Traps, Devices and the "out of combat" concept

That's an interesting point.

How ARE people currently using Time Bomb?

I've always wondered what Trip Mines would have been like if they were made into Stick Bombs, i.e. something that you throw at the ground, it sticks to it and THEN becomes a Trip Mine. The functionality of the power remains, in the sense that you can set traps with it just as you could previously, and indeed might even be enhanced since you might be able to stick them to walls and ceilings, but it adds an extra functionality as a semi-direct attack. I do recognise that this might make the power overpowered, though.

Then again, I was also convinced that making Assassin's Strike not suck when used out of hide would make it overpowered and that's evidently happening, and I'm sure someone at some point made the argument that Elude would be overpowered if it didn't make you "only affecting self." But like I said, I doubt that would be an easy sell.

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.

Caltrops is quite good actually. Slows things down, does some damage, bunches them up, and confuses the AI. It's useful when fighting some EB for it to be spending half the time trying to get off the caltrops instead of fighting you.

Speaking of Caltrops, it IS a useful power, but it "confuses" the AI a little too much. I infer that the idea behind its Avoid effect is to cause enemies to try to run out of the patch, even though that's generally a mistake, and if that's all they did, that would be fine. However, this Avoid effect causes the AI to panic and run all over the place like a headless chicken, run away to the other end of the map, scatter to the four winds and just behave erratically. This I don't like very much, which has caused me to be wary of throwing out Caltrops willy-nilly. I know it's useful, but I also know it has a cost, and that cost is running enemies.

And running enemies make me more angry than they really should.

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.

Don't run! You'll only die tired.

I assume they are using it the way I've always seen it used: stealth in and plant it in a spawn (I've seen it used in other ways, but all of them marginal in frequency).

When Omega was first released on test for VEATs, I commented that it should have been a light grenade. In fact, the taunt may have been added after I made that joke, so VEATs you're welcome.

That might be worth time bomb's 9 second cast time.

This is pretty true..to IT on trip mine would be crazy good. I think another problem with teh interuptable powers, is how heavily they favour having Defence compared to Resists, or neither. Traps at least gets FFG to provide some dev, but no blaster primary 'gives' defence. AT least the snipes can be used at a big range, before stuff starts to hit you.

Maybe a new mechanic such as..if the damage taken is under X threshold, you will not be interupted. Just like a mozzy bite would not stop you driving a car (or whatever) in the same way as being hit by a log would.

Oh and another thing..yes, NPCs do cheat a lot, but how can something with snow storm, darkest night and standing in a tar patch..manage to get a snipe off?

I had to hold my tongue when a friend said he didn't use the rest powers in that game. It is such a joy to win a battle and then know you will quickly be ready for the next fight - and that in a game that is worlds away from this one in the likelihood of having a close call battle as opposed to player domination.

It shows that a game can be harder without relying on slow, do-nothing-for-a-while powers.

Don't know if the toggle would play nice, but they could have the power grant two clicks - one to drop the bomb, the other to trigger it.

They could even have it allow you to drop multiples if they want.

In case Triage Beacon isn’t made mobile, a +damage resistance power could be added to it to help keep you alive (similar to the devouring earth cairns), or have the beacon place the regen buff on any allies entering the area so that the buff stays on them (for a limited amount of time) even after they leave the area.





An excellent suggestion, Instead of slowing the team down by having them wait while you place each & every bomb, this would be a power you could just toss & keep fighting.

I would definitely take a power like that.




One other thing I would like to see is Gun Drone’s duration lasting a lot longer than it does right now.

This is a big issue for me, the fact that I have to stand directly over everything as a traps/devices character pretty much flies in the face of every single archetype it's based on when it comes to direct combat. If every traps power and the mine powers from devices worked like caltrops and gave m a reticle, even with a short range, they'd be miles more useful and lose nothing. Just that alone would mean I could feasibly throw traps into active situations just by hanging back and not attacking. And being able to throw traps into active situations meant I wouldn't slow down a team as much. Really the biggest issue I have with traps and devices is having to either have stalker-level stealth/invis or solo to get goo use out of them.

