The Last Eagle Flies
New member
With Calico's kit seemingly shifting to a new direction, the ability to transform an enemy into a harmless critter goes back to the drawer. Before that ability is revisited again for another hero's kit, I'd like to talk about how it could be done. I will not be suggesting numbers, only mechanics and their implementation.
Deadlock is very different from Dota, so any ability crossing over needs to go through changes. In Dota, a Hex is essentially a combination of a very strong slow, combined with the enemy being both silenced and disarmed. All of this seems very doable in Deadlock as is but there are a few caveats. Since this is a shooter, transforming into something else is going to interact heavily with hitboxes. And unless the critter is really big, the hitbox change is going to be in the enemy's advantage. Not to mention dashes, should they be allowed or not?
Other abilities have set these three precedents:
So, breaking down the description. The transformed hero would retain the ability to melee, dash and channel spells they have already started. The damage they deal would be reduced, both for balance and thematic reasons. Don't want a transmogrified Abrams punching you to death recurring too often. The size of the critter is one of the biggest balance concerns. Even with the slow, a smaller target will be harder to shoot, even more so if the target has suddenly different hitboxes. I see this as a sensible tradeoff to such powerful crowd control, so the transformed unit really should be smaller.
For the implementation itself, all you really need is a single frog/critter model with a few animations: dash (large hop?), melee (tongue whip?), channeling, moving and idling. For additional readability, the critter could be colored according to the primary color of the hero being transformed. Transform Abrams? Blue frog. Transform Infernus? Red frog. The system for handling this kind of a color overlay seem to be in the game already, used by abilities like Catalyst.
In Dota, the main purpose of Hex is to make someone completely unable to fight back as you kill them. For Deadlock, the purpose would shift more into taking someone out of the fight or to catch up with someone you're chasing.
Deadlock is very different from Dota, so any ability crossing over needs to go through changes. In Dota, a Hex is essentially a combination of a very strong slow, combined with the enemy being both silenced and disarmed. All of this seems very doable in Deadlock as is but there are a few caveats. Since this is a shooter, transforming into something else is going to interact heavily with hitboxes. And unless the critter is really big, the hitbox change is going to be in the enemy's advantage. Not to mention dashes, should they be allowed or not?
Other abilities have set these three precedents:
- Unless you are stunned, you can dash.
- Disarms don't affect melee.
- Channels are only cancelled by hard crowd control, which is rare and telegraphed.
So, breaking down the description. The transformed hero would retain the ability to melee, dash and channel spells they have already started. The damage they deal would be reduced, both for balance and thematic reasons. Don't want a transmogrified Abrams punching you to death recurring too often. The size of the critter is one of the biggest balance concerns. Even with the slow, a smaller target will be harder to shoot, even more so if the target has suddenly different hitboxes. I see this as a sensible tradeoff to such powerful crowd control, so the transformed unit really should be smaller.
For the implementation itself, all you really need is a single frog/critter model with a few animations: dash (large hop?), melee (tongue whip?), channeling, moving and idling. For additional readability, the critter could be colored according to the primary color of the hero being transformed. Transform Abrams? Blue frog. Transform Infernus? Red frog. The system for handling this kind of a color overlay seem to be in the game already, used by abilities like Catalyst.
In Dota, the main purpose of Hex is to make someone completely unable to fight back as you kill them. For Deadlock, the purpose would shift more into taking someone out of the fight or to catch up with someone you're chasing.
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