[Suggestion] Time Stopper with "offensive" power

[IamaMedalHunter]

It is very known that Time Stopper is exclusively used for critical situations. In MM2, it froze everything on place I can't remember if it could freeze bosses though.
But the level where it was the most useful is indeed Quickman's stage which featured insta-death traps and the one and only boss in the game to get his health drained in The World of frozen time.

But why does Time Stopper only hurt Quickman and does nothing at all on the other bosses ? Well maybe it'd be due to how Quickman runs FASTER than the others. Sure the other robots can move too but not enough to be affected by Time Stopper (counting out Heatman's tackle since he's invincible in this state). So since Quickman can reach a fast enough speed to be weakened by Time Stopper, if he ran even faster, he'd have more health drained, to the point where he could be insta-KO'd if he ran twice as fast as he did in MM2. *looks at Ra Thor*

So, I think you know where I'm getting at : Time Stopper in MM8BDM with killing potential. But let's not forget that Time Stopper is rare to find and hard to reach, and that is because its role is primarily allowing you to nullify threats around you for a while so you can get to safety. And especially it affects EVERY PLAYERS. You can easily imagine that giving too much offensive power to this weapon will make it fatally over-powered, occasionally resulting in many kill steals and in other players helplessly watching their health go away and complaining about that.

However, and fortunately, players normally move around at standard speed, which means they'll have next to no health drained from a Time Stop. Now let me explain how I see it working : the amount of health drained out of an enemy is proportional to this enemy's speed when time was stopped. That simply means that the faster you were running and/or falling when Time Stopper was used, the more health you'll lose ; this implies that you'll be completely safe if you were standing still when Time Stop takes effect. An enemy who was running with SR50 would have 5 or maybe 6 health points drained.

Giving killing power to Time Stopper would first finally give a reason for the weapon's obituary a chance to appear, and also give the escaping player slighty better comeback options, even though it's just few health. But this tiny drained amount could count, who knows.


And Time Stopper's sound effect doesn't play when activated. I'd like to hear it when time stops. I definitely remember this being suggested on another thread.

[Rozark]

But let's not forget that Time Stopper is rare to find and hard to reach, and that is because its role is primarily allowing you to nullify threats around you for a while so you can get to safety.

Hi I'm just going to stop you right here for a moment.
Don't balance weapons in a deathmatch setting around how rare they are.
Thanks.

In other news, this type of question has been asked numerous times throughout versions and seemingly nothing has been done about it. While this is probably not the solution, Time Stopper should actually be a weapon and not just a troll aesthetic toy.

[Stardust]

It hurts if you're the fastest robot master and suddenly you can't move at all.
I think the time bender weapon from flash man from classes in vanilla would make time stopper more interesting, sure it might not be as canon as in MM2, because it would only be a local freeze (a radius around you instead of the whole stage), but at least that would make it appear in more stages as it wouldn't be anymore 5 seconds of pause.
+ a slight drain while the enemies are frozen, assuming you couldn't change weapons when they are frozen.

[Bikdark]

But let's not forget that Time Stopper is rare to find and hard to reach, and that is because its role is primarily allowing you to nullify threats around you for a while so you can get to safety.

Hi I'm just going to stop you right here for a moment.
Don't balance weapons in a deathmatch setting around how rare they are.
Thanks.

Uh, you're kinda wrong.

Do you understand risk vs reward? That's kind of how deathmatch is supposed to work. You take time away from mindlessly running into people with Fire Storm to acquire an overall stronger weapon to help you win. The downside to acquiring this overall stronger weapon is that you took the time to acquire it, and to max out the effectiveness of said weapon, you must survive and use it effectively. Despite my whining and crying about how poor of a gamemode deathmatch is, there are strategical elements involved.

This is how it has always worked, and it's evident in every arena shooter. Not only is your logic flawed, it's flat out incorrect. The formula for 90% of arena shooters is: start with a junk pea-shooter, grab a couple baseline weps to get you going, then shoot for top tier weapons once you've garnered map control. Alternatively, rush power weapons right out of the gate, but this puts you at risk for falling behind if you can't defend yourself while looking for that Rush Coil to get GHold. If your logic was applied (or even true) to the game, there would be no point in picking up other weapons because your Mega Buster would be at the same power level as every other weapon.

To be honest, I'm not even sure you play this game.

[Russel]

Personally, I think if any change is made to Time Stopper, it would be set up to just...not do anything offensive whatsoever...at least in terms of damage.

I wanna point out that your suggestion is unhealthy.
Because there's no real way to tell when a Time Stop happens, it would still be unavoidable damage to everyone on the map.
This is not good and creates an unfun environment for...pretty much everyone involved that isn't making use of the weapon.

