against ranged opponents. Simply standing anywhere beyond the mid-point of a Magnetise bubble means she's as good as got Zephyr's Turbulence on her, with recast options before the first ability ends. But you seem to see large-range Polarise as an annoyance, and would prefer to be able to shoot past it and over it until it has grown enough to make it more viable to shoot the bubble for high damage to the most enemies.

If this had been the original form of Magnetise I probably wouldn't have blinked, but as we've got the current, I believe the current is better.

Energy return for kills is a fun idea too, but considering the amount of enemies that can be inside a bubble (18-20 on the average mission) that would quickly become very, very strong. It might be a better idea for her to have her stats adjusted for a higher base energy so that she can maintain her casting for longer before need of topping up.

Polarise is an interesting one, your idea for changing damage to shields into generating Cells is not a bad one either. I do like this as it can then affect Shields in a more noticeable way to the player. However their effect... not so useful as you've literally just restored Mag's and her allies shields with the initial cast.

Crush is another interesting one, especially for interaction ideas, but I think there's better interactions out there that you could really exploit. So... let's see about this, okay?

With all of that in mind, my take on your rework is in the spoiler below, take a look, tell me what you think:

Spoiler

1. Pull. Ability yanks all enemies in range towards Mag at high speed, pulling them off their feet. Mag will also pull any Shards or Cells to her location, if she is within a Magnetise bubble that she has cast (not one from an ally), these will grant bonus damage over time to enemies within, and bonus damage and radius to the explosion at the end of the cast. If she is not, Cells will grant Mag up to 60% resistance to status effects, reducing the duration of any status effects she does not resist by up to 60%, while Shards will grant Mag up to 35% resistance to physical damage types, reducing chance of knock-down by 35%.

2. Magnetise. Cast a magnetic field on an enemy, drawing in all weapons fire and concentrating it as damage-over-time to enemies within range. At the end of the cast the expiring magnetic field will collapse explosively causing damage to all enemies in range multiplied by the amount of damage absorbed. Cells and Shards within the casting range will be absorbed and converted to bonus damage and damage multiplier. A maximum of four bubbles can be in place at once, casting a fifth will cause the oldest bubble to decay and explode.

Casting Pull inside a Magnetise bubble will make Pull omni-directional, but at half range for directions outside of her regular field of aim, it will also deal bonus damage to enemies targeted by Magnetise.

Casting Polarise inside a Magnetise bubble will deal bonus damage to all enemies within the bubble creating an extra Shard or Cell from each instance of damage.

3. Polarise. A radial burst of polarised magnetic discharge which restores allied shields and deals damage to enemy shields and armour, for each instance of damage to an enemy a Shard is created from armour and a cell is created from Shields, permanently reducing them by 15% of their maximum per cast. Shards and Cells can be gathered with Pull.

4. Crush. Grasp and lift all enemies within range with one hand, and then again with the other, magnetising their very bones and then crumpling them within their own bodies. Crush will leave enemies incapacitated for 3 seconds after use, unable to get up until they have recovered.

Enemies inside a Magnetise bubble will take bonus damage for the conflicting magnetic fields adding new twists to their misery. If a Magnetise bubble is within range of Crush it will pulse with a radial Pull field, once for each lift, drawing enemies and Shards/Cells to the center of the bubble to maximise the amount of enemies affected and the damage dealt with the final Crush.

At the end of Crush, all magnetise bubbles in range will decay and explode, restoring energy to Mag for each bubble destroyed this way.

Now with this, I've tried to incorporate a balance method of giving Mag that ability to gain survivability by using her abilities more, but at the same time make the gameplay with her bubbles much more active and effective the more you do cast.

The energy regen was a mechanic I wanted to slot in somewhere, but to do that, and the other things, I needed to Frost Globe the ability; reducing the potential number of bubbles means players can spam the ability for damage to a large radius, but the rest of the interactions will make it more viable to play around that small number and place them tactically.

Then there's the interactions themselves, pulling enemies and shards into her bubbles to vastly ramp the damage up, via Pull itself, or via Crush is something that I feel would give players even more reason to place a bubble on the most tactically positioned enemy, then play inside it like Frost, yanking enemies and Shards into the bubble, polarising for additional damage, armour and shield stripping... And then the desire to have four bubbles up and full of enemies for the big Crush cast? Yeah, I can see people really building up for this.

So... thoughts?