New Equipment Idea: Combat Stim

[ModdedMarionette]

After gathering data/feedback from the community and tweaks based on them, I'd say I am ready to post it here for developers' easier access.

Current plan

Combat Stim (Placeholder name, subject to change) - Providing a burst of pain tolerance and muscle durability.

• Global effect on everyone upon activation, in the same fashion as how adrenaline does it.
• 3 uses.
• Duration should be about the same as how long adrenaline technically lasts, scaling in the same fashion with Combat Drugs.
• During effect, marines are immune to stagger.
• During effect, marines are immune to knockdowns, including ones from Shieldbugs, Antlions, and Uberdrones if convar enabled.
• During effect, marines receive 20% damage reduction.
• At the start of the effect, damage reduction would be higher depending on the Combat Drugs skill bonus (kind of like Heavy Armor but damage reduction goes down immediately over time). It's uncertain what the exact value should be, so I'd say 80% (base 20% + 20% * 3 Combat Drugs bonus step) and decays over 1 second from 80% to 20% for the rest of the duration, and then tweak it as we playtest.

Convar values (that I can think of)

• Duration of effect, default however long adrenaline technically lasts in real time.
• Duration step from Combat Drugs skill bonus, default however long adrenaline's duration scales with Combat Drugs in real time.
• Damage reduction factor, default 0.2.
• Bonus damage reduction step from Combat Drugs skill bonus, default 0.2.
• Bonus damage reduction decay rate, default depends on how the calculation is done.

Goal

Combat Drugs is probably the most useless skill bonus as of right now. While Bastille has advantages over Faith in a few aspects, there's no denying that the usual Tesla Cannon + Medgun meta is way easier and more popular to use, which makes him simply an inferior Faith, despite his potential to be otherwise.

Having equipment like this can not only elevate his Combat Drugs skill's value, but also give him the potential to be something other than "inferior Faith" that's much more accessible.

Prior to this idea, all the proposed solutions so far (that I know of) to this topic are either overcomplicated, too niche, both of the former two, or being the last resorts (like straight up replacing Combat Drugs with something else and calling it a day). Thus the design of this equipment is purposefully one-of-a-kind, so we are not just coming up with filler additions for the sake of it.

Combat Drugs is also one of the few skill bonuses that affects the team as a whole, and having equipment such as this can give that trait more purpose.

Relevant URL's

Discord discussion thread:
This is the source of most of my tweaks to this concept. Feedbacks were provided with reasonings backing them up.

Steam forum thread:
Unfortunately nothing useful came out of this one. It eventually got derailed by a troll.