[Discussion][Player] The Harpooner / L2 Roper with a fixed trajectory

[Strato Incendus]

Okay, so since IchoTolot suggested a combination of constructive and movement skill in the Jetboarder, I'll throw my hat into the ring by pulling this specific skill suggestion out of the joke-skills thread.

I'm going to start out by simply quoting what I wrote in the joke thread, and then add possible changes:

The Harpooner. This is a 3/4 joke, 1/4 serious suggestion : A combination of several of the skills currently in the running for the 20th skill:

The lemming throws a modern-day whaling harpoon with a detonating end piece. This is a long, thin projectile that causes an explosion when it hits and has a rope attached to it.
- The shape of the harpoon would be identical to the spear of the Spear Thrower and could therefore be used as such.
- The detonation on impact creates a Bomber crater. This and the arc of motion would be that of a Mortar.
- Attached to the harpoon is a rope. This could serve as a surrogate Roper, but with a fixed arc - and thus potentially serve as a downward Builder.
- If you exceed the maximum length of the rope, the rope will tear, leaving behind just the harpoon with the detonating end piece. Now you have a genuine Mortar and Spear Thrower at once! This projectile without the rope is going to continue on its parabolic trajectory until it hits terrain.
- If you shoot up into the ceiling, with thin-enough terrain, you can find Laser-Blaster-like applications.
- The Harpooner can kill Zombies.

I don't know, maybe this would be a valid compromise for a lot of people who are currently espousing either the Spear Thrower, the Mortar, the Laser Blaster, or a downward Builder?

It won't be a stand-in for the Slider, but it could fullfil a lot of these other purposes... while still being logically consistent (after all, these modern whaling harpoons with detonating end pieces do exist, unfortunately).

So, while IchoTolot's Jetboarder is a combination of constructive and movement skill, the Harpooner would either be
a) a combination of constructive and destructive skill (harpoon sticking in the wall + explosion)
b) a purely ranged constructive skill, like the Spear Thrower, but with the attached rope, it would be more like an L2 Roper, but with a fixed parabolic (=L2-Mortar-like) trajectory. In this case, the harpoon would not explode.

Zombie killing would be out of the question by now, since to my understanding, the community consensus was that
a) either a skill should kill Zombies, Neutrals, and regular lemmings alike, or none
b) a skill with the potential of killing regular lemmings was not appreciated, so Zombie-killer skills won't be happening

I've already asked IchoTolot for his opinion on this, since I remember he said he was quite fond of the L2 Roper in general. He merely said the explosion would be enough; a constructive skill with a rope would be nice though.

So a constructive skill with a rope attached to it that doesn't cause explosions (and also doesn't kill zombies, neither with the flying terain piece nor with any explosion) would be the most likely implementation of the skill proposed here.

At this point, if there's no explosion, we don't necessarily need to call the skill a Harpooner. I'd be fine with calling it the NeoLemmix Roper instead, too. In fact, I might actually prefer that, because then it would be the official implementation of another L2 skill, but in a form adapted to NeoLemmix.

Whether we would call it "Roper" or "Harpooner" should most likely just depend on the shape of the projectile:
a) if it's a long spear with a rope attached to it, calling it the Harpooner makes more sense
b) if it's a hook shaped like an anchor (which is what the L2 Roper uses), calling it the Roper would be more obvious



Possible applications:

- this skill would be more versatile than the regular L2 Spear Thrower, because the rope can serve as a bridge. At the same time, like in L2, the rope can tear if you exceed its maximum length, so that only the projectile continues to fly. This projectile acts like the Spear Thrower's spear or the hook of the Roper.

- the rope can be used, among others, for downward Building, which is a feature many people are wishing for but which we don't have right now. At the same time, the way in which this downward Building is achieved is different enough to the Builder in order for it not to just be the same thing in reverse.

- the rope creates a bridge much more quickly than a Builder or Platformer. This way, this skill can be used for flow-control solutions more easily without always having to contain the crowd just to build a bridge. This is an application that often comes up for the L2 Glue Pourer, which has been ruled out, but the Harpooner / Roper could still perform that function. How many levels have you played where you need a bridge quickly, but can't contain the crowd? Stalling the rest of the crowd behind the Builder by spamming further Builders has certainly never been fun for me...

