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tl;dr version of my ideas

Poison (poison dagger? mid-ranged (throwing the dagger?)) - Low/No damage initial hit, but a HUGE long-term "bleeding" type effect. More DPS than Hack (by at least 20%?). But since it's effect-based, only one "poisoned" effect can be applied, limiting it's max power in a crew. Give it a HUGE cooldown (Fire Rain length, or longer) so it's recharge loads up again just before the effect wears out.

Vampire (vampire fangs? melee.) - A damage and healing ring in one. It targets enemies and hits them for about 70% of stanard 3-swords level DPS, but then also heals the person who used it.

Normal post:

A major concern of any new ring is always going to be "where does this fit in?"

With attack rings, the obvious answer is always "attacking", but pure damage is already spoken for (Hack, Slash, Mantis), so merely making yet another big damage ring is something none of us are aiming for.

In that case, the next question becomes, what do we want in secondary effects?

And herein lies the problem. Many really cool rings are virtually ignored in late-game because of being weak or having secondary effects that are useless, or even hurt the crew more than helping.

With this in mind, I think we should discuss a bit what kind of new attack ring we want first, instead of what the animations are going to look like. Once we come to an agreement on that, we can discuss what it should look like after.


A few current effects (and my impressions from own use, and players attitudes of the rings).

Knockback - Hate it. This disrupts major AoE and mobbing, with nearly no upside (minor kiting/escape aid).
Slow/Root/Fear - Mixed messages. Generally hated in mobbing, but occasionally have their uses, typically in kiting/escape. (Fear is often taken as a top choice.)
Sleep - Useless in groups. Since everyone should be attacking, the enemy won't stay asleep.
Dodge Down - Minor uses, but dodge/to hit is badly balanced currently.
Hit Down - Borderline useless, most enemies die before it has a use, and bad balancing means even bosses rarely feel the sting of this effect.
AoE - Loved beyond words. Mobbing Mobbing Mobbing!
Bleeding Effect - Typically ignored as part of damage due to fairly low duration on all current bleeding effects.


Potential new effect: "Poison"
An extended bleeding effect that specifically has a far longer duration. Used on weaker enemies, this would be a useless skill, since they die so fast against other attacks. Too many players activating it would also prove useless, since only one poison sticks on enemies, like buffs. A poison-effect ring could become a new standard part of "buff checks", ensuring one player has poison, but it's not double-taken so as to be useless.

- Notes on balance. It's DPS would need to be up there, close to the top damaging rings' DPS to be considered a viable choice. A good twist could be to give it a long (fire rain length, or longer) cooldown, while being single target attack. Doing this with a higher DPS than Hack would make it a hard choice to rely on for normal combat, and if more than one person takes it, overlap (two people using it on the same enemy) would make it a lot weaker than Hack is. But for one dedicated "poisoner" who can beat Hack's DPS with it at RR1... then throwing an RR4 on bosses for massive poison power, it would be a really nasty ring, and add diversity to a currently "everyone's the same" setup.

Potential new effect: "Vampire"
Not so much a new effect in itself, but a dual-effect of healing and damage. Must be targeted on an enemy to activate, but gives healing to the person using it. The ability to get both damage output and healing at the same time will appeal to many runs, and once again open up more range in ring selection, having many players pondering between swapping an attack (lower DPS, but keeps your life higher), or swapping a heal (better DPS, but much weaker healing). And newbies across zOMG would finally be able to self heal without veterans ripping our hair out that they haven't learned how to keep their HP up.

- Notes on balance. Power vs. healing would need to be considered carefully. Making it a midrange strength attack ring that also provides fairly good healing would be nice. It should feel NOTEDLY weaker than the standard 3-swords family of combat rings, but the healing should feel strong enough to make up for it, WITHOUT being stronger than existing heals. Around 60%-70% damage/heals feels like the sweet spot, since it can't heal without a target (an enemy to hit), which limits it's healing use substantially (in situations either you're at full when you start using it, or you just finished off the enemies when your life is down), while not being so weak as to be ignored.

>Kay's "What we need" logic

Well, I HATE mobbing and I HATE swarming enemies and I HATE AoE. Do you know why? Because I'm a ******** goddamned hipster and I hate popular stuff! scream
No, the real reason why is the entire ******** game is played like that, and that's part of the reason why roles and the such died and gameplay became stale. When someone realized "oh ******** this, let's just mob everything!" and made a guide with the very specific ringset that you should use, the fate of zOMG! was sealed. Call it speed, call it mobbing, call it whatever the bloody hell you want - fact is, no one will play Hive/SS/Papa Saw or any other boss instance in any significantly different way.

Two exception aside, which are the night terrors (does AoE Sleep) and the big dogs (300 damage to single targets WITH protection), it almost feels like the devs are just too afraid of making "big creeps" that don't really need to rely on thousands of other creeplings equal to them to be useful. Nope. All dificulty bumps are made with one model in mind: Spawn more of them. Coliseum actually managed to avert that a bit (but the place failed because of other reasons that overrule any reason you get - Gold - so in the end,, does it even count?)

And ranged rings are on the worst end of the scale, right next to effects that spread foes away from you. Paying more stamina for range is pretty much pointless, because nothing in the game barring kokeshi (medium range. might as well not consider it ranged) sea-cycles (come in packs, much better prey to AoE) and bosses (All bosses are weak against crews by default. Lorelei only makes people sleep from afar and that only hurts her more than help. The only one with efficient ranged damage will drag you closer by magic anyways) will even bother to shoot you from afar. So you're either breaking the game by kiting, or you're fighting them up close, and if you're doing that, you'd be better off using close ranged rings for efficiency.

So it's not that I feel a ring is useless just because it is, I feel that the environment itself is what make them useless.
I hate all of that... I hate being passively forced to play a game a certain way one supposedly about freedom to play however the ******** we want. Maybe it might seem like what we need, but I for once, call it criminal.

But anyways, I'm done ranting, Ignore all of the above because... No one in the god-damned boards will feel the way (except Raxa, which blew my mind), and if I was catered to, I'd probably complain far more. A change from that would need to be done in a gradual way. And that's why I come up with so many monster suggestions. I blame the monsters for the game's staleness.


So, before I side-track again... let's run down effects (and new mechanics), shall we? and I don't mean attack rings alone, but I'll attempt to stick to them anyways. I was told on the other thread to recycle old ideas, and so I will. scream IDEA DUMP, ******** THE HATERS!

And click the titles. They're threads.

Edit: Ideas are gone. Moved it to another thread. They're deviating too much from simply attack rings.

Idea copied from user ideas since it is an attack ring: