Swift Stone - Sprint based shiftstone
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Musical-Memoirs
The shiftstones still have a gap of some playstyles being unfavored. Resulting in some people not being incentivized to learn them. One of them is sprint based playstyles. Why would you learn the hard to get used to sprint, if you have Flow and Stubborn for boosting the easy to learn dash? Most players completely skip sprint which is such a shame for the variety of playstyles...
My suggestion:
Swift Stone
With the Swift Stone you get 2 small buffs on sprint:
- A way shorter buildup lag from starting spint.
- Keep your sprint while changing directions.
While these buffs might sound extremely small compared to what Stubborn and Flow gives, but they have more advantages then you would think, making them good enough to be worth it in my opinion.
The advantages:
- This makes sprint easier to learn. The way faster feedback from starting a sprint pose to getting the speed helps to realize if you did the right pose or not.
- It motivates the use of sprint, so more people will want to learn it.
- It's one of the rare Shift Stones that would be good for white belts, making early gameplay more interesting.
- It's easier to maintain your sprint through a corner, allowing to dodge attacks way easier.
- If you miss a sprint pose, it's easier to regain your sprint with the short buildup.
- Between 2 sprint poses it's already possible to do other moves while maintaining speed, but this timing is incredibly hard, while for dash this is incredibly easy already. With the shortening of the startup lag it's a bit easier for sprint as well.
(Name suggested by Acorn.)
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MHS1AGF50Z3N
i fear that this stone would be extremely overpowered and quite difficult to play against
in most games, mobility is the most important skill, if you opponent cant hit you. you can never lose
it would effectively make sprint a better dash. just with the ability to maintain it indefinitely. and much harder to punish a mobile playstyle
dash will damage you if you dash into a spawn, sprint doesnt have that drawback. so youre only gaining benefits without taking on ANY risk.
oh and why must the focus be on adding instead of fixing. this is why we have cosmetics before stable connections or enough players for sbmm
M
Musical-Memoirs
MHS1AGF50Z3N
Remember, you have to use a shiftstone slot. If I take this I will have to sacrifice another strong boost I used to have. Now think how powerful flow and stubborn are as mobility buffs, my suggestion is nothing extreme.
Currently it is undeniable that dash has a slight upper hand when compared to sprint. Even without the use of shiftstones. In fundamental playstyle dash allows for a faster spawn pace as it's way easier to multitask, while being mobile. Dash has way more tech that use it's abilities, even without shifstones. Then the shiftstones that use dash are extremely powerful as well.
You can definitely sprint into your own spawns or stuff already existing on the ground and get damaged. Sprinting while holding a structure is also risky, since you are swinging your arms near your own body, including the hand holding the structure. And this is the standard behavior of sprint. Swiftstone would actually make it easier to reach the speed where you will hit yourself.
If not being able to take damage from accidently dashing into your own spawns is a concern, then Stubborn stone is also a bad one, that one definitely removes risk. Just watch something like this. They are intentionally hitting themselves for a permanent +2 defense thanks to a stubborn+adamant synergy, get no knockback and can easily multitask since a dash is so long. https://discord.com/channels/362905006275297290/1055510747456749618/1355748315781791785
"so youre only gaining benefits without taking on ANY risk." Uhm, have you looked at the other shiftstones? Enough of them only give a boost without any downside.
- Adamant - Actively removes risk, as hitting yourself even gets the 1 damage reduction.
- Flow - Removes risk from bad aerial attacks, by giving you the ability to correct your movement.
- Stubborn - Only removes a lot of risk from bad dashes and jumps through damage reduction and ignoring all knockback.
- Vigor - Only heals, allowing you to play more risky.
And if you want the focus to be on fixing issues, then report bugs! I have also reported bugs before, but that doesn't mean I will not be posting my ideas for future content.
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MHS1AGF50Z3N
Musical-Memoirs ive been against shift stones since i first heard about them. for that main reason, its just a straight upgrade in several cases, forcing players into using them to not be at a disadvantage
what youre pitching is the ability to maintain a high speed, and still be very nimble. dash is fairly predictable, chaining dashes is already pretty evasive.
in a game where mechanical skill is 90% of the game, why have a barrowed power? turn each stone modifier/perk into a move or condition.
i would rather see powerups spawning in the arena than have the shiftstones (not suggesting that, but would be a way to get the passives into play). because both players would always have access to the same options. where THE PLAYERS are the ones who make the difference, it allows for playstyles to be very fluid and adaptive instead of "X stone has good matchups against Y stone"
oh and theyre not bugs, theyre "features". bethesda mentality
M
Musical-Memoirs
MHS1AGF50Z3N I can understand the dislike for shiftstones. Something I love about Rumble is that most of the moves are the same between players. It all depends on what abilities you spend time on to create your fighting style. Unlike the many fighting games where character selection determines a lot about your abilities. Shiftstones are a light version of character selection, since the base is the same. From the standpoint of 'shiftstones were a bad idea' I can totally understand your concern of adding even more of them.
But I have grown to like them for how much it allows us to diversify our fighting styles further. And you can change them up between matches easily.
In the gamemode/gamerule update that is planned I do hope they will bring a no shiftstone mode, even though I would probebly not play that mode myself much. And a gamemode that spawn powerups actually sounds incredibly fun to play with! A super smash bros style party mode.
Y
YourNeighborNat
While these two sprint buffs being included on a sprinting stone would very nicely improve QoL, I do think I would personally like a sprinting Shift Stone to provide some kind of interesting benefit when at full sprint speed build-up.
Since we already have damage reduction and knockback negation on Stubborn, instead of something like that, perhaps a sprint stone could have the top speed of sprint increased where you would hit full normal sprint in a shorter time, but a faster sprint than normal if you kept sprinting past that for the full duration that it would normally take to build up or perhaps a bit longer? If not this, then perhaps some other kind of effect that triggers after being at top speed for enough seconds? Perhaps longer/higher dashes and jumps out of top sprint speed which may help bridge the gap between sprinting and dashing (although this might be a thing that could be added to base behavior)?
Also, I think it could be useful to have some kind of visual effect to denote that the player has improved sprint. Perhaps some kind of special particles around the player's feet?