CTF Ideas Council Summary - December 2020

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Hiya offenders and defenders!

We’ve got something new going on here. During the first week of each month, starting right now, a thread like this one will be posted. In each thread we will be going over what the CTF Ideas Council has been discussing during the past month. We won’t be going over every single thing we discussed, this thread will be dedicated to the bigger topics that the CIC feels can use community input. I encourage everyone to discuss the topics covered in this thread, you are free to do so by replying here. The same applies for any questions you may have, I’ll try my best to answer all of them. I will be the one in charge of writing one of these up every month, so if you have any feedback on the formatting/writing, please message me about that on Discord (Yami#9752).

Well, that should cover everything. So let’s get into it!

Support Credits
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We feel as if supporting is not very rewarding right now. To give players more of an incentive to play offense, we’ve been thinking about introducing support credits. I won’t be going over the exact values we discussed here, but these are the ideas we had for actions that could earn someone support credits, as well as increasing the amount of credits for offensive objectives:

• Successfully reviving a teammate as necro
• Killing opponents in a certain radius of blocks around your flag carrier
• Stealing the flag will grant more credits, but there will be a longer cooldown between getting these steal credits (To prevent farming)

We're looking for more ideas like these. You can leave them below!

Pyro
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I’m not spoiling anything here yet. We will be testing a small new ability for pyro after the current season ends, potentially replacing flint and steel, however that’s not decided upon. More on this one will be public in the future…

Engineer
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Engineer is getting some love as well! The changes vary from the long-time demanded sword instead of a pickaxe and ability for TNT to blow up medic's webs to some other changes to its abilities that will hopefully make it a viable AoE support. Testing will begin soon!

Chemist
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Chemist currently has a full hotbar. We wanted to change this by merging the fire resistance & speed potions together, and it would last 90 seconds per potion.

However, this sparked discussion about something: what are we going to do with the strength? A few ideas have been thrown around, but we haven’t been able to agree on anything so far… so we’ll be asking you about your opinions of chemist strength.

For inspiration, these are some of the ideas we thought of:

• Making chemist strength a small aura around the chemist player.
• Removing the strength all together and giving chemist a stronger sword in exchange for it.
• Making the strength a passive buff for chemist only.

Roadmap
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No, not right now, deal with it. We'll be trying to release a roadmap for CTF in next month's summary. This roadmap will be going over all the major milestones we want to make happen in CTF in the upcoming time. Stay tuned for that next month.

Festive month!
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December is for sure a great month. Christmas, new year's eve and of course a CTF event! Expect an announcement for a festive event which will be held later this month...

Dwarf
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A while ago, we asked the community to fill out a survey about what you guys want to see happen to dwarf. Now, we've taken a look at the responses, and we have an idea ready. The intended role for this reworked dwarf is core defense. Here's a breakdown of the abilities:

Weight

• Passive: when holding your weapon, you will lose the ability to sprint. However, as a trade off, you gain strength and immunity to all crowd control that is not vanilla knockback. Think of scout swap and elf wind element.

Gathering Experience

• Passive: dwarf can earn XP through taking damage. Maximum XP level will be capped at 10.
  • Retained Knowledge: when you die, only half of your XP is lost.

Sword Throw

• This ability has a charge-up. Charging for longer increases the range. When released, the dwarf will throw their sword in the direction they're looking.
  • If it misses, no cooldown is applied and the dwarf will lose a portion of their current XP.
  • If it hits, the ability will go on a short cooldown. During this cooldown, the dwarf will not be able to use its weapon. The target struck will take damage and debuffs. The damage done and debuffs applied are based on the current XP level of the dwarf. All XP is consumed upon hitting a target.

Statue Mode

• When activated, consume all XP levels to enter Statue Mode. Duration is dependent on the amount of XP levels consumed. While active, the dwarf is invincible (Note: only to damage! Knockback is still applied as normal) and receives a heavy slowness debuff.
  • While in Statue Mode, an aura will originate from the dwarf. All teammates inside this aura will get Strength and Resistance.
  • When leaving Statue Mode, an explosion will occur at the dwarf's location, damaging all opponents nearby. The amount of damage done depends on the amount of times the dwarf was hit while Statue Mode was active.

Not a lot of numbers right now as they are still subject to change.

Objective Credits
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Recently there was a suggestion that we should encourage objective play through extra credits. We fully agree with the idea, but there's something else I want to ask the community: what could we give extra credits for to encourage objective play? Again, here's a few previously suggested ideas for inspiration:

• Your team lacks a medic! Play medic now for double the credits.
• Your team has not captured yet! Capture the flag for extra credits.

Scout
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We'll get around to looking at more potential changes to scout soon. In the meantime, we'd like to ask the community for their ideas on possible changes to help give us some inspiration. When suggesting ideas for this, please keep in mind what we are aiming for - we want scout to mainly be a recovery class.


And that’s all we’ve got for this month. Again, be sure to leave your thoughts about all subjects down below. See ya in January!

Happy capping and recovering!
-The CTF Staff Team

 

Thank you wulfi98, repay me by applying for staff please.

Good concern; I'll try to bring up stalemates as a discussion topic for the CIC soon.

Certainly an interesting idea, although I'd prefer the strength only being given to enemies in a certain radius around a flag carrier - I feel as if strength being global during a stalemate would possibly make things harder for recovery, as classes like archer and scout (when voidswapping) would have to stay fairly far away from the carrier when trying to recover. This means any classes that get on them will have permanent strength, allowing for the archer/scout to be killed much quicker which can cause problems considering most recoveries currently originate from these classes' abilities to instantly kill the carrier. Additionally, other classes that have strong recovery potential such as pyro would have a much harder time getting to the flag carrier when facing a roam with permanent strength.

Resistance does not reduce true damage from sources like pyro or elf pure element, so this likely wouldn't help as much. Looking at giving strength to opponents will probably be more viable.

Apologies if I wasn't very clear on this one, but we already have the changes for engineer planned out; I was only announcing our current progress with it. These changes will hopefully be tested soon and feedback on them when that happens will be greatly appreciated.

No. XP will no longer be earned by crouching, only through taking damage and XP will no longer be depleted by blocking with your sword. It will however start depleting when you are no longer taking damage.

Keep in mind that you will be very heavily slowed while this mode is active; think of something along the lines of slowness III. It should be easy for opponents to avoid the explosion radius given this heavy immobility the dwarf would inflict on themselves when the ability is activated.

If any classes are put severely out of place due to the removal of strength, that can of course be looked into. I am however interested to see how things play out without any damage increases to other classes (potentially excluding chemist) first.

Not sure if you are referring to strength specifically or chemist buffs in general. If you are referring to buffs in general, the intention is to only remove the ability to give strength to teammates in potion form. Speed, fire resistance, regeneration, jump boost and instant healing will still be able to be given to teammates by splash potions.

Making it a flat instant heal would prevent a lot of recoveries that currently occur just as the carrier manages to get to their medic and because of that could potentially lead to more stalemates, so I'm not sure about that one.

While new classes are certainly something to be considered, our current focus is moreso making some already existing classes more viable than they currently are and giving them a good place in the game. Once that has been solved, new classes can be looked into again, though.