- yet, the rope can of course also be used to contain crowds, just like Builders and Platformers

- the skill would not be as overpowered as the L2 Roper, because it's harder to aim. Thanks to skill shadows, you can predict the trajectory once the lemming is in its designated target position. (Memorising a projectile's trajectory can be difficult though, especially during "mental pathfinding" at the beginning of a level, i.e. before the crowd is actually released.)

- the Mortar-like parabolic trajectory would allow a certain amount of "aiming" though by varying the distance to the target and paying attention to the skill shadow accordingly: The harpoon / hook flies upwards first - if it hits a ceiling now, the rope creates a ramp to that ceiling. When the harpoon / hook comes down again and hits terrain at about the same level as the lemming throwing it, you end up with a more or less flat, Platformer-like bridge. When the harpoon / hook falls further below the altitude of the lemming performing the skill, this is where you get the downward ramp that a downward Builder would create.

- whether the rope tears or not is not based on whether the harpoon / hook flies up or down, but simply on how far away (in pixels) from the throwing lemming it gets. The exact maximum length can be debated; it should probably be longer than a single Platformer, but shorter than two Platformers.

- the limiting factor of this skill would thus be its range. It's a somewhat omnidirectional constructive skill, but you can't chain several Harpooners / Ropers to each other as easily as you can do it with Builders and Platformers. Additionally, it's easier to prevent backroutes than with the L2 Roper, because you can shape the terrain in such a way that e.g. there isn't even enough space for the harpoon / hook to fly upwards, so you also can't turn it into a horizontal or downward bridge either, because the projectile already gets stuck earlier.



I may have been fervently opposing IchoTolot on the Spear Thrower and Mortar recently, but know that I'm not at all opposed to projectile skills in general - especially the constructive ones!

The L2 Archer and Roper are two of my favourite skills from the pack. Now that we do know double-assignment skills won't come to NeoLemmix (i.e. no "click the lemming, click the target direction"), for the Archer I don't see a way to make it work "unaimed", i.e. with just a single assignment. Also, the Archer doesn't have a rope attached to it, so building bridges with it is similarly difficult to creating one with the Spear Thrower, or, in NeoLemmix, making a Stoner staircase.

For the Roper however, it did come up in discussions that this could be the final skill if we find a way to make it work without double assignment. This is my suggestion on how to do it.

[IchoTolot]

I would be ok with something like this, the question I would have is how the rope is being handled though.

Does it always form the shortest way between the lemming and the hook? I think that would make the most sense.

a) if it's a long spear with a rope attached to it, calling it the Harpooner makes more sense

I would favor a spear here.


I think I like the jet boarder still a bit more due to the added movement and mid air assignment (yes surprise I don't completely object movement when it's different from what we have now), but I would see this as my 2nd favorite option currently.

[Strato Incendus]

Does it always form the shortest way between the lemming and the hook? I think that would make the most sense.

Yes, indeed. It doesn't artificially extend to always have a standard rope length. Just like a Platformer's or Builder's bridge also becomes shorter when the gap they cover is smaller and they run into terrain.

The difference with the Harpooner / Roper would of course be that, due to this being a ranged skill, he wouldn't turn around after his skill runs into terrain (because it technically always runs into terrain at some point, unless you throw the spear or hook beyond a level edge ).

I think I like the jet boarder still a bit more due to the added movement and mid air assignment (yes surprise I don't completely object movement when it's different from what we have now), but I would see this as my 2nd favorite option currently.

Thanks, great to hear we can agree on something here!