Not everyone likes location reticles, so they would be losing something.

(This is also why I prefer Devices to Traps for bombing, cloaking device and smoke grenade, between those two you can tap dance on top of anything short of a rikti drone.)

That's how I used to use it when I was still trying to use it at all. The idea would be to toss Smoke Grenade at a spawn, then move in with Cloaking Device and place a Time Bomb at their feet. After that, I'd back out and watch the blinking light. At the second-to-last blinking speed, I'd open with Full Auto, so that I can snag all enemies in the spawn with it just as the Time Bomb exploded, ideally killing most of them. If I wanted to be cruel, I could to the same, but substitute Full Auto for the Long Range Missile Rocket which did more damage but was much slower and harder to time.

The thing is, though, that as others have found, this is still far too slow and far too unreliable, and still pales in comparison with what other Blasters could do by comparison, especially something like Fire/Fire and ESPECIALLY what Blasters can do with a decent Epic. It's barely useful when solo, it's utterly useless when on a team, and it's a pain in the *** to use.

City of Heroes seems to have originally been balanced like older, more classic MMOs like EQ and AO, in the sense that you're not just balanced in what you can do in a fight, but also in how you can recover from it. A lot of older MMOs didn't give you many (if any) tools to recover from injury and fatigue, which meant you either have to have a healer to heal you between battles, or otherwise use up expensive consumables. Back in 2004, Rest had a 10-minute timer, and people still claimed it was far better than in most contemporary games where if you got hurt and had no-one to heal you, you had to go back to town or wait for hours and hours. I imagine it was, but better than very bad still isn't exactly good.

It is for this very reason that I agree with you entirely. I'd go one further, actually, and postulate that you can have a game that's both good and challenging without it having to rely on cheap time sinks and awkward mechanics. Hell, most sets in our game that aren't Traps or Devices already prove that.

This is a nice parallel for my own Steel Rook, essentially the second character I ever made. I was leery of making a Blaster at the time since the paper manual didn't really sell them very strong, but a friend of mine wanted me to make a character "like the Brotherhood of Steel from Fallout," and that meant Assault Rifle, which meant Blaster. It took me something like 5 years of getting that guy to 50 through grit teeth, doing everything far slower and with much more difficulty than my namesake - Samuel Tow the Kat/SR Scrapper - ever had to, but I got him there.

I soloed most of the way to 50, so I'd gotten a good habit out of using Trip Mine at my own feet in case someone approached me and Time Bomb to toe bomb spawns, Taser and Beanbag and Cryo Freeze Ray to stop meaner foes and so forth. But every time I set foot on a team, I was essentially without a secondary, and every time I stepped off a team, I was back to very, very slow mode. Eventually, I got sick and tired of fighting everything in tiny baby steps, so I rerolled the Steel Rook as the Bots/Traps Mastermind who prompted me to create this thread.

Traps IS better than Devices in almost every way, because while it's just as good at setting up traps (better, actually), it's also not that bad on a team. Sure, Trip Mine rarely gets used and a lot of the gadgets don't get full use out of them, but I can at least USE them in the first place. And, being a Mastermind, I don't have the insult that is Time Bomb. I have Detonator, instead, which is like Time Bomb only it detonates instantly and I can pick where it detonates by move-ordering a henchmen to that location. In essence, Detonator is like Time Bomb, only ten times better. Sure, I waste a henchman but I can always call another one down. Sure, the Assault Bot is an expensive henchman to lose if I want maximum damage out of detonator, but you know what? It's worth it. For the utility of that power, it is so damn worth it!

To my eyes, Triage Beacon is kind of a halfassed power. It's ugly as sin on a graphical level and very unimpressive on a functional level. It's just a tetrahedron with a low-res texture which broadcasts an EXTREMELY low-res, very uninspiring effect. As ugly powers go, it's the ugliest. Making it fly by making it into a double pyramid and possibly giving it a better texture and effect would be great. It would improve the power's utility by a LOT and it would also also make it look prettier.

