Medic weapon idea - Riot Shield

[[UIT] Akame]

I'm always in support of zerker getting a riot shield. As others have already suitably covered: yes it should break eventually. I support shield bashing.

and using it or small-arms with a shield is an even trade in my opinion, while also bringing some actual use to the machete, which otherwise never gets serious use.

The issue is that the dual weapons were all coded as a different weapon than their single counterpart. So for each combination you would have to make a different weapons and switching between them would require cycling through. Also the breaking itself and the restrictions which carrying it would have to be coded as well. This is quite a bit of work considering TWI does not have a huge dev team. Thus my suggestion using piecemeal coding from other weapons.

 

[BEEEEEES]

big whup. I'd rather have something that works intuitively and works well rather than something half-assed together just to get it out there quickly.

TWI devs must be fairly sharp guys, I'm sure they can figure it out.

Personally, I really like your idea of "Blocking Stamina" (Arm Strength)- so even though the shield won't ever break, you can't just sit around blocking because your arm gets tired out and leaves you exposed while you rest. I think that's fairly realistic.

If you have 100 block stamina and damage gets taken out of proportionally, and any extra beyond that 100 (or however much stamina you have currently) goes to your armor/health. So you can technically block that raging FP attack (the first X points of damage gets absorbed by your block stamina), but since raging FP attacks typically do 100+ damage, you will still get whammied for some damage. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

 

[[UIT] Akame]

big whup. I'd rather have something that works intuitively and works well rather than something half-assed together just to get it out there quickly.

Personally, I really like your idea of "Blocking Stamina" (Arm Strength)

If you have 100 block stamina and damage gets taken out of proportionally, and any extra beyond that 100 (or however much stamina you have currently) goes to your armor/health

I'm trying to balance work with playability. We all know TWI is focused on HOS right now, so I was trying to figure something with reasonable feasibility.
As a programmer myself I know how much time you can save reusing code so I was trying to figure a way to make this idea work well while still retaining ease of implementation.

The ARM could be implemented as a number at the bottom of the screen where the flashlight meter is. I'm not sure but I believe battery power is a player stat so ARM could be in the same way. The incrementing and decrementing over time is just like the flashlight. By giving the riot shield it's own attack or limiting it to use with only one other weapon you have offensive options without complications. The only things left to implement would be damage to ARM from specs and damage carrying over to you after being reduced.

 

[BEEEEEES]

It's not so hard to wrap one's mind around, check it-

Approach ze first:

In trader UI, there's a "Buy Shield" button down by the "Buy/Repair Armor" button. I mean, is it too much a stretch to stipulate that if you buy it, you're stuck with it equipped unless you drop or sell it? Add a new assignable hotkey for "Block" and boom, there it is.

Restrict shield to 1hand weapons only. Not only for balance reasons, but so new anims/models aren't needed. In the "I've been purchased" code for the shield, it parses the player's inventory and drops any 2-hand weapons, similar to how dropping weapons is already handled in existing code when a support carrying more than 15 weight switches to another perk during trader time.

If tackled in this manner [if you have a shield, it is equipped until you drop or sell it] there's no need for weird shield+<weapon> object tomfoolery or new overloaded functions to deal with player input in a different way than if they didn't have a shield. When the player switches weapons, the code that's already there handles it, because we ensure the player doesn't have any 2-handed weapons already when the player picked up this shield (if they had enough available weight to pick up this shield)- so there's no animation weirdness where players sprout extra arms and carry shield + a bullpup in two hands or whatever.

Approach ze second:

The "I'm now equipped" function for one-handed weapons is updated to check if the player has a shield in their inventory. If they do, the shield also comes out with the 1-handed weapon the player has switched to.

Approach ze third:

The shield becomes its own "weapon" and does not pair with 1-handed weapons. Primary fire blocks, secondary fire bashes. Put a ~1 second weapon wield/unwield animation on it and you can easily switch to it in time when a zed gets too close for comfort, then switch back to a different weapon when the range opens up. Absolutely the easiest to code- requiring nothing beyond making the object itself, and this solution still works absolutely fine from my perspective as a player as long as you can switch to/from it in a second or so, with the added flexibility of still being able to switch to/from 2-handed weapons normally (assuming you had the carry capacity to pack them).

 

[Keaton Fox]

If it could be used with a weapon, I thought it should only be used with the 9mm handgun. Because everyone will always have one, and it wont make the 'shield and gun dual wielding' overpowered.