[For Fun] Barrier Defense

[Galaxy Brain]

I've had an idea for a new defensive set centered around the Absorb mechanic for a while now, and I may as well toss it out there!

 

Barrier Defense

A High-Tech Force Field, Defensive Runes that project a field vs attacks, or a second skin that formed via a mutation, you are able to conjure an incredibly tough Barrier around yourself for protection!

 

Barrier Defense aims to fill a thematic defensive niche where your character is able to shrug off damage thanks to attacks hitting a personal barrier instead of themselves, and rely mainly on a high amount of (Temp HP) to survive, along with some offensive tools.

 

 

1.) Power Barrier:

Basic armor toggle, grants you a refreshing absorb amount that does not decay, but will hit a cap of 50% after some time. The idea is that by letting it build to 50% you can have impressive defense vs alphas, but then repeated hits will start to sting. The refreshing ticks help negate this somewhat but requires time to build up to actual shielding.

Toggle, 5% Absorb per tick (3 s), Max Absorb = 50% (Un-enhanceable)

 

 

2.) Activate Shields:

Emergency Click Power. Perma out of the box, Activate Shields gets you an instant amount of shielding as well as boosts your Absorb Cap temporarily, this does not stack but cutting the recharge down allows you to rapidly replenish shielding and keep your max shields higher.

Click, 30% Absorb for 60s. 60s base Recharge. +25% Max Absorb (Un-enhanceable)

 

 

3.) Base Shielding:

Your character has a passive layer of shielding on themselves. This grants a small amount of defense, as well as increased Max HP and a boost to Healing/Absorb. Sort of a basic passive.

Passive, 2.5% Def vs All but PSY, +10% Max Hp, +10% Healing/Absorb Enhancement 

 

 

4.) Advanced Filter:

Mez Protection Toggle. Adds a bit extra absorb per Tick like with Power Barrier, but also grants a substantial bonus to resistance vs Debuff Effects (Slow, End Drain, Defense, etc) as long as you have any active Absorption.

If the game cannot recognize X amount of Absorb being active or not, then this can be changed to have more generic resists.

Toggle, 1% Absorb per tick (3 s),  Special: 50% res vs (Debuffs) while Absorb is active [If impossible, can be 25~30%]

 

 

5.) Reflection:

Your shielding reacts to incoming attacks and can even reflect damage back at attackers! While active, incoming attacks (they do not have to hit) can trigger a special "Reflection" attack that acts like a chain-attack that spawns from you onto a random nearby enemy. This attack is comparable to a T1 Blast and has a 20% chance to occur. Also grants some defense to the player, with more defense gained if you have shielding currently. This is a unique take on a damage aura where you actually get a sort of free, random ranged attack within a short radius (20ft?). Will hit individually much harder than a damage aura but lack true AoE. 

Toggle, 7.5% Def vs All while shielded, 3.75% otherwise [5% if impossible]. 20% chance to trigger special Reflection Attack when attacked. High End Cost

 

 

6.) Adaptive Barrier:

You can adapt to the situation at hand based on the amount of Shielding you currently have. When you have a layer of Absorption, gain HP Regen and Damage Resistance (All). If your shields are down, gain Recharge Rate and Movement Speed. The idea here is that you have bolstered shielding and breathing room to heal, or you have an "oh crap" moment when shields are down to get Activate Shields / etc back faster or to re-position. If we cannot get the absorb check to work, this could work like the Radiation Armor power that scales on HP?

Passive, 10% Damage Resistance, 75% Regeneration / 30% Recharge, 50% Move Speed

 

 

7.) Amplify Shielding:

You can concentrate and give yourself a great boost to both Healing/Absorption Enhancement as well as Endurance Reduction for some time.

Click, 50% Heal/Absorb Boost, 50% Endurance Discount for 30s. 120s Recharge.

 

 

8.) Nova Shield

You can turn the tides of battle and sacrifice your barrier in a violent explosion of energy! This is a PBAoE attack that will affect up to 10 targets in a 15ft radius for Smashing/Energy damage and have a 50% chance to cause knockdown. The damage of this power varies greatly based on the amount of Absorb you had upon activation, the more Absorb the higher the base damage of the attack! This will apply a -1000% Absorb though, stripping you of all shielding immediately.

Click, Special PBAoE damage. 50% chance to KD, very long Recharge (6 min). Very low end cost and very fast activation speed

 

 

9.) Maximum Barrier:

You can immobilize yourself and push your shielding to the max, rapidly building up power as you gain a massive layer of Absorption! This works similarly to Hibernate as you are locked in place and cannot use other powers while you toggle this on, and gain a huge layer of Shielding. This shield lasts for quite some time, and can directly feed into Nova Shield and in general make you very durable every so often.

Special Toggle, 20% Absorb per tick (10s Max), Max Absorb = +200%, Duration = 1.5m, Recharge = 10m

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

The premise here is that you have a few token defenses but mainly rely on having readily available Absorb Shielding to eat attacks with, on top of unique offensive utility to give the set a fast paced style where you can take damage and dish it out, but have periods where you are vulnerable. Mainly thanks to Reflection and Nova Shield, as well as having a stacking Absorb bonus up to a certain point that you can bolster with a few powers. 

 

If possible, the mechanic of being "Unshielded" could be played with to more effect such as a cooldown for the auto-refresh if your shields hits 0, or more dynamic between shield values and what stats you get.

 

Numbers are of course not set in stone, and the Absorb mechanic as a whole is really unexplored, but given every other Defensive mechanic has it's own set I figure it should as well 🙂 

Edited January 5, 2020 by Galaxy Brain

[Galaxy Brain]

(Shameless bump)

With the change to Sentinel Regen I think this may be a more viable idea... 😉

[MTeague]

On 1/5/2020 at 2:35 AM, Galaxy Brain said:

Barrier Defense aims to fill a thematic defensive niche where your character is able to shrug off damage thanks to attacks hitting a personal barrier instead of themselves, and rely mainly on a high amount of (Temp HP) to survive, along with some offensive tools.

well.... I'd say the Thematic Defensive Niche is already filled by Energy Aura.   EA is basically already "Force Field Armor".

That said.  Nothing wrong with asking for a second flavor of Force Field Armor, I suppose.  No armor set works quite like what you've proposed, that's for sure.

[Galaxy Brain]

1 hour ago, MTeague said:

well.... I'd say the Thematic Defensive Niche is already filled by Energy Aura.   EA is basically already "Force Field Armor".

That said.  Nothing wrong with asking for a second flavor of Force Field Armor, I suppose.  No armor set works quite like what you've proposed, that's for sure.

I think a 2nd FF-type armor has room for sure. I mean, we have WP, Regen, and Invuln as 3 types of "naturally tough" or "healing factor" style powersets.

[Monos King]

On 1/4/2020 at 11:35 PM, Galaxy Brain said:

7.) Amplify Shielding:

You can concentrate and give yourself a great boost to both Healing/Absorption Enhancement as well as Endurance Reduction for some time.

Click, 50% Heal/Absorb Boost, 50% Endurance Discount for 30s. 120s Recharge.

This power probably needs to add another +max absorb to not become totally useless later on. Current absorbs (especially bio) already fall into the pit of being overpotent beyond need, as ablative carapace with basic healing enhancement can overcap absorb without even putting on defensive adaptation.

[Infinitum]

On 1/5/2020 at 2:35 AM, Galaxy Brain said:

I've had an idea for a new defensive set centered around the Absorb mechanic for a while now, and I may as well toss it out there!

 

Barrier Defense

A High-Tech Force Field, Defensive Runes that project a field vs attacks, or a second skin that formed via a mutation, you are able to conjure an incredibly tough Barrier around yourself for protection!

 

Barrier Defense aims to fill a thematic defensive niche where your character is able to shrug off damage thanks to attacks hitting a personal barrier instead of themselves, and rely mainly on a high amount of (Temp HP) to survive, along with some offensive tools.

 

 

1.) Power Barrier:

Basic armor toggle, grants you a refreshing absorb amount that does not decay, but will hit a cap of 50% after some time. The idea is that by letting it build to 50% you can have impressive defense vs alphas, but then repeated hits will start to sting. The refreshing ticks help negate this somewhat but requires time to build up to actual shielding.

Toggle, 5% Absorb per tick (3 s), Max Absorb = 50% (Un-enhanceable)

 

 

2.) Activate Shields:

Emergency Click Power. Perma out of the box, Activate Shields gets you an instant amount of shielding as well as boosts your Absorb Cap temporarily, this does not stack but cutting the recharge down allows you to rapidly replenish shielding and keep your max shields higher.

Click, 30% Absorb for 60s. 60s base Recharge. +25% Max Absorb (Un-enhanceable)

 

 

3.) Base Shielding:

Your character has a passive layer of shielding on themselves. This grants a small amount of defense, as well as increased Max HP and a boost to Healing/Absorb. Sort of a basic passive.

Passive, 2.5% Def vs All but PSY, +10% Max Hp, +10% Healing/Absorb Enhancement 

 

 

4.) Advanced Filter:

Mez Protection Toggle. Adds a bit extra absorb per Tick like with Power Barrier, but also grants a substantial bonus to resistance vs Debuff Effects (Slow, End Drain, Defense, etc) as long as you have any active Absorption.