Personally, I have a big problem with immobile summons that have continuous effects. If the thing is going to last for 90 seconds and have some kind of profound effect, then it really should follow me around, because if it doesn't, I'll just fight one fight over it and walk past it. Yes, I'm aware that it's good for Elite Boss fights, but you know what? With how broken the AI is, Elite Bosses take off running like idiots and run away from anything you've placed the moment they so much as sniff your Poison Gas Trap, so that Triage Beacon? Useless. Completely. It's only useful if you can fight over it, and when fighting an enemy whose movements you can't control and who regenerates back to full if you don't follow him when he runs, you can't fight over it.

And let's not even bring up the Devouring Earth here. Yes, their eminators are stationary, but they can relocate them an infinite number of times every time you run away from them. If a Guardian drops a Quartz and you hide around a corner so the DE creatures have to run away from it and to you, the Guardian will just run up to you and move the Quartz at your feet. If I could do the same with the Triage Beacon, I could live with it being immobile, but I can't. It's stuck where it is.

This is the big issue for me, as well. The reason these powers were designed in this way is you were expected to set them up around a corner and pull enemies into them, not use them offensively like people are now. I get yelled at for "Ya havsta praise people for their opinion!" on these things, but the fact of the matter is most of the praise Trip Mine gets is NOT for being used like it was intended. People have simply found a way to use Trip Mine offensively and thus break its original design, and THAT is what makes it so popular. If the only way to use Trip Mine were to lay a field and pull people over it, it would be very unpopular. Sure, some would still like it - there are people who enjoy setting up minefields. But it would still be just another Time Bomb to most.

This is the "out of combat" concept I spoke about in the original post. These powers are conceptualised to be used as traps prepared in advance of the fight that you pull enemies over. The sad reality is that pulling enemies has always been, and will always be, slow, cumbersome and inefficient, the tactic people only use as a last resort. To have that as your first resort written into the design of powers just consigns you to playing very slowly, levelling up very slowly and being left behind on teams. And I've seen this first hand. I WAS a Devices Blaster and I'm a Traps Mastermind now.

I don't mind powers that have an out-of-combat application. In fact, I wouldn't dream of changing Trip Mine or Poison Gas Trap in such a way as to hamper people's ability to set up mine fields with them. I suggested a "sticky grenade" redesign for Trip Mine precisely because that way people could still toss down a field of Sticky Grenades just waiting for someone to walk over them and still make a mine field, but people could also toss them at range and into fights in progress. I want the ability to set up minefields, but I want the ability to do more with the powers than just that.

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.

Well there were dangerous spawns before we had the purple patch.

If only the devs thought to give players access to some sort of slow or immobilize in the Traps power set! Some sort of... web-like... grenade-ish... thing... with which they could simultaneously apply slow, -jump, and immobilize to a target with a single power. And of course, this theoretical power would need such a duration that could easily stack to overcome the level of immobilize protection found on most EBs and AVs... yes, such a power would be very useful, indeed.

I'm off to the ideas forum!

We're not arguing if this powersets are good, in fact I love my DP/Traps Corruptor. We arguing if the game has changed that much that out of combat powers are out of date. I think so!

Yeah, when you figure out a way to immobilize Infernal, Nosferatu or Brukholder, let me know, because I'd really like to know. On my end, they ignore Caltrops almost entirely and just shrug off web grenades. If I'm able to stack maybe five on them at a time, they get stopped, but I can't manage to stop them for more than a fraction of the second every once in a while.

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.

i've played several Traps users and Trip Mine is my third or fourth favorite power in the set. Some teams move too fast to use it much, but it's almost always quite useful for longer battles and events like the prisoner escape.

Time Bomb on the other hand ranks as my tenth or eleventh favorite power in the set. And in keeping with that ranking i generally never take it. However, with the way vanity pet toggles now work i'd think it would be easy to change it to a Remote Detonator power. Give it the same sort of toggle as the pets and the current 15 second lifespan and have it explode when it dies. i would still reduce the interrupt, but even with it still there i'd be far more likely to take Time Bomb if i could set it off at any time in the 15 second window it's active.