Quickening
Prowler
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2005
- Posts
- 1,049
- Location
- Sri Lanka (now in Vancouver, BC Canada)
- Society
- Freelancer
- Avatar Name
- Amberle Quickening Netherwraith
A recent thread about booby traps and the like got me thinking about decoys. It's been around 4 years since I last used one and I'm sure a lot of people probably have not used it even once in their EU career.
I guess we could chalk it up to a number of reasons:
(L) armor and (L) guns allow people to hunt certain mobs above their level.
The slow run speed pretty much makes decoys obsolete, the distance you make on the mob is negligible.
The trend of having more and more high regen mobs means more time spent not shooting the mob means more PED lost.
A lot of mid-level hunters nowadays can take on a large percentage of mobs present in the game.
It's really a pity that MA have not done anything about the decoy system. I remember having quite a few fun hunts on big spiders and the like back in the day. I've heard my fair share of good ideas to revamp the system and this particular one seems to be the most interesting:
Make the decoys destructible items with an HP bar. Better decoys have better HP (obviously).
Allow the player to use a decoy-tagger (gun or built into the dispenser etc) that selects the mob the decoy will attract (have a limited range of 60-70 maybe, better models have superior range).
Allow the player to drop a select amount of decoys (this could also be dispenser based) within a certain range of each other.
A typical scenario will be as follows:
Player tags a mob. This should not aggro it.
Player places allowed amount of decoys within the allocated range.
Player attacks mob.
The mob will then proceed to attack the decoys in the order they were placed, moving onto the next as soon as it is destroyed.
Things to think about:
Certain uber mobs should ideally have built-in AI that allows it to avoid low-level decoys.
Multiple players tagging a mob would be an issue.
Decoys disappear if not attacked within a given time (5mins?) so as not to cause terrain clutter.
What effect does the decoy skill have?
Why use them?:
Ideally they should be priced so that they would be equally viable as using a good set of (L) armor to just tank the mob. Also would mean less or no FAP use required (some will see this as a disadvantage).
It would also allow for some interesting strategic hunting depending on terrain and decoy placement.
Hopefully another potential crafting medium?
This is a very much a skeletal design but do you think it would be a worthwhile modification?
I guess we could chalk it up to a number of reasons:
(L) armor and (L) guns allow people to hunt certain mobs above their level.
The slow run speed pretty much makes decoys obsolete, the distance you make on the mob is negligible.
The trend of having more and more high regen mobs means more time spent not shooting the mob means more PED lost.
A lot of mid-level hunters nowadays can take on a large percentage of mobs present in the game.
It's really a pity that MA have not done anything about the decoy system. I remember having quite a few fun hunts on big spiders and the like back in the day. I've heard my fair share of good ideas to revamp the system and this particular one seems to be the most interesting:
Make the decoys destructible items with an HP bar. Better decoys have better HP (obviously).
Allow the player to use a decoy-tagger (gun or built into the dispenser etc) that selects the mob the decoy will attract (have a limited range of 60-70 maybe, better models have superior range).
Allow the player to drop a select amount of decoys (this could also be dispenser based) within a certain range of each other.
A typical scenario will be as follows:
Player tags a mob. This should not aggro it.
Player places allowed amount of decoys within the allocated range.
Player attacks mob.
The mob will then proceed to attack the decoys in the order they were placed, moving onto the next as soon as it is destroyed.
Things to think about:
Certain uber mobs should ideally have built-in AI that allows it to avoid low-level decoys.
Multiple players tagging a mob would be an issue.
Decoys disappear if not attacked within a given time (5mins?) so as not to cause terrain clutter.
What effect does the decoy skill have?
Why use them?:
Ideally they should be priced so that they would be equally viable as using a good set of (L) armor to just tank the mob. Also would mean less or no FAP use required (some will see this as a disadvantage).
It would also allow for some interesting strategic hunting depending on terrain and decoy placement.
Hopefully another potential crafting medium?
This is a very much a skeletal design but do you think it would be a worthwhile modification?
