Electric Discharge Defense trigger on melee damage

[Klonan]

As titled, I think this would make the Discharge defense actually quite useful, if it also knocked back biters a fair distance it would look cool.

At the moment triggering it manually is somewhat impractical, and it is rather hard to judge when to set it off. If it was activated automatically when the character is damaged by melee, it would be a really useful anti-biter weapon.

[IronCartographer]

Time to necro a 5 year old thread with a modern addition!

Stun and knockback were added, but it's still a manually activated device, largely unused.

Rather than melee alone, it could also be if the shields are depleted [below a threshold?], and clear any acid around the player, aiding their escape.

[provet]

+1, in it's current configuration I've only used it once and then never again, not looking back once.

But to fire it when shields deplete or gets under a certain threshold would actually both make sense and give this (right now) useless item a reason to exist.

Though I find this necroing a tad late, @IronCartographer lol.

1.0 is already here.

[QGamer]

As far as new player experience goes, a new player won't really understand in what situations the Discharge Defense would be useful.
(i.e. I've never seen a reason to use it in all my time playing this game. Even now, I wonder what it's supposed to be used for.)
Why take time to put away grenades and press a button on a remote to manually use armor equipment when you could just deploy combat robots and then run around?
Additionally, every other item in the armor operates completely automatically. Why is there no automatic mode for the Discharge Defense?

[conn11]

I like this idea, knocking back the biters would be superbly useful if taking melee damage.
The discharge remote could and should still be kept if a more manual approach is preferred.

[bobucles]

Even if a knockback effect proves troublesome, a stun effect would be very useful for mitigating melee damage.

Of course, neither approach is very useful for surviving an acid bath.

[IronCartographer]

knocking back the biters would be superbly useful

Even if a knockback effect proves troublesome, a stun effect would be very useful for mitigating melee damage.

The knockback and stun are implemented in 1.0; it's the auto-fire and potential acid cleaning that are concepts only.

[conn11]

knocking back the biters would be superbly useful

Even if a knockback effect proves troublesome, a stun effect would be very useful for mitigating melee damage.

The knockback and stun are implemented in 1.0; it's the auto-fire and potential acid cleaning that are concepts only.

This is known. My point at least was: getting meeled by biters are mostly unwanted, discharge defence does help in such situations. Having it on an automatic mode would free up the player's hands for more offensive tools (e.g. grenades, poison). Though not directly removing acid pools, at least the slow down effect of acid is mitigated by combating biters more effectively.
Secondly, this would make discharge defence a far more viable option than just using PLDs.

[ambbma]

Resurrecting an old idea. This would make this useful. Manually triggering is nearly impossible to use when u need it because your busy trying to not die with other more offensive weapons. Maybe now it can be considered for a 2.0 feature/fix.

[fZAqSD]

I like this idea; click-spam is the least attractive part of the Discharge Defense. To make a QoL buff that wouldn't be too big of a combat buff, the discharge could trigger on any damage taken when there's a target in range, but have a limited fire rate (e.g. 2 per second, which is about half the speed of a relaxed click-spam) and could be research-locked (e.g. auto-trigger requires last non-infinite Energy/Electric Weapons Damage).

This would also fix how, as far as I know, you can't use the discharge defense at all while using the spidertron remote. If it's overpowered to have an army of Spidertrons all loaded with discharge defenses, just make the auto-trigger fire rate limit even lower when using the remote.

[erkki772]

Maybe Three effects for that

1. Trigger from melee
2. Huge explosion after shield depleted. 2% bonus to range and damage per shield %.
100% shield depletion gives unique bonus.
3. Spam removal. All discharge triggers are counted as one. Only increasing damage output. No more mouse wheel firing

100% Depletion explosion would shoot 3x chaining light like that electric tower