As I understand it. Powers will be structured something like CoX, being Primary Secondary and Tertiary (whatever they are going to call them). I often thought in CoX it would be fun to have a wildcard power as well. Something that may not normally be available to your AT. Maybe as a reward for a particularly long or difficult trial or maybe even having to give up one of your primary or secondary power choices to get it. Just a thought here, but I think it might be interesting. Maybe as a downside make it unpredictable so you would get a random power. This would at least make whatever hoop you had to jump through to get it appeal to replay.
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I reserve the right to have an opinion. You reserve the right to not agree.
Hi Follies, there will most likely be temporary powers earned through play, as well as plenty of crafted temporary powers which will allow players to expand the capability of their character. Tertiary Sets (which is our replacement of Pool Powers) are going to be based off versions of Primary Sets, and open to all Classifications. This means a Stalwart (our tank) can pick Support Tertiary Powers, Control Powers, Ranged Offense, and so on. There are no restrictions for taking a Tertiary that is normally not available to the Classification. You do have to pick them at the cost of a power slot choice, which may require not taking a Primary or Secondary power however.
I can see the idea of a wild card temporary power earned as part of a reward for completing certain content. Particularly if the 'wild card' powers are limited to a degree where they may be different, but each provide a unique aspect which can change the tactics for completing the related content. The result is rather the same, in that the player may have a different experience playing through this particular type of content based on what wild card power they get during play. It is something we would need to carefully evaluate however.
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Maybe you could come up with a single "power" (probably something that would exist as one of your Tertiary Powers) that literally rolls the dice every time you use it. Perhaps there could be like 6-8 possible effects that could happen and the power simply randomly chooses one from that list each time it's used. This would allow for "unpredictable" outcomes in battle that would be perfect for those "crazy" characters who like to have chaos happen more than worry about perfect combat tactics. The random effects certainly don't have to be overpowered in any way, and some of them could even be considered "random backfires" that basically result in nothing useful happening.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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The [url=http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Rod_of_Wonder]Wand of Wonder[/url] has been done before ... as far back as 1st edition AD&D.
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Actually I was thinking of exactly those kinds of "classic" magic items when I was suggesting this kind of "wildcard" power for CoT. I even thought to use the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deck_of_many_things]Deck of Many Things[/url] as an example but held back when I recalled just how stupidly-overpowered that item was. I didn't want to confuse the issue for the purposes of CoT.
My idea here is a little more on the comical/chaotic side. For instance if you recall that scene from Batman Returns when the Penguin randomly picks an umbrella from his collection to use against Batman but it turns out to be a "cute" one that doesn't hurt Batman at all.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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Yay! I wanna play now! =D
I reserve the right to have an opinion. You reserve the right to not agree.
Now that you have mentioned it I want an entire power set based on that concept. It would be really sweet if I could actually assign different aesthetic options for each "outcome" of the power so that I could have an actual fizzle animation when I get a "fizzle" outcome and a big boom for the highest damaging one and so on.
Sure, I would probably relegate that character to groups only so as to minimize the impact that "bad rolls" has on me personally but it could be a pretty fun one to use.
The concept of having an entire powerset full of "random" powers might be interesting on paper but frankly in practice that would probably make for a borderline unplayable character.
Consider this: Even with one random "wildcard" power in your attack chain you're already getting a pretty strong measure of unpredictability as to how your character performs during a prolonged combat situation. I'd think one power like that would be enough to add some "chaos" to the mix without needing to take it to a hyperbolic extreme. Basically what I'm saying is if you literally couldn't predict what many/most of your powers were going to do from minute to minute then you'd likely faceplant every other combat.
To be perfectly blunt I doubt many teams would want such a "loose cannon" with them, especially if they were going to do some kind of serious Master-level trial/taskforce that required "no deaths" or other strict requirements. Having a teammate with one power occasionally doing something silly might be fun (or at least tolerable) for a team and that player could even temporarily avoid using that one single power if absolutely necessary. But if like half of your powers were designed to produce random results you can see how that would make you at the very least a "questionable liability" for any vaguely serious team.
Bottomline it might be great for roleplay purposes but for overall "playability" I don't really think this would be doable.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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The viability of such a set would depend completely on the "range" of randomization that they use. The early ones, especially the starter ones, could have a fairly narrow damage range (gonna assume they'll use a single fixed damage value for each ability like in CoH) and/or a few random secondary effects, think dual pistols but instead of explicitly swapping the effect it's randomly chosen on each use. As you progress through the set the randomization could get wider and wider and more "outcomes" could be added.
