Controller Powerset idea: Elastic Limbs

I was thinking about popular superheroes who's power sets don't appear in this game. They would mostly be made of moderately ranged entangles that deal damage over time. Other than that, I have no real ideas, so let's see the massive shitstorm of discussions that takes place while people try to turn this one thought by some random member into a fully functioning, fun to use controller powerset.

Cool idea, completely impossible in the game. Sorry.

I am posting just to say I misread that as "Controller Powerset idea: Electric Lambs," which would be simultaneously the best and worst idea ever.

The first pets would be 3 electric lambs, the second two electric rams, and the third an android who regularly falls asleep.

Ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-ah.

While Electric Lamb Orchastra has some potential... if only to cause BaB's AND Castle to both post that infinity face-palming picture...

The very real problem with something like Elastic Limbs is that the game treats all characters as a bubble relative to their surroundings. Avatars in the game don't actually touch other enemies. This animation / bubble effect scaling can be witnessed in sets like Mental Manipulation, where Mind Probe on a short avatar looks really naughty when performed against a tall avatar. The effect can also be seen giant monsters where visible effects applied to pets are animated against the size of the rendered critter.... so if you immobilize say, Lusca, with stone cages... you have drastically oversized stone objects everywhere.

Players are deliberately decoupled from critter visual effects in order to save not just on network bandwidth, but system bandwidth and processing performance as well. If the game had to transmit per-player hit zones on multiple enemy critters, the sheer amount of information needed would make the game unplayable even on the fastest residential cable connections. This is why most games that wind up featuring pixel-perfect hit detection, like games based on Unreal Engine 3 or ID Tech 4 / Tech 5... tend to have a limited number of multiplayer spots available. To date, the only game that has made a hybrid of client-side and server side detection work in an MMO enviroment is Planetside... and as anybody whose been on the receiving end of 6 Jackhammer shots in a row from one NC player can tell you... it didn't exactly work perfectly.

Okay, in fairness, some commercial fiber connections probably could handle the sustained network performance needed to run a fully physics enabled, client side hit detection, and animation modification / deformation in real time.

That's a few years down the line, and then there's still the issue of the processing power your computer would need to have...

Sorry to bump an old thread here, but I'm a big proponent of elasticity. Elastic Melee is completely possible. Don't know about "control" though... seems like an odd choice. For melee you could simply have regular punch/kick/whatever animations, then throw out a projectile FIST or LEG or something, faded out at the end and with some blur and rippling effects so as to keep it from looking awkward. It would look like a generic gloved/booted limb, but with power customization, we could change the color of it so it would look fine considering it'd just be a quick-moving projectile. Tier 9 could be a spinning whirlwind of fists with a decent range.

Not sure if it should be considered a Blast or Melee set, though...

But I already explained how it could be done. Please continue reading.

Great that you don't like it, and that you don't think being bombarded with vast amounts of dense liquid is an acceptable form of combatting a thug. Your argument that water powers don't look right is based on Energy Blast, which was originally designed as a water blast set. In 2003 when the game was being developed it didn't look right, so they labeled it as Energy Blast. It's 2010 now. Your basis for arguing that they wouldn't look right is based solely on conjecture and opinion based on the fact that they didn't like the way water looked when developing the game 7 years ago. I think it's time to give water powers another shot.