Counterattacks

Um, entities which use the new Fiery Embrace all had their attacks changed to allow for it, as I recall. Powers gained the bonus in stages (first it was tanker primaries only, then PPs were added, then APPs, etc during beta.)

Correct. There's no way for a power to change the definition of another power on the fly, so there's no way for a player power to "add" a self-damage component to a critter's power. There *is* a way for one power to flip some of the effects of another power off and on, so if all the critter attacks were changed to have a self-damage component that was normally off, a player power could flip that on temporarily. But of course, that requires literally changing all of the critter attacks to support this feature. There's no way to do it dynamically.

Wouldn't really work. Pets don't "immediately" attack something that attacks the mastermind, they will aggro on things that attack the player because that attack is signaled to the pet AI as if it was attacked. But if the pet is taunted, say, attacking the mastermind doesn't automatically generate a retributive strike. While taunting is not an issue for a pseudopet or untargetable pet, aggro also doesn't translate immediately to a counter attack because pets don't attack instantly. And if you're attacked by a number of foes in rapid succession, there's no way to get the pet to counterattack all of them. And giving pets instant attacks creates other potential problems, like convincing them not to just spam them all the time. This would likely be vulnerable to all sorts of AI-related race conditions.

To be honest, the easiest way to implement deflection/counterattack into the game engine would almost certainly be something most players never suggest but makes more sense design-wise. Make the game cause *every* attack to generate a retributive counterattack, and add a way to turn it *off* by flag. Then set the flag "off" by default, and make the devs have to turn it on in special circumstances.

This way, there's no need for massive computations to figure out how and where the counterattack would go. Every attack basically simultaneously self-damages the attacker unless a particular flag is off, and the flag starts off that way. The flag would then be set not on the attacker but as a target check: if the target of the attack had the flag set, the counterattack would happen. So defensive powers and abilities would in effect "turn off the counterattack suppression" and the game engine would allow the attack to self damage the attacker. No auras, no reverse calculations, no CPU expensive conditionals. But you would need to make a fundamental change to the way damage attribmods are processed, which won't be trivial. That's a bit of an oversimplification of how I would do it, but it illustrates the basic idea. Sometimes its a lot easier to compute when something shouldn't happen then when it should, and that's often the path of least resistance.

Trying to do this with what we have now is likely to be impractical. People have thought about it for years, and rethink it every time a new game engine feature arrives. I personally don't think its possible with the current toolbox.

There's also granting temporary powers to a target

You can grant a whole power to a target. You can't edit a power on the fly, either your own or a target's. You can, of course, do things like apply buffs which affect the power, which is actually in a weird sense how Dual Pistols ammo works - by buffing and debuffing the chance for certain effects to occur. But you cannot create an effect that doesn't already exist and add it to a power that already exists.

I was thinking something more along the lines of PBAoE toggle which uses the 'suppress on hit' mechanics of stealth powers, but instead of suppressing one of the power's effects, it grants a temporary power to the target. I'm not exactly sure if the reverse of suppress-on-hit is possible (suppress-until-hit), but if so, it would be basically a PBAoE damage when you get hit (get hit, grant a temporary power to all enemies in range which does self damage).

Then again, now that I think about it, if you could do suppress-until-hit, there's no need to grant a temporary power when you could just suppress-until-hit a damage tick.

That would work/make sense on something like, say, a Calzone golem, spraying everyone in range with boiling hot marinara sauce on every hit (sorry, first example that came to mind - it was made for D&D 3.5) but for a counter attack just against the attacker? Your method would be AoE.

Probably the simplest method would be the modify every attack out there (note I said simple, not easy :P) for a containment like effect triggered by a unique status that someone with a counter attack power would self-apply.

Ah, I see. I wasn't in beta so didn't see that process occur.

Cthulhu love the poor Intern who had to do all of that.

Yeah, I wouldn't wish a process where some poor random code munkie had to change every attack power in the game on anyone.

Unless they could do it via a batch job / script of course.

Well, D&D runs off the "Human Brain" game engine which can have a lot of flexibility.

Yup, never before D&D has anyone used an opponent's attack against them. Ever.