Squad Leader Archive
Thread: Thoughts on our role post CU
Kyodor wrote:
Interesting idea; I especially like the Crowd Control one - but what about a defensive ability? Having the same purposes as CoB? Just a idea.
We already have a defensive skill, rally +80 to defense +40 to melee and ranged accuracy for 30 seconds.
Secondary Role: Medium Range Combatant
Offense: Moderate (3)
Defense: Moderate (3)
Crowd Control: Moderate (3)
A Squad Leader’s power shows through the bonuses they are able to bring to their group members. Squad Leaders have many various abilities to improve the coordination and effectiveness of their group. Even outside of a group the Squad Leader is a decent combatant, but their offensive and defensive capabilities are only average with no special abilities setting them aside.
Message Edited by MailekEOC on 05-03-2005 03:08 PM
Anyways, back to the topic. If non-SL's actually understood our skills, then we would be needed more often and wanted more often, instead hey, SL's give terrain negotiation, lets take them for that and that only.
Me, I take my profession seriously, that's why I have no problems with having the creature or whatever attack me over others. I wanted the leadership role, so I have to take the good with the bad.
If we could get more firm knowledge of our own skills, then I think we would be a force to be reckoned with.
Primary Role: Player character control and coordination
The SL gains a various skills to aid, guide and lead the group. He can assign targets and waypoints to characters and can call in formations or commands where when the characters follows the command will receive various defensive or offensive short time buffs.
Secondary Role: Crowd Control
The SL secondary role is crowd control, his player character coordinating abilities already influence the effectiveness of his group his direct offensive and defensive skills are to either single out a target make it more vulnerable to attacks from his group or affect larger groups and hinder the attack or movement abilities of his opponents.
most important missing skills are besides the ability to from larger /meta groups / raid parties:
This is to coordinate the attack of all pl in his group.
the rest is here
- /assigntarget:
marks a target for all ppl in his group to attack this target, queueable, the SL can give a que of up to 4 targets.
This is to coordinate the attack of all pl in his group.
Hmm... I am using VolleyFire for that... problems are:
- in big teams the cooldown is too long to do that constantly.
- in small teams this procedure always makes me the tank.
- /formations:
[...]
Dynamically moving waypoints, people having to stick to positions... won't work.
- I still have to see a moving waypoint in the game. We have them jumping for several hundred meters at missions, that's oki, i saw them moving after targets in space, but the refreshes there were either only once, or once every 10 seconds or so. Your concept would require much more dynamically moving waypoints, No idea if the game is able to do that.
- The team will soon give up with the formations, the SL makes one step to the left, the whole formation turns by 90 degrees. The whole team has to run around like crazy to get into position again. Before they manage to do so, the SL fires at a target to the right, so he turns to the right, all positions change again. That's a torture for the team and no fun at all... won't work.
What i'd rather choose would be some nice command helpers. This is a very big variation of the command mode which was suggested quite some time ago. The SL should have access to an area map (like the one used for setting up buildings, but with a bigger range) where he can see characters and NPCs. (As far as they are in detection range of anybody of his team.) Of course, the map would require to be scrollable for quite some distance and be zoomable.
There it should be possible to quickly create waypoints which are spread to the complete team. In an improved form, the SL would be able to select one or more members of his team and assign a waypoint to them by right-clicking on a place on the map. Would he right-click on a creature/npc/enemy, that one would be marked for the selected teammates for attack, similar to the marking we now have at volley fire.
The next step would be, that the SL actually gives the commands to leaders of different teams. (Perhaps his "team" would actually consist ofseveral teamleaders and himself. How many teams the commander can actually lead i don't know. According to current code, 7 may be the limit, but 5 seems more logical to me. That's 40 people, definitely more than enough...*) Here the concept of multiple SLs comes into play. Would the commanding SL just give out waypoints or targets to a "normal" teamleader, that teamleader would only have the waypoint or target, the team would be unaware of it. If he's a SL himself, he can pass on the marking of a target to his team quickly by issuing volley fire on the target. For the waypoints, we'd need a small new functionality on the waypoint monitor... give SLs the ability to double-click on a waypoint to share the waypoint with the complete team.(If the leader had no SL abilities, he'd have to take more effort to coordinate his team, it takes time but is not impossible.)
*: Of course, for the commander it would be even nicer to have 7 teams of 5 people than to have 5 teams of 8 persons. 35 would still be enough, but with 7 commandable squads, he'd be more flexible. But as usual team limits are 8 people, i assume that 5x8 would be the way to go.
Message Edited by Sylow on 05-18-2005 02:26 PM
Message Edited by Sylow on 05-18-2005 02:27 PM