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Hot Smoke: A consumable that blocks visuals, including night vision and heat vision, with black smoke. With the heat, it would deal about the heat and damage of two Flamers and spread over a moderate area over a few seconds. Would not block lock-on or gunfire.
Hot Smoke would be useful to any mech in this sense. A heavier mech could use it to hide their orientation from the enemy or prevent someone from torso-twisting away from a rotation of gunfire / lasers. A lighter mech could drop it to retreat, especially also using stealth. Finally, it would deter both allies and enemies from entering the smoke or risk overheating while using hotter weapons.
Heavy Trap: A deployed device like stop-sticks or a bear trap. Depending on implementation, could either slow anything in its limited radius by 75% - or deal about 40 damage to the first leg it contacts, to snap off the legs of circling light mechs.
A Heavy Trap would be useful in a game with no melee combat where, for some nonsensical reason, the safest place to fight an Atlas is hugging its leg and gnawing it off. If there won't be a way to punt the little ****** down the street or into a building, a deployable like this to help assaults who got left behind by their team would be nice. Not to mention, a light mech could use it to deter pursuers as well. It's another adaptable device that's mainly to deal leg damage or slow down a mech to make it more vulnerable if they wander into it.
Tripwires: Two types of trip-wire, one with a visible laser and one without. Would be placed on a nearby wall at a low height. The version with a visible laser would deal damage in a focused blast, again to deal leg damage. The version with an invisible laser would produce blips on the map similar to seismic sensors - and would still be visible by using night vision specifically.
A Tripwire would be useful for a scout to place before moving on, or for an assault to set behind themselves for early warning. Could alert teams to an enemy push, but not what kind of mechs it is detecting. The damaging version would be useful in deterring an enemy from taking a certain route, or be quickly placed while retreating to damage the pursuer, similar to the Heavy Trap above. Either way, a damaging version of one of these would need to at least be able to core the leg of a light mech.
Reactor Critical: With the introduction of this consumable there would also be a very small chance for this to happen at random to ANYONE when they are DESTROYED. Other components can be crit, but if an engine is hit with a critical it builds up a higher and higher chance to violently explode a few seconds after it is destroyed. With the consumable, one can guarantee the explosion willingly, but once activated it cannot be deactivated. Damage should scale with total armor and tonnage.
Reactor Critical is something that exists in some other mech games, most recently in memory in Titanfall 2. Light mechs already have a tendency to swarm an assault left behind, and including a self-destruct to ensure their kill would raise the chance of success - but if they kill an assault and fail to move away from their mark it could deal massive damage to them in the resulting explosion. Killing an enemy who is closely grouped to their team might also trigger an explosion, and rushing an enemy team when you're out of ammo or near death would be made even more threatening. It would become even less wise to ignore zombified mechs, as well, since they might be carrying a dangerous payload.
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Since melee doesn't seem likely to come to MWO, here are some alternatives that could help with the close-range combat thing. If I can't at least displace an enemy with melee that does no damage and smacks them into a wall for a temporary speed reduction or seize-up, then maybe some consumables will do the trick?
Personally, I'm down for a melee system where you don't do damage, you just shove enemies by quickly turning your torso while in contact or nearly in contact with an enemy (0-10m or so). Difference in tonnage would determine the distance the enemy is moved, and if they collide with a surface or other mech, they should be briefly stunned or severely slowed.
Without such a system, consumables like these ones would offer something new and interesting, hopefully.
Edited by GlyphKnightMax, 26 April 2021 - 11:12 AM.
