Focused Feedback: Teleportation Pool Revamp

[Burnt Umber]

 

22 minutes ago, Luminara said:

It's deliberate.  If players had the ability to TP one critter after another without aggroing the entire spawn, they'd do exactly that, and diminish what little challenge Cryptic was capable of creating.  The Alert mechanic is the specific counter to player tendency to find the easiest way to "win" with powers like TP Foe/Teleport Target or snipes.

 

. . . .

 

We do have spawn leashes now which could be used to limit scattering, but then, we'd have players leveraging TP Target to pick off one enemy at a time, staying beyond the scatter/search range, essentially negating the purpose of the Alert mechanic, and aggro altogether in many scenarios.

I follow you on the reasoning, but I remain a bit skeptical that players, on the whole, are willing to slowly pick-off individual critters with little risk to themselves.  For instance, I think the changes to make instant-snipes suggest that players generally weren't taking/using a power that allowed them to do exactly that.  At the same time, I have to concede that unorthodox/irregular playstyles is something the player base thrives on and players will certainly try to cheese scenarios given the chance.  So, you are probably right that there would be a glut of tele-sniping characters were Teleport Target to be less aggro-inducing.

 

38 minutes ago, Luminara said:

The HC team could change it, make it a more realistic response, basically causing critters to start searching in different directions when they're Alerted that a buddy has gone missing, but that would lead to entire spawns scattering all over the map.  Is that what we want?  Fears were changed precisely because they did that, caused entire spawns to flee in different directions.  Most players avoided Fear powers so they didn't have to deal with that.  I suspect that creating the same situation with TP Target would probably lead to very few people bothering to use it, and be viewed as a sizeable step backward.

I actually would love to see such a change:  maybe not scattering the critters to the four winds so much as sending them away from the spawn point similar to how a critter will run when sufficiently demoralized but wander back (albeit sometimes very slowly).  In contrast to the old fear powers (or at least what I remember of them), I would hope that searching behavior wouldn't be a status effect overwriting the normal AI behavior for the duration, causing them to flee to the farthest parts of a map/zone.

[Koopak]

43 minutes ago, Vigilant Vergil said:

I actually would love to see such a change:  maybe not scattering the critters to the four winds so much as sending them away from the spawn point similar to how a critter will run when sufficiently demoralized but wander back (albeit sometimes very slowly).  In contrast to the old fear powers (or at least what I remember of them), I would hope that searching behavior wouldn't be a status effect overwriting the normal AI behavior for the duration, causing them to flee to the farthest parts of a map/zone.

I agree this has merit however in order to avoid the issues fear used to have I would suggest that the "Search" mode use a salted pathing toward the teleport caster. This would cause them to start moving in that direction and the players would have to fall back to keep tele sniping, hopefully running out of ground to fall back to eventually. If possible Id also argue for a counter, say on the 3rd tp target used on a spawn, the spawn goes strait to aggro.

Obviously this is all wild speculation though because I suspect most of what i just described would require new AI states and behaviors, and im not even sure if the pathing system has any support for "create a series of randomly distributed way points that bring you closer to caster's original location".

Feels like one of those bucket list items that, ultimately, aren't worth the time it would take away from other projects for a relatively niche mechanic for a handful of powers. Stalkers might be able to get some fun out of the system though.

[0th Power]

On 11/13/2020 at 1:35 PM, Jimmy said:

Target mode no longer requires line of sight to the target, so long as the target is in a location that is a valid teleport destination

This is everything I wanted (and requested) for combat teleport.  Also, i think I called my suggestion combat teleport too. 

[Jimmy]

As the patch is nearing completion, we are no longer seeking feedback on this topic.

 

The latest patch notes can be found in the Beta Patch Notes forum.

 

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