Make Piercing Thrust Great Again (beam attack adjustments)

[carnegie]

Beam attacks are great, especially Piercing Thrust because it lets melee characters effectively fight other melee demons while hiding behind their tank ally. However, the main thing preventing it from being super amazing is that it can't target "around" an ally half the time. For example, I might be here:

Code: Select all

P..
.AE

P=player
A=ally
E=enemy
.=floor

Piercing Thrust will always want to go THROUGH my ally to hit the enemy which I don't want to do, and there's no way to adjust its targeting to go through the empty space above my ally and then down-right to hit the enemy. It would be great if the pathfinding for beam attacks was adjusted to account for these situations.

[Ferret]

Hmm.. I'll look into this, but the fix may just end up being that Piercing Thrust and Shocking Spear just ignore allies.

[Ferret]

At least for now, I have made Piercing Thrust and Shocking Spear only hit enemies, but raised their SP costs by 10 to compensate. For comparison:

Ghost Bite: Range 2, 70 Power Pierce, hits one target but can hit any square in range without line of fire. 15 SP.
Piercing Thrust: Range 2, 70 Power Pierce, hits one or two targets but only if they are enemies. 20 SP.
Shocking Spear: Range 2, 85 Power Pierce/Elec, 10% shock chance, hits one or two targets but only if they are enemies. 25 SP.

In effect, Piercing Thrust costs more than Ghost Bite because it's basically Ghost Bite that can also hit 2 targets at once if they're both enemies. If all you really want is attacking through allies, Ghost Bite is the better ability. Piercing Thrust can do that too now, as well as hit 2 enemies when possible, but you pay SP for that versatility each use.

More direct beam attack adjustments might happen later, but I still have nightmares of the last time I messed with that code.

[carnegie]

Awesome! This isn't exactly the workaround I'd envisioned, but I like this better because it opens up more opportunities for Piercing Thrust and Shocking Spear to be effective. Thanks!

[Ferret]

I probably should have tried to provide some UI way of determining how you want to aim a thing more precisely but... thinking about it made my head hurt a little. I've said it on record before, but I'm pretty terrible at UI and really hate working on it. I have to be in the right mood or I end up just spinning my wheels on it.

Since there aren't that many abilities that even use beam aiming, I figured it was easiest just to do this for now. I didn't know how much you'd appreciate the SP cost jump, but I had hoped the ability to use it 100% in hallways like Ghost Bite would make up for it.

[wizzzargh]

Just finished a game in the new build where I got to play with Shocking Spear and Reprobus' Piercing Thrust- I barely even noticed the higher mana cost compared to the new utility (though to be fair I WAS a Bloodlusty Tormentor, so...)