New game mechanic: Slip and slide skill

Critkeeper · 2014-08-29T23:42:38.560Z

Put slippery goo on ground. Someone walks over it. If the person orders their champion to a location in the goo, instead of stopping at that location they continue to move along their current trajectory at their current velocity until they leave the goo. Reversing direction on the goo is possible but you have to work against your momentum (it would be implemented as a slow whose magnitude depends on the angle between your previous trajectory and newly issued one-- it would be rather technical, but just pretend it works like the way inertia that everybody already knows about and experiences every day works)

Critkeeper·Aug 29, 2014·5 votes·617 views

Put slippery goo on ground.
Someone walks over it.
If the person orders their champion to a location in the goo, instead of stopping at that location they continue to move along their current trajectory at their current velocity until they leave the goo.
Reversing direction on the goo is possible but you have to work against your momentum (it would be implemented as a slow whose magnitude depends on the angle between your previous trajectory and newly issued one-- it would be rather technical, but just pretend it works like the way inertia that everybody already knows about and experiences every day works)

3 Comments

QWERTYSTOPAug 30, 20142 votes

Problem: That's pretty resource-heavy for an unreliable effect that doesn't do much. It doesn't stop someone from charging straight at you or running directly away, for example. At best, it disrupts enemy positioning a little, but not enough to go in on unless it's a really big area, since unlike a normal forced-movement you have no control over where they go.

I saw a suggestion a while ago that Kog'Maw's line-slow be modified with something that's similar in fluff - mechanically, a dash just behind the projectile, so he's sliding on it as it goes. Like a train laying its own rail, except with a slide made of vomit.

CritkeeperAug 30, 20141 votes

The thing it does is change the basic variables for interfacing with your champion. Typical cc does that by just locking out your control over all those variables for a set amount of time. Slows soft lock you by diminishing the amount by which you can influence the variables that control your champions positioning. This would just soft-lock you out of controlling your change in position based on your velocity and orientation, with some added bits on top to make it intuitive as an inertial effect so people don't scratch their heads and wonder what is going on.

It does add some gameplay that other sorts of crowd control doesn't add. For example, typically stunning an amumu after he bandage tosses into your team doesn't keep him from ulting a few seconds later, so the only counterplay is to just spread out while he is stunned as much as possible. Typically you can't spread out enough because the stun won't be long enough and your team is likely slowed from randuins or rylais.

With an effect like this amumu would bandage toss in, and then slide his way out of your team on goo. He would want to time his ult properly in order to make it occur where he wants it to occur. If you stun him it will compound with the effect of the goo so that your team WILL be safe. Against most dashes its no different than a knock back that can only be used when the enemy is moving or dashing and who's direction and power depends on the speed and direction of the enemy dash. You could make your team safe by just knocking back amumu for example.

So why implement it if its most interesting use case is no different than a knock back? Well because it provides less control than a knock back-- the enemy controls all the variables. In a typical knock back you can control one of the variables by positioning the source (you) of the knock back, like lee moving around you in order to kick you backwards. With this the enemy controls all the variables so if you use the goo improperly, they may be able to use it against you by using the slip and slide to extend their dash.

Aside from that its edge cases are different. A knock back is an interrupt and locks amumu out of ulting just because he is airborne. Dropping goo on an unmoving amumu does nothing and doesn't stop him from ulting or interrupt him from casting spells.

In other words it is interesting and deep and it isn't hard to communicate to a player instantly what is happening, because we all have an intuitive sense of nature and inertia is a natural kind of thing we all experience.

And from a "resource heavy" perspective, I can assure you it is not. I'm studying at arizona state as a software engineer and hold an associates degree in physics and you can take my word for it that the amount of computer cycles spent feeding the graphics card instructions, computing the optimal path around obstacles, keeping up with the network, and doing all the other eclectic tasks vastly vastly vastly vastly vastly dwarf computing one single number per champion based on their speed and orientation.