Replacing Respawn Punisher.

[error418]

Note: nothing discussed here has any impact on the game and is for all intents and purposes food for thought, a game design exercise if you will. Regardless, I would still love feedback on the idea from a game design perspective.
Respawn Punisher as it is:
Respawn punisher increases the respawn time for both the user and the user's victims along with special gauge loss. This is a problem because it reduces the experience of those affected by increasing downtime and punishing you more than usually without recourse. It's design also promotes using it on weapons with range or that stay alive longer, which are often the weapons that benefit from some maps having poor design in ways not healthy for the game.

Respawn Punisher's identity, what to keep and what to let the salmonids eat.
Here are what I deem to be the main components of Respawn Punisher's identity as a gear ability (the good and the bad).

• Risk/Reward
  • There should be a great benefit to using it, but in return a great loss for using it poorly
• Rewards/losses tied to splats
  • This ability seems to want to help weapons that focus on splatting opponents, allowing them to make a bigger impact on the game to make up for poor painting ability, mobility, special output, etc.
• Increased downtime
  • This ability was likely also created to curb stomp the Quick Respawn meta from Splatoon along with the changes to Quick Respawn itself.
• Reduced special output
  • This might have been added to reduce special spam within Splatoon 2 but it really just adds insult to injury, especially for splashdown users.

Proposed Rework: Vampire Squid
I would like to replace Respawn Punisher with Vampire Squid. Instead of increasing respawn time and special gauge loss for both parties, this special focuses on rewarding splats without punishing the splatted player.
Each time a user of this ability splats an opponent they gain 50% of the other players special gauge loss added to their special gauge. This means that splatting an opponent with 75% special ready would give the user of this ability 18.75% special gauge for themselves ( (75% / 2) / 2). Getting splatted with this ability however, causes the user to lose 25% more special gauge. Special Saver counters this, but Tacticooler counts as 100% special gauge loss for the purpose of this calculation.

The benefits of this rework:

• No more increased downtime for either party.
• Weapons that put down less paint but output more splats can output more specials now.
• This acts as a Tacticooler counter because splatting an opponent under the affects of Tacticooler would give you a full 50% of what they had because of the 100% special saver. This makes Tacticooler way more of a risk to use because it gives the opponents Vampire Squid user the potential for a very quick special.
• This benefits players who learn how to target important targets.
  • Ranged weapons using this ability will want to target players who have their special, or have been alive for a long time with a potentially near full gauge.

Relation to Respawn Punisher's Identity:

• Risk/Reward
  • There is the potential to lose more special gauge than usual, but also gain it way faster for playing well.
• Rewards/losses tied to splats
  • The ability only does anything when someone is splatted, whether that be the user or the victim.
• Increased downtime
  • This is not present in the new rework.
• Reduced special output
  • This only affects the user if they play poorly, which goes back to Risk/Reward instead of punishing everyone.

With these changes, I believe I have kept everything good about the identity of Respawn Punisher while killing as much of the bad as possible.

Some Notes:

• Splats gained using a special weapon do not return special gauge.
• Obviously if the users gauge is full, nothing happens. This also goes for specials where the gauge is used as a cooldown like Tenta-Missiles, Tacticooler, Wave Breaker, etc. during the cooldown period.
• The ability would still glow on the splatted screen much like Respawn Punisher.
• It would still be main-only shirt like Respawn Punisher as it replaces Respawn Punisher.
• Trades would make up for extra special loss only if the other person had full special gauge or 25% with Tacticooler so weapons that die or trade a lot would still not benefit as much, it also directly competes for a slot with Ninja Squid. This being said, if it became a problem, this penalty could be upped as a balance change to make it more risky.
• Without Tacticooler, the fastest way to gain special is to splat all four opponents with full special gauge which is a very rare scenario. Even with Tacticooler, two of them would have to have 100% special gauge to get special for use against the other two.
• Much like respawn punisher, assist do not contribute.
• No idea what this would do to haunt either, it could either stay like it is now with Respawn Punisher or use this ability with the rules of haunt.

Thanks for reading, I am eager to hear opinions about this concept!

 

[Aiko.Octo]

Interesting. I'm far from an expert on this stuff but it does feel like a well though-out concept that could be effective at punishing the otherwise low-risk feeding that tacticooler enables. Giving low-ink-output slayers a greater ability to get their special could be a game-changer, possibly so much that it risks unbalancing some things, but that's something playtesting would have to tell.

Now, personally, as someone who finds making super-aggressive risky plays to be peak fun, I would be upset if this ability resulted in that playstyle being too harshly shut down. But if it's balanced well enough maybe it would just curb the behavior of the whole team doing it via tacticooler while having one team member (maaybe two) in that role would still be perfectly viable. It's interesting to think about.

 

[OnePotWonder]

I like this idea a lot, but it is a bit unclear regarding how its effects work regarding Special Saver. If the user siphons half of the enemy's lost special gauge, does that mean they take less from a player using Special Saver, since they lose less? I think not.

It might be better to just simplify the whole process, having the ability user always steal 1/4 of the enemy's special gauge, reducing the maximum effect of Special Saver and Tacticooler.

 

[Gh0ul1sh]

Absolutely love this rework! I do feel like we tend to lose a bit of the qr counter respawn punisher is, but they could honestly just tone back the power of qr a bit or maybe introduce a different ability that could counter it

 

[error418]

I like this idea a lot, but it is a bit unclear regarding how its effects work regarding Special Saver. If the user siphons half of the enemy's lost special gauge, does that mean they take less from a player using Special Saver, since they lose less? I think not.

It might be better to just simplify the whole process, having the ability user always steal 1/4 of the enemy's special gauge, reducing the maximum effect of Special Saver and Tacticooler.

Special Saver acts as a counter to this so you can make your killer gain less. I did make an exception though for Tacticooler because part of this design was also to take Tacticooler down a peg. That exception could be lifted if Tacticooler ever gets a nerf or pencil gets a nerf though. The main idea though was that special saver could be counterplay to teams trying to abuse this ability.

 

[EverGreen]

I like this concept because I do find RP to be very annoying when in SoloQ or playing in a comp without cooler. However, I can see issues with it when 2 or more players from the same team use this ability and just eat up all of the special charge on the opponent's team (this would also give Vampire Squid (VS) users the ability to spam their own specials). I think if you adjust the numbers a bit or maybe make the amount of special charge absorbed a flat number like 10%, this could be a breakthrough.

 

[Lego1upMushroom]

I think this idea would be great though it will defiantly need heavy amounts of balancing or it might become just as unfun as RP is to fight