If changes were to be made to the weapon, which I do feel is warranted, we would first need to define the issues with the weapon.
First, we would want to give incentive to grabbing the weapon at hand aside from "Let's fuck with everyone on the map" because that's annoying and as of now the only real reason to even think twice about grabbing this weapon.
It has little to no legitimate use in any game mode aside from escaping because you can't set up plays due to the inability to swap off of the weapon.

Second, we would want to make sure the weapon provides counterplay that allows players to be able to avoid the player or otherwise mitigate the effects of the weapon.


I have two suggestions, the first of which is simply to make use of Za Warudo from the Rockman No Constancy expansion.
Originally, it was just a reskin of Classes' Time Bender, but then that weapon was changed to effectively be as useless as the weapon it replaces...if not moreso because it just freezes an area around the user and doesn't provide the same security as a full-world time stop.
Za Warudo instantly drains all of the ammo for the weapon and allows the user to capitalize on the use of their generally hard-earned, physics-defying weapon.
Classes Time Bender can no longer do this.

I suggest Za Warudo because in concept, it makes sense for use a Time Stopper-based weapon. You press fire, and suddenly everyone around you can't move for a short period.
This gives a very clear incentive to get the weapon as it is effectively a better Spark Shock. It allows you to set up plays and make kills because of its allowance of almost-instant weapon swap, and when it's out, it effectively tells everyone in the vicinity to "get the hell away from this man."
I feel like this would be a fairly sizable change to the weapon to allow it to be less of a goddamned joke. If the weapon is a problem after this due to range or stun time, those are numbers that can be adjusted easily.


...But if we're still hard-set on requiring a full-world time stop...

My other suggestion would be to make it so players can no longer be frozen with time freeze and allow the user to swap off of Time Stop for its duration.
...This would allow the user to set up plays and prevent themselves from dying to that atomic fire that's flying at them.

This suggestion is 100% utility and is neutral to everyone on the map. The logic behind it would be to stop projectiles but not prevent setting new projectiles into the space around anyone in the map.
I'm not as fond of this suggestion as Za Warudo, but I suppose it would work under the right conditions.

[Knux]

My other suggestion would be to make it so players can no longer be frozen with time freeze and allow the user to swap off of Time Stop for its duration.
...This would allow the user to set up plays and prevent themselves from dying to that atomic fire that's flying at them.

This suggestion is 100% utility and is neutral to everyone on the map. The logic behind it would be to stop projectiles but not prevent setting new projectiles into the space around anyone in the map.

I fully agree with this suggestion, as being able to freeze Vblocks and other gimmicks can work to the player's advantage, too. Sure, it can benefit opponents as well, but that's risk vs reward at work.

[JaxOf7]

Time Stopper thread huh?

http://www.best-ever.org/download?file=timestopperrecode.pk3

Brings that up I guess. Primary problem I had with it was all the bloated failsafes. However, that recode also allows victims to look around and also allows stage music to play (through a haxxy method that only works if there are other people) and actually plays the time stopper sound throughout the map.

So anyway, music and being able to look around should severely reduce the annoyance factor of Time Stopper.
Other issue I've had with Time Stopper is whether it is actually of equal value to the Etank it's placed next to.

Etank:
*Guaranteed full health
*Can use any time regardless of weapon state

Time Stopper:
*Full health is not guaranteed
*Can pick up items/weapons with it
*Allows for controlled rapid change of position
*Disrupts enemy charge weapons
*Have to switch to it

I personally find Time Stopper to be of less practical value than Etank, and this is made even more so when victims can look around.

Soooo buff idea I had was simple: TimeStopper usage grants an energybalancer effect for its duration.

Think about, when you used TimeStopper in the original Quick Man's stage, you grabbed ammo to keep it going. And while Time Stopper itself gaining ammo was a terrible time that should never be repeated, there's no reason we can't still have its gameplay revolve heavily around grabbing ammo.

So yeah, with timestopped health grabbing and distributed ammo grabbing, Time Stopper is pretty much a semi-MTank+ExitUnit, very worth it no matter how you look at it, and could even give excuse to reduce TimeStopper duration to further reduce annoyance.

[BiscuitSlash]

When I read the suggestion at the top of the thread, I thought it was going to say make Time Stopper do damage to players with speed buffs, as that would emulate Quickman receiving damage from Time Stopper due to his speed powers being messed with.

There aren't that many things in the game that give the player a significant speed boost. The only one that comes to mind is Scorch Wheel.

Honestly it wouldn't hurt to make a time frozen player have a little bit of their health drained if they had Scorch Wheel active (assuming it isn't a huge pain to safely code). It wouldn't be anything major, but it would be a neat inclusion.

[Xhatahx]

BUMP
I was thinking of a kinda merge of old Skull Barrier and Spark Shock. When you use Time Stopper, you have the Time Stopper "sparks" randomly appear around you and your ammo gets drained. You take no damage(except for stage hazards) and if someone attacks you, he or she gets frozen(as in Spark Shock frozen) for some time, maybe 2 seconds.