Trying to be as unbiased by personal attachments to skill suggestions and the idea of "whose skill suggestion wins in the end?" (both ideas might still lose out to the Slider or Laser Blaster, eventually), I think we can frame the difference between Jetboarder and Harpooner as the following:

The Jetboarder would have more Runner-like applications - especially if the "jet" part actually makes him move faster than the rest of the crowd. The former Skateboarder's property of increasing jump width would fall away, as Proxima correctly outlined - because the skill would levitate at a constant altitude, i.e. there would be no need for the lemming to jump in the first place, even though he can jump off the jetboard itself.
Just like the Runner performs automatic little jumps when reaching gaps, I think the Jetboarder would be more useful if he floated more than 1 pixel above the crowd - this would allow him to get over trap triggers more easily. In L2, 1 pixel would suffice for that - in NeoLemmix, it would not. This is a behaviour that I originally suggested for the Skateboarder, and I think with the Jetboarder, it would make even more sense. A skateboard would require pretty big wheels, in relation to a lemming's body size, to lift the lemming above your average trap trigger. But a jetboard can fly anyway, so why not make it a couple of pixels more in height?
Maybe this way the Jetboarder could become the skill the Disarmer should have been - something that allows a single lemming to survive several traps in a row, without immediately andpermanently disabling the traps for everyone else, too!
The Jetboarder is essentially a Runner - with a built-in Jumper when it comes to gaps, because it can make it across wider gaps than Jumpers - that stones at the end when it hits a wall, but survives.

In contrast, the Harpooner would, as the starting post implies, have more Roper-like applications.
In L2, I think there is no doubt that the Roper is more versatile than the Runner. But of course, that's also partly due to the ability to aim it manually.
Since the Harpooner would have a trajectory more comparable to that of the Spear Thrower or Mortar, it would be weaker than the L2 Roper (which in general is probably a good thing), while the Jetboarder would be stronger than the L2 Runner, because much like my Skateboarder suggestion, it would be a Runner with upside. So the Harpooner and Jetboarder are probably more comparable in power and versatility than the L2 Roper and the L2 Runner.
In that way, I really don't have a strong bias here as far as personal contribution is concerned, because if the Jetboarder could be equipped with some properties of the former Skateboarder, I could still contribute to that skill as well if it were to become the final one...



It's just that I can currently imagine more uses for the Roper - based on L2 experience - and thus also for a NeoLemmix adaptation called either Roper or Harpooner.

For me, the main novelties L2 introduced in terms of skill performance - compared to original 8-skill Lemmings - were:
- jumping (we already have that one now! )
- shimmying (we have that as well, but my strong favour of the Slider is connected to both jumping and shimmying)
- "filling" behaviour (Filler, Glue Pourer, Sand Pourer --> Glue Pourer is the strongest one of those, but already rejected)
- laser blasting
- "flying" skills (can be emulated quite well with Gliders and updrafts)
- quick and easy bridges without repeated assignment of "Builder-fest-like" skills. Thus, I usually prefer Glue Pourer and Roper to Builder and Platformer.

So if we can't have (Glue) pourer / filler behaviour in NeoLemmix (the Sand Pourer is essentially L2's version of the NeoLemmix Walker or Stacker, so redundant for us), then shooting ropes with projectiles at the end would certainly still fill a new niche.

[namida]

From what I can gather, this proposal is essentially "spear-thrower, but specifically a horizontal trajectory and the projectile is really long", if the exploding hook element is removed (and that doesn't seem too popular?). To be fair, I'm only half awake at the moment and might be misunderstanding / skipping details - but if that's all it is, it's not different enough to consider it as a different skill, and instead it would come down to being something to consider as an implementation detail (and name / visual) of the spear-thrower. This isn't a rejection - just a "it's not a seperate skill from one of the existing proposals".

[Strato Incendus]

Not a horizontal trajectory - a parabolic one, like with the Mortar. You want the Harpooner / Roper to be able to create slopes, both upward and downward. For upward slopes, he needs to be able to actually shoot upwards.

Yes, I do agree this could be merged with the Spear-Thrower thread. Though the fact that a rope is attached to the projectile is indeed essential to me.

A Spear Thrower with a rope attached to it might get my vote. A Spear Thrower without a rope definitely won't.

[IchoTolot]

Yeah, the merge could be done.

To explain it again in my own word + checking if I missunderstood something :

A spaer thrower that after it hits terrain connects the place of the thrower lemming and the spear with a rope in the shortest possible way.

[Strato Incendus]

A spaer thrower that after it hits terrain connects the place of the thrower lemming and the spear with a rope in the shortest possible way.

Since the Spear Thrower's trajectory is also parabolic, as far as I know, yes, that description is accurate.