High mobility impacts support classes

liandri

Omni Ace
Omni Ace
Jul 29, 2016
448
1,108
93
Zone of Bones, Australia
#4
Link Gun from UT was a good example of a support weapon I'm aware of.
A reverse-engineered Missile Swarm that fired seeking repair drones.
Certainly AOEs, like Wyntyr mentioned.
Deployables, such as FF Engineer's deployable shields or Biotech's Healing Generator.

You could even play with the idea of support with unique smart weapons. An example could be a weapon that fires drones that latch on to nearby allies and assist them, reloading their weapons faster, overcharging shields or blocking shots entirely for a brief period. Once the drones "expire", they return to your weapon and reload themselves to be shot again. Shooting at enemies could temporarily disable their weapons, snare or blind them, or just be a general nuisance. This way, you have a toolkit for multiple situations, as well as an offense option, and something that would assist you in retreating if necessary.
 
Aug 14, 2016
978
1,554
93
#5
I rarely play any kind of support or healer in games. But few times I did and had a good time doing it was in Anarchy Online while I was playing as the Adventurer and Metaphysicist classes.

As an Adventurer I had a lot of auras that could buff attack, defenses, movement speed, and even healing. Because of this even if I was not actively healing people I could just passively heal them with one of my AOE healing DOT auras. As long as my aura was active I and people around me would get a small heal every few seconds. So I didn't have to think about healing myself or other people while in a fight, because as long as people knew to stay within the range of my aura they would keep being healed over time. On top of any other aura buffs I had going at the time too because they staked. So in large battles Adventurers was both damage dealers and backup supporters because of their auras, as people would naturally gather around them while on front lines.

As the Metaphysicist was a pet class that could also use AOE attacks, it was not uncommon for players to send their pets into battle while stay back to charge up one of their AOEs that toke a long time to cast. Metaphysicist has one pet for attacking, one for defense (projecting energy shields), one for debuffs (often slowing or rooting enemies), and one pet for healing. If I just summoned my healing pet it would only follow me around and only heal me. But I could also tell my pet to follow other people around and heal them even if they was not in my team. It was not uncommon for me to just tell my pet to follow around the tank in the group while I stand back far away casting massive AOEs that toke like 30+ seconds to cast.

Because if my personality type (I'm a yang fire type) even if I pick a support class in games I tend not be good at them. Not because I don't want to help people, but because it is against my nature so the order of my thoughts healing and buffing near the bottom of the list. And that is why the few times in games where I was able to play support and/or healer well are in games when I can passively heal people or set up a kind of automatic heal for people (like telling a pet to heal people for me or setting up an self heal station while in battle). So unless there are going be skills and abilities for passive healing in Em-8er I don't think anyone should look to me for support, unless they need something to die faster because I'm pure glass cannon ready to blast holes into mountains and making a crater on the moon that was in the horizon.
 
Likes: Pandagnome

Pandagnome

Kaiju Slayer
Fart Siege
Welcome Wagon
Happy Kaiju
Jul 27, 2016
7,730
10,079
113
Island of Tofu
#7
Specialist thumpr

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Skills:

- Creating pot holes for traps
- Creating new routes with the use of multifunction drills
- Can make things ragdoll if the drill hat is locked in place on the ground causing the mek to do a windmill of chaos kicking things.
- Also does some thumping but is most useful as a rescue thumpr mek!
 

Grinstone

Deepstriker
Jan 30, 2017
11
24
3
#9
I always thought the concepts of something like a healing generator (in the Dragonfly's case it provided a life steal to anyone close enough) or some kind of healing beacon that could be tagged for a heal were neat. Rather than force the healer to chase after or hit everyone who needs healing it becomes everyone's task to make certain they get the healing they need.
 

Mahdi

Firstclaimer
Jul 26, 2016
1,079
2,330
113
44
South Carolina, US
#10
Dragon fly healing ball wasn't bad to use in caves when you could bounce it around, but miss in an open field and it's a wasted skill. They did have that aoe heal though.

I could see having a generator operated healing skill that shot tethers to those in range. Less of a h.o.t. with the more people connected unless coupled with a higher energy output. Some really great customization options there.
 
Likes: Pandagnome

Pandagnome

Kaiju Slayer
Fart Siege
Welcome Wagon
Happy Kaiju
Jul 27, 2016
7,730
10,079
113
Island of Tofu
#11
I always thought the concepts of something like a healing generator (in the Dragonfly's case it provided a life steal to anyone close enough) or some kind of healing beacon that could be tagged for a heal were neat. Rather than force the healer to chase after or hit everyone who needs healing it becomes everyone's task to make certain they get the healing they need.
I like heal nades where you can throw it and some of the damage inflicted from the nade can give back as health to yourself. If you could throw a few nades together at different points it could create a nade link and anyone in that radius could benefit from that too.

I wonder though if the concentration of healing could be improved with upgrades by a certain amount and if so could it mean using less nades but meaning less coverage than using lower healing effective nades and able to spread them apart compared to the stronger heal nade.
 
Likes: Mahdi