Comes up once in a while. The big problem is animations: how do you make grappling attacks that look right on both a Rikti Monkey and the Hamidon?
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No not the hook.. the attack.. I would love to see a melee set based on the ability to hold and inflict damage. Something where it is a toggle. Ideally you hold the enemy with you, so that if you flew to the height max then dropped them, they would take major damage. Something wrestling-ish. Thoughts?
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That toggle sounds like it would be single-target, and would require both hands free (sorry Shields users) and would prevent you from using other attacks while it was active. Minor DoT Smashing damage to foe?
Also, falling damage counts as "damage from source other than you", for purposes of calculating XP, if that would bother you.
Also, how would the animations would look like considering the hieght range between the PC's (4-8ft) and the foes (Rikti Monkey and DE Swarms through Malta robots and Fake Nemesis).
I apply Grapple, Leg Lock, Arm Bar or Choke Hold to the DE Swarm and...?
I could see this in PvP, but in PvE it makes less sense.
The problem with grappling is making it look good. A selection of games do have it, but very few of those actually make it look good. Let's take Prototype as an example:
In prototype, you can grab and hold two things - people and large objects. Grabbing and carrying around people looks relatively good, because you're strong enough to whip people around like they're wet laundry, even when jumping and scaling building. But humans are human-sized, the same size as the protagonist. The other things you can grab are large items - trucks, cars, air conditioning units, large boulders, etc. This looks TERRIBLE for two reasons. Firstly, these items are supposed to be heavy, but they do not APPEAR to be heavy either in how they're lifted or how they're thrown. They appear to be made of cardboard and stuffed with beach balls. You know how Propel garbage has no weight in City of Heroes after it's been propelled? You know how that's very ugly? Like that. The second problem is that holding a large item blocks most of your view, which means the item becomes transparent, which in turn means you don't really know what you're carrying, which in turn makes it INCREDIBLY ugly.
Why is this not applicable here? For one, size difference. Enemies in our game range from tiny like the Rikti Monkeys, Red Caps and Wailers to huge like Greater Devoured and Zeus Titans, to humongous, like the Kronos Titan, Babbage, Baphomet and so forth, to weird, like Swarms, Storm Elementals, the Cap Au Diable Demons, the various ghosts, stuff like Seeker Drones and so on, to outright STATIONARY like the different Howitzers, Arachnos turrets, Vanguard turrets, to say nothing of wall-mounted computers, statues, power generators, SUBMARINES and so on and so forth.
There really is no good way to pick all of these things up unless the power had several different animations for the different things, which I'm pretty sure isn't even possible. But even if we assume it's possible, even if we assume you could grab small things with one hand, big things with both hands, huge things with both hands over your head and even if we imagined some way for you to grab a swarm of insects or a storm cloud, you're still left with the problem that this is a self-crippling action - you need both hands free for your combat animations to work, and even a one-handed grab would require that ALL OTHER animations in the game be re-made to work with one hand like they did for shields. And that's only against small stuff like Imps and DE Shards. Big stuff would take up both your hands (or look REALLY stupid) and just prevent you from using powers at all. Trust me, no-one would use something that disabled all their powers unless it was REALLY powerful, and there's no way any one power would be made REALLY powerful. That, and dropping stuff from high up does trivial damage to high-level NPCs.
I could, probably, see two ways for this to even be conceived. One would be to give all enemies a size statistic and make the grab only work on enemies of a particular size, allowing you to grab them with one hand, then use them as a shield providing some manner of defence, while you used your other hand to fight with. This has the very unfortunate consequence of not only not working on all enemies, but not working on enemies based on a completely random factor that has never counted for anything, meaning some factions would be vulnerable all the way up to elite bosses (say, Kurse) while others wouldn't be vulnerable at all, like the Devouring Earth replete with gigantic walking plants and rocks. Having a power not work on bosses is one thing. Having a power plain not work on anything from a faction is quite another.
The other is animating a bunch of "throw" animations to account for the various sizes of enemies and excluding the "holding" phase altogether. Just a straight-up pick-up-and-toss for some degree of damage and enemy relocation. This might work, though either a certain size of enemy or a certain class of enemy would need to be resistant.
Both of these "solutions" are not possible currently. There is no way for the game to play a different power animation based on what enemy it is used against - there's one animation that the power calls for each state, and state does not take target into effect. This right there makes this impossible short of the introduction of a brand new functionality. Holding enemies to you, as well, or even affecting their position in any way other than teleportation or knockback/up. Neither of those applies, as you need a COOPERATIVE animation between yourself and the enemy. I'm not even sure if this is even possible, but supposing it is (shooting an enemy causes him to play the reeling animation), there's no way to coordinate and sync up the animations between the two models. Hell, there's no way to force them to have a common orientation, nor do any powers in the game actually care about what orientation your enemy has. What you need is for both models to animate together, orientated correctly and in sync, all the while not actually being able to be animated together, and then have to somehow have the thrown model transition into knockback. But remember - animations do NOT move your location in the world, so if you pick someone up and throw him, he'll snap back to where he was on the ground before being knocked back.
It's just... A technical impossibility without some serious new technology, which would require entering an enemy as a prop in the player's own animation and... Well, that goes into Standard Code Rant.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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No not the hook.. the attack.. I would love to see a melee set based on the ability to hold and inflict damage. Something where it is a toggle. Ideally you hold the enemy with you, so that if you flew to the height max then dropped them, they would take major damage. Something wrestling-ish. Thoughts?