Topic: MK3
A band of vets from my alliance had a brainstorming session and came up with a MK3 plan that requires minimum amount of work in arts and coding department. It also gets more people to farm on Beta and has few twists that makes the game more enjoyable to a lot of parties..
If that sounds interesting then keep on reading.
MK3 MANIFEST
Something a lot of players feel is the balance between MK1 and MK2 bots is bad. From combat capabilities, MK2 is always superior to MK1 in every way and that is what should change with MK3 bots. We came up with the idea that MK3 bots should have superior damage to MK2 but inferior tank to even MK1 counterparts. That makes them easier to lose as a result of poor play.
We went with superior damage route because it's something both PVE and PVP players find useful.
Bear in mind that we only thought about MK3 combat bots to keep the work amount required to add them as low as possible.
Superior Damage
Superior damage is archieved by raising the bot's damage bonus from 5% per Robotics skill to 10-15%. Here is where some community input is needed on what the exact damage output should be when considering the tanking drawback. This chart can help with that. I compared MK2 against MK3 with maxed DPS skills. I personally think 10% per Robotics skill is balanced.
Inferior Tank
Inferior tanking abilities comes from the fact that MK1 slot loadout is used. That means the end result will have the same tanking abilities as MK1. Until...
Superior Speed
To make MK3 bots more interesting and give them more interesting roles, they should have 10% speed bonus comparing to MK1 counterpart. Way to balance it out is to make their tanking ability even smaller: -10% armor and -10% accumulator.
SLOT LAYOUTS
Aside from the stats differences mentioned previously, they should have identical slot loadouts as their MK1 counterparts, meaning 1 less head and leg slot than MK2. Bot bonuses itself should come exactly like MK2 besides raised Damage per Robotics skill.
MK3 CORTEXES AND CT-S
In an attept to attract even more attention to Beta islands, we figured best is to make MK3 Cortexes a rare drop from Beta Rank 5 NPCs and Beta Observers. We figured best is to not limit them to only beta and add them to 3-stripe Star Beacon loot tables too. The main point is that they should be very rare in all the cases.
MK3 CT-s should be acquirable as a rare drop from Beta NPCs and from Artifacting on Gammas. Again, they should be very rare!
PRODUCTION COSTS
Production should be handled in familiar manner. For MK3 bot, you need MK3 cortex, MK3 CT, MK2 bot itself and minerals required to build MK1. Additionally to that, some Colixum based commodity could be added.
BIGGEST ISSUE
Biggest issue is figuring out how their texture should be colored. Pink only fits to Ville and black is already taken by faction heavies. Gray? Just darker shade of the MK2 color? Something else?
BUT WHY?
A lot of players have been longing for new bots for a while now. We figured the dev team is small and came up with the plan to first and foremost, make MK3 bots balanced and not superior to MK2s in every way! It might not be the coolest of ideas, but it's something new that hopefully doesn't require too much work.
Additionally it enhances following:
- Add meaning to Beta islands
- Make farming NPCs more interesting since you might jackpot
- Buff Artifacting
- Better chances for vets to blow their NIC up
Any ideas, suggestions? What devs think? Yes, no, maybe?