Movement Bind to step back?

[TrashBasher]

When I use a melee toon I frequently use targetenemy$$follow which is great, but what seems to happen is that I get too close to take advantage of cones well.  Is there a way to bind a key to step back say 2 feet?

[Redlynne]

Trick question ...

Are you a 2D Cone user or a 3D Cone user?

 

 

 

The reason why I ask that question is ... Hop 'n' Pop.

 

What's a Hop 'n' Pop?  Well I'm glad you asked!

On 6/16/2019 at 9:36 AM, Redlynne said:

One of the tricks I learned while playing Ice/Ice which seemed utterly foreign to everyone I ever met on the Tanker forums was the notion of turning Frost (a Melee Cone attack) into a PBAoE by pointing it in a useful direction.

 

What do I mean by that?

Well, you need to abandon your ...

... in order to understand what I'm talking about here.

 

So with Range slotted into Frost, you can get a Cone Range of about 15 feet on it.

"So what?" ... I hear you cry ... "that's just going to be wasted."

 

Well, that range WOULD be wasted if all you did was stand on the ground and point your cone towards one side of the $Targets that will be attacking you, resulting in one of these:

 

If you're surrounded on all sides using a melee cone that misses 3/4 of the attackers and has extra range to waste "beyond the attackers" on that side of you isn't going to help anything ... right?

 

 

 

Well ... that would certainly be true if you stay glued to the ground and only POINT your Frost Cone attack to one SIDE of the $Targets surrounding you.

So why would you want to stay glued to the ground like a Stone Tanker who can't ... JUMP ...?

 

 

 

If you've been paying attention so far, you know what's coming next ... (temporary) three dimensional positioning in order to use your Frost attack WAY MORE effectively ... so as to turn it into more of a PBAoE(ish) attack.

 

All you have to do is JUMP UP ... about 15 feet ... which you can do perfectly fine with Hurdle and no Combat Jumping and simply "time it" to click Frost when you're at the top of your jump.  So instead of doing a Cone TO THE SIDE like in the above pie chart image, you instead do a Cone that angles DOWN to hit everything clustered up around you like this:

 

 

Do you see how much WIDER the purple ring is than the green ring in that cone?  The purple ring is only 50% farther away from the peak/caster, but it covers a MUCH wider area, catching way more $Targets within it that would all be clustered up upon your location.

 

I call it the "Hop 'n' Pop" move.

You "hop" upwards from the pile of aggro you've got clustered up on you and at the top of your jump you "pop" them with Frost and catch EVERYTHING that was around you on all sides ... just as if you hadn't moved and had been using a PBAoE attack instead.  It'll take all of about 2 seconds to make the jump/attack/fall, you'll hit A LOT more $Targets with your Frost attack, dramatically improving its efficiency of converting endurance into damage, you'll defeat dogpiles of aggro faster and you'll also be debuffing everything attacking you in melee range even more than they would have been debuffed if you'd stayed put on the ground and only pointed Frost at one side of the dogpile instead of hopping above it to catch ALL of them in the Frost Cone before falling right back down in the middle of them.  You don't even need to switch $Targets or anything.  Herd up the aggro onto you and then jump to use Frost on ALL of them.  Your jump height will be almost exactly the distance that a Frost attack enhanced for +50% Range will reach ...

Note that the Hop 'n' Pop can be used with ANY Cone attack (such as Empty Clips in the Dual Pistols set), it's just that Frost synergizes really well with it when Frost is enhanced for Range (of all things).

 

 

 

Hope that helps.

[TrashBasher]

Thanks, this is certainly a good thing to consider for Hover Blasters and I have wondered about that.

 

Regarding melee, I doubt there is a way to do what I mentioned without a teleport power.  I will try that on my Savage Melee toon for fun, using /powexec_loc.