Repair Gun Overcharge

[Tarvin]

I came up with this suggestion after reading someone else's topic about making engineers and such less tedious, which was making secondary fire for repair guns a toggle on/off. I don't want to take away from his idea, which is good in it's own right, so I made a separate topic for this one. The other idea for the repair gun is here: viewtopic.php?f=26&t=74246

A different way that the repair gun could be improved is by giving them an overcharge ability. Overcharge would briefly increase the power of the repair gun and give people on repair duty something else to focus on besides the wall. While overcharge is active the repair gun would start overheating. If a repair gun does overheat it will be unusable until it fully cools.

To prevent overheating players would have to stop using Overcharge long enough to let the repair gun cool. The heat level of the repair gun would be shown in the place of the ammo clip indicator and would turn red to indicate heat level.

The Overcharge function would be more potent for Technicians and Hotwires to avoid decreasing the value of purchasable characters.

[RypeL]

You are making some well thought out posts. glad you joined the forum. Personally i dont really am chilled enough atm with Beta 4 arround to think about new ideas in depth atm but i´ll definatly look up all your posts again later.

[Tarvin]

Thanks. I'm glad that my ideas are finding some interest. I am/was a huge fan of the Command and Conquer franchise of anything made pre-Red Alert 3 and would love to do anything I can to help this game thrive.

[Goku]

Thats a really good idea. Its hard not to fall asleep when on repair duty.

[Truxa]

Why not add overheating to chainguns too then? Especially those heat-generating laser rifles like the SBH and Laser Chaingunner?

Perhaps any automatic weaponry should have that overheating.

In case of the chainguns, it could be limited to just those 3 (GDI/Nod officers and LCG) as they dont seem to have a secondary fire (aim) use this to "overcharge" them too. So it wouldnt only be the repairgun able to overcharge.

Downside of your idea though:

When you repair a building normally, you can estimate how many engineers/hotwires/techies you'd need to keep the spam up. Adding overcharge would allow for rapid repairing, but what about the continuous repairing? It makes it harder to estimate the amount of engineers/hotwires/techies required to keep the sustained spam up.

[Tarvin]

Overcharge wouldn't be good for the weapons like Chainguns because the ammo clip is already so small. If the ammo clip were higher, like 500 for the regular chaingun,I could understand overheat. As it is now they are already balanced. The most important distinction is unlike someone on repair duty people playing officers would be actively participating in combat. I can see it being added if the entirety of their ammo capacity were placed into a single clip and reload was removed from the picture.

The only secondary option I can think of is an auto-spin up where the gun is kept spinning to eliminate the initial waiting period before you can shoot again which I do find annoying when in the middle of a fight. The chaingun can have plenty ammo in the clip but if you let off firing to conserve ammo you have to wait before you can shoot again. That would have to be balanced by adding the overheat mechanic. Keeping a gun on rotate mode would keep the guns heated up a bit before the player even fires decreasing how long players can stay in the fight before falling back.

As for the issue of estimating how many will be needed for base repair duty I don't think that will be an issue. After people have enough experience the effect of overcharge would be factored into people's repair need estimations. Maybe something like just having 4 repair spam vs. 5 which would free people to go elsewhere.