Saturday, December 3, 2011

Combo move!

A bunch of the community was just jamming with J Todd Coleman on Twitter (or spamming in my case). He's awesome. 'nuff said.

Anyway, I just wanted to expand a bit on something I mentioned over there on Twitter that probably needed a bit more explaining. (Read from the bottom up)


Anyone who's played a fighting game for any length of time knows combo moves in video games aren't anything new. Basically you string together a series of moves to generate a final powerful move.

In MMOs, the first thing that comes to mind are the group combo moves in LOTRO known as Conjunctions.

In Magic The Gathering they are a smart combination of cards that result in an unbeatable victory state . . . or perhaps doing things like playing a Griffin card followed by a Griffin rider card to boost the other card's damage.

What I'm proposing is something slightly different and more simple.

Let's pretend the developers have coded it so when you cast an ice snake, a fire shield, and a storm shark in that order, you will then spark a chance at a combo move (it doesn't have to work 100% of the time). BOOM! You've made the right combination of cards and the words "Combo Move!" flash above your character's head (similar to the critical message). Because you threw these three cards in this order and successfully made your percentage chance to cast a combo, this releases a meteor strike spell upon all opponents directly after that last storm shark is played. It'd give more reason to go for the boss over the minion first for sure. The boss would have been whittled down a bit from the storm shark and the ice snake and the meteor strike then hits both the minion and the boss. Right?

WOW! That could be game changing.

Now, a normal person would probably never buy those spells individually . . . what life wizard is going to buy a fire shield, ice snake, and storm shark with their training points let alone even load that combination in their deck? But, if we knew casting those spells in a row created a combo move, then you might see people spending their points differently.

What if as a necromancer I cast a Banshee, Feint, Sacrifice combination, and it resulted in summoning a minion to help me for two or three rounds? I might actually load banshee again!

You could even get crazy long combo chains of five or six cards that produced hugely powerful combo moves all their own. AMAZING!

Combo spells could be designed at every level of play and there could be multiple spell combos for us to discover.

I just seems like there is so much potential in combo moves for unlocking special spells . . . so many things they could do with that.

What do you think? Certainly would make the community work hard at trying to discover all the combo moves for a season. :)

Happy dueling

5 comments:

TALON NIGHTSHADE said...

This is an Awesome Idea. Maybe KI would make utterly new spells, like tempest and scald will create acid rain, a global spell that puts up 25 percent armor peircing. They could also make the spells into the mutates, like a firecat and the storm global would make a Storm Cat. Combining spells would complicate the game though. People would combine the spells without knowing it. It should be like the critical idea, it is only available after a certain level with a quest to Diego. Another combo idea is that it would put a tick with extra damage on the enemy. Its a cool idea though!

Evan LionTamer said...

Good idea, Friendly.

drewsimon said...

I hate to say this but, "C-C-C-C COMBO BREAKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Swordroll said...

In response to this, and Kevin's Post, I posted at http://www.swordroll.com/2011/12/where-our-spells-are-headed.html.

Alexander Nightwraith said...

Friendly,

I have sid this before and I will say it again. YOUR ideas are game changing. Again another GREAT IDEA.

As Always keep it up!!