If the game cannot recognize X amount of Absorb being active or not, then this can be changed to have more generic resists.

Toggle, 1% Absorb per tick (3 s),  Special: 50% res vs (Debuffs) while Absorb is active [If impossible, can be 25~30%]

 

 

5.) Reflection:

Your shielding reacts to incoming attacks and can even reflect damage back at attackers! While active, incoming attacks (they do not have to hit) can trigger a special "Reflection" attack that acts like a chain-attack that spawns from you onto a random nearby enemy. This attack is comparable to a T1 Blast and has a 20% chance to occur. Also grants some defense to the player, with more defense gained if you have shielding currently. This is a unique take on a damage aura where you actually get a sort of free, random ranged attack within a short radius (20ft?). Will hit individually much harder than a damage aura but lack true AoE. 

Toggle, 7.5% Def vs All while shielded, 3.75% otherwise [5% if impossible]. 20% chance to trigger special Reflection Attack when attacked. High End Cost

 

 

6.) Adaptive Barrier:

You can adapt to the situation at hand based on the amount of Shielding you currently have. When you have a layer of Absorption, gain HP Regen and Damage Resistance (All). If your shields are down, gain Recharge Rate and Movement Speed. The idea here is that you have bolstered shielding and breathing room to heal, or you have an "oh crap" moment when shields are down to get Activate Shields / etc back faster or to re-position. If we cannot get the absorb check to work, this could work like the Radiation Armor power that scales on HP?

Passive, 10% Damage Resistance, 75% Regeneration / 30% Recharge, 50% Move Speed

 

 

7.) Amplify Shielding:

You can concentrate and give yourself a great boost to both Healing/Absorption Enhancement as well as Endurance Reduction for some time.

Click, 50% Heal/Absorb Boost, 50% Endurance Discount for 30s. 120s Recharge.

 

 

8.) Nova Shield

You can turn the tides of battle and sacrifice your barrier in a violent explosion of energy! This is a PBAoE attack that will affect up to 10 targets in a 15ft radius for Smashing/Energy damage and have a 50% chance to cause knockdown. The damage of this power varies greatly based on the amount of Absorb you had upon activation, the more Absorb the higher the base damage of the attack! This will apply a -1000% Absorb though, stripping you of all shielding immediately.

Click, Special PBAoE damage. 50% chance to KD, very long Recharge (6 min). Very low end cost and very fast activation speed

 

 

9.) Maximum Barrier:

You can immobilize yourself and push your shielding to the max, rapidly building up power as you gain a massive layer of Absorption! This works similarly to Hibernate as you are locked in place and cannot use other powers while you toggle this on, and gain a huge layer of Shielding. This shield lasts for quite some time, and can directly feed into Nova Shield and in general make you very durable every so often.

Special Toggle, 20% Absorb per tick (10s Max), Max Absorb = +200%, Duration = 1.5m, Recharge = 10m

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

The premise here is that you have a few token defenses but mainly rely on having readily available Absorb Shielding to eat attacks with, on top of unique offensive utility to give the set a fast paced style where you can take damage and dish it out, but have periods where you are vulnerable. Mainly thanks to Reflection and Nova Shield, as well as having a stacking Absorb bonus up to a certain point that you can bolster with a few powers. 

 

If possible, the mechanic of being "Unshielded" could be played with to more effect such as a cooldown for the auto-refresh if your shields hits 0, or more dynamic between shield values and what stats you get.

 

Numbers are of course not set in stone, and the Absorb mechanic as a whole is really unexplored, but given every other Defensive mechanic has it's own set I figure it should as well 🙂 

 

[BrandX]

#8 Needs some massive -Regen tacked onto it.

[Galaxy Brain]

On 7/7/2020 at 1:49 PM, BrandX said:

#8 Needs some massive -Regen tacked onto it.

Necroing super hard but this thread got brought up again, do you mean -Absorb Regen for the character?

[BrandX]

3 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Necroing super hard but this thread got brought up again, do you mean -Absorb Regen for the character?

 

No, it's an attack that I thought could use some -Regen on it as part of the attack.

[Replacement]

Glad for the necro; missed this the first time.

 

I don't think I'd do -Regen on an armor set if I could avoid it.  I suppose if your Barrier is Infinity War Iron Man and you're just swarming your opponent with neverending nanomagic* that might qualify as -Regen?  But overall I'd just as soon avoid that for armors where it's not an obvious thematic.

 

"While Absorb is greater than 0" Mechanic: My understanding is this should be possible.  Whether or not the server wants multiple players all checking the condition every single server tick isn't a question I can handle, but I do think the engine is cut out for handling this.