I'll admit that the planning of such a set would require significantly more effort to get right so would probably be a few years before they would even consider it.
To be clear I'm not totally against your idea but I agree it would have to be very well designed/structured in order to not become "unplayable" as I described earlier. It all would depend on just how "random" you'd allow each power in the set to be.
You see my idea for a single "wildcard" power was very much along the lines of having it produce truly "chaotically random" effects like one cast would get you an AoE Damage Cone while the next could produce a PbAoE Mez while the next could be a Self Heal and so on. The entire nature of it being a "wildcard" power is that you would literally never know from cast to cast what you'd get out of it.
Now if I understand correctly your version of a "wildcard powerset" is more like the first power would always be a single target ranged damage effect but the "random" part might be say the amount of damage that it did from cast to cast. While I can certainly agree that would be a version of a "random effect" I hope you can see that your vision of an individual "wildcard" power is a lot different than mine.
Given that your definition of a wildcard powerset is effectively much, much less "random result" oriented than mine I could see where that just might be workable as a full powerset. I'll be honest with you in saying I'd still much rather have my one single "hyper-random" wildcard power than your "random damage from a known damage power" effect version. You mentioned CoH's dual pistols powerset as your primary example to explain your idea and what you're proposing here just seems like a slightly altered version of that. Nothing wrong with that per se; just saying that's fundamentally different from what I was talking about.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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I see the huge difference now, and how I should have phrased it differently. I really shouldn't be posting in the mornings before my brain wakes.
Yeah, having an entire set based on true wildcard powers wouldn't be workable.
No worries. Like I said your version of a "dual pistols equivalent with random damage types/amounts" powerset might be workable as long as great care was used to balance it. It could be like a "chaos magic" powerset where you were guaranteed to do certain amounts of damage with it but you would randomly produce different TYPES of damage with each power usage. Could be fun.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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was just thinking about the idea of a character with all "wildcard" powers....and then jumping into a pug where over half the team is comprised of the same... first few fights/missions would more than likely be a hoot but I know that after a bit it would get old as you cannot reasonably expect to be very successful, especially in missions that are critical that all members are involved in the fight in a meaningful way.
again...it would be cute and I would more than likely laugh my arse off for a bit...but after the 'shine' wore off I would more than likely play such a character again and I would probably avoid any teams/pugs where there were more than one.
regarding random FX on a set power...that could be done as an augment. while it would be random it doesn't overtly upset the balance in the character nor make them useless. one knows what they can do, they just don't know what special effect will be happening.
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Once again I find myself agreeing with Lothic. I'm also reminded of the Super Booster II: Magic Mystic Fortune power that has a random buff to others. As well as the Super Booster V: Mutant Secondary Mutation that affects the player (even turn you into a Rikti Monkey!)
There could go the other way instead of just one power or powerset being random. A whole Archetype could end up being an elite Random Archetype character where you could switch from a Blaster build to Tank or Scrapper... damn need to remember the new names. Like I said that could be an Elite AT because the player would have to have the skill to jump from one style to another whenever you activate the Randomization power. Something like the Peacebringer/Warshades but you can't control what you end up as. Not that I want such a thing just playing the devils advocate.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
Yeah those are good examples of tiny bits of "wildcard randomness" CoH already provided.
That would certainly put a different spin on things. It would be like a "random shapeshift" power.
One thing you'd probably have to do with it is put a fairly long recharge timer on the random shapeshift power (like say once every 5 minutes) because otherwise people would just keep shapeshifting until they got to the form they WANTED at any given time which would bypass the random nature of it. The other thing the Devs would probably have to do to encourage players to "tolerate" the randomness is that each form would get some kind of very unique buff or bonus that you couldn't get anywhere else. Like for example the "Blaster form" should have a type of Nova Blast that's somehow bigger/better than any other Nova in the game. With bonuses like that it would become worthwhile to "roll the dice" to see what kind of random character you'd be playing at any given moment
It's an interesting idea but like the "wildcard powerset" idea it would likely be very tricky to balance between being overpowered and unplayable.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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It could be fun. Against a lot of foes which don't have particularly specialized defenses the damage type might be little more than cinematic. Taking down a member of the Rooks with a burst of fire, chunk of ice, or gust of wind doesn't matter much if they take the same amount of damage from each. But when you go up against a group of Pyrebrands, maybe getting that fire damage type might require some quick thinking.