 

Advanced Filter: I don't think you need more +absorb here.  I think mez protection and conditional resistance is good enough. 

 

Reflection: I'm sure you anticipated this response: CoH has a long and storied history of saying "We can't do Thorns/damage return effects in CoH."  But I always thought that was more about actually storing an attack's damage to return, which you are not doing here.

With your particular implementation: I'm struggling to think of a way a power could be cognizant of who attacked you last and single them out for a targeted attack.  Can anyone think of any other mechanism that does anything like this?   I don't think there's anything that uses an ummm "get last attacked-by" type function.  It won't help vs Ranged attacks, but I think it would be possible to fire off something like a pbaoe every time you are attacked (or a % amount of the time).

 

Amplify Shielding: Serviceable, but for some reason I'm not super keen on this power.  I guess because it feels like a) stuff you already have and b) too similar to Energize, when this set is already thematically nudging in on EA's space.

 

Nova Shielding: Minor quibble... is there a reason we need -10000 absorb?  Should be able to apply a -[current absorb] if you are just wanting to reset it to zero.  Is it supposed to apply Absorb Resistance or something so you cannot regain Absorb for a while?

 

Overall: I like it, I like your Regen/Willpower argument, and I like just about all the powers -- even yo' basic passive Base Shielding (in fact I was really happy to see some diversified protections with it).

 

I would be slightly concerned about the strength of Nova Shield with all the other tricks going on to amp it way up, but that's what balance testing is for.

 

*where does all the volume of material even come from?!  Is Iron Man gray-gooing the planet under his feet to pump up a never-ending supply of nanomachines?  If you find yourself watching Infinity War/End Game, consider the sheer quantity - measure it in multiples of car sizes - of nanomachine "suit" Iron Man goes through.

[Black Zot]

Interesting concept, but seems extremely prone to cascade failure.  Especially if you apply all the "requires shields for effect" options.

 

It really is Regen-like in its apparent function - you're invincible until you hit a tipping point of incoming fire, then you go splat faster than you can do anything about it.

[Galaxy Brain]

1 hour ago, Replacement said:

Reflection: I'm sure you anticipated this response: CoH has a long and storied history of saying "We can't do Thorns/damage return effects in CoH."  But I always thought that was more about actually storing an attack's damage to return, which you are not doing here.

With your particular implementation: I'm struggling to think of a way a power could be cognizant of who attacked you last and single them out for a targeted attack.  Can anyone think of any other mechanism that does anything like this?   I don't think there's anything that uses an ummm "get last attacked-by" type function.  It won't help vs Ranged attacks, but I think it would be possible to fire off something like a pbaoe every time you are attacked (or a % amount of the time).

 

Its been a bit, but my idea to bypass "true" reflection/thorns damage was to have reflection just be a chain attack off yourself with a limited range (20ft) that would hit a baddie at random in range. If you got thugs A, B, and C around you and thug A fires and triggers reflection, it could shoot to any of the 3 around you. If its 1v1, well there's only one guy to go to! I feel this would be more like an actual "attack" rather than a damage aura since it'd technically be ST, with RNG determining if it fires at all per swing at you. 

 

1 hour ago, Replacement said:

Nova Shielding: Minor quibble... is there a reason we need -10000 absorb?  Should be able to apply a -[current absorb] if you are just wanting to reset it to zero.  Is it supposed to apply Absorb Resistance or something so you cannot regain Absorb for a while?

 

Not sure tbh! Just sort of a failsafe in case other sources stack on you from outside buffs. It'd definitely need testing, but the idea should be that when you unleash Nova Shield that the sacrifice should mean something.

 

 

59 minutes ago, Black Zot said:

Interesting concept, but seems extremely prone to cascade failure.  Especially if you apply all the "requires shields for effect" options.

 

It really is Regen-like in its apparent function - you're invincible until you hit a tipping point of incoming fire, then you go splat faster than you can do anything about it.

 

Looking back at this, I think it'd be more fun if there were more variances of having shields up vs shields down. Per @Replacement's comment tweaking the design here or there where a power could drop added Absorb or added effect in exchange for embracing different benchmarks:

If shields < 1 = X

If shields > 1 = Y

If shields > 90% = Z

[BrandX]

2 hours ago, Replacement said:

Glad for the necro; missed this the first time.

 

I don't think I'd do -Regen on an armor set if I could avoid it.  I suppose if your Barrier is Infinity War Iron Man and you're just swarming your opponent with neverending nanomagic* that might qualify as -Regen?  But overall I'd just as soon avoid that for armors where it's not an obvious thematic.

 

 

 

You're inverting the barrier.  Seems like it could be -Regen.  Likely wouldn't even be enough to be a big difference.