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straehomebrewreview · 4 months ago

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So, y'all may have seen my post about the Skipper Revised recently, and thank y'all for the support, I really appreciate it. Today I wanted to go through my changelog for everything that I have done to revise the mech. DISCLAIMER, this is in no way meant to be negative onto the original creator, boisegang, these are just my thoughts on the abilities of the mech and the replacements I had thought up. Without the original, I would not have been able to make this at all. It is a really great design that kicked off my enjoyment for this stuff. Look at the original vs the document or .lcp (I would recommend the .lcp) to follow along!

(Image for attention/retention)

So without further ado, let me get into this.

Stats: I reduced the overall stats of the Skipper to be more in line with the Atlas, a little bit weaker even to make up for the sheer amount of reactions.

Gun Fu: the original version gave keen, a new way to interact with the game by making criticals more common. I liked the idea of criticals as a main theme, but I was not so keen on adding new keywords to the game (personal prefrence). I instead changed it to just give +1 accuracy to ranged attacks while next to your target. Basically reverse engagement. I thought that the effect was a bit powerful, (especially with this already buffing vanguard), so I decided to make sure that critting would never let you get the normal effects (roll twice and take the highest).

Untouchable: I liked the concept behind the original and have recently been playing an evasion heavy build, so I decided to add a feature that felt in theme with it: if additional effects would happen when an attack misses you, they do not trigger. I have taken 16 damage from reliable machine gun fire in the past and I think it fits the theme to be able to dodge reliable.

Bullet Time: I took major cuts to a lot of features of bullet time. My first change was taking out passive charges (for now). If you are going to have access to more reactions than the Atlas and most of them are good, they should be gained through criticals or stabilizing. Next up, I took out every secondary part of the reactions (no more slowing, immobilizing, or knocking targets prone in addition to the original action), decreased their costs (to make up for it being harder to get them), and did a few things to some of them individually.

Snapshot: made it basically a mini Scylla NHP usage, makes more sense in context of the weaponry later on (crits have good effects).

Dodge: made it where the reaction is on hit rather than on attack and made it a betting game of how much you do not want to get hit.

Rapid reload: I see what was going on with the limited systems being basically as ammo and this system letting you reload it. Unfortunately, the Gilgamesh exists and it makes use of limited ammo based weapons that have some pretty good effects. Instead I let it reload weapons/systems quickly as this (to me) was slowly becoming a cool/weird fusion of the Atlas and the Raleigh.

Deadeye (formerly slickshot): while the idea of firing even more bullets sounded pretty fun for the Skipper, I thought that there was a small area in which the Skipper had trouble dealing with. What does it do against heavily armored foes? The major thought is that by giving it an ability that applies shredded, you can still let it attack them. I made sure that the cost was high for it and that its effect was limited in time.

Gun Kata: in comparison to the other abilities, I felt like gun Kata was rather lacking as a core power. Instead of basically being a "burst" I decided to have it be an ability that lasted for the rest of the battle, reinstating the passive bullet points into the build and making them immune to the conditions that turn off their passive.

"Rose" Piston Pistol (formerly autopistol): This pistol (as well as thorn) had things that inspired me throughout my revisions, but the limited six feature had thrown me off. It was basically a gun that had better stats when using limited charges, but worse stats otherwise. I enjoyed the fact that it dealt a flat amount of damage (inspiration for the critical reduction from before). So instead, I decided to make it a weapon that had an extra effect on a critical (same goes for thorn). With an effect on criticals, I also wanted to keep the spirit of the mini Raleigh, so it must unload the weapon for the effect to work. One thing I noticed was that this mech needs to have good escape options (to keep it from getting clapped out of the sky), so I decided to give it abilities based off of manuvering yourself away from enemies (hence a big burst of air from a piston).

Bullet Jump: I really enjoyed this system, the only thing I really wanted to change was a little bit of vagueness in when it triggers (it triggers on movement, less reactions the better).

"Bellringer" lever action shotgun (formerly painkiller): A loading shotgun that packs a punch is really cool, I just wanted to adjust it so it fits better with my theme. Took out Dazed because adding keywords feels a little off to me still (personal prefrence). Replaced it with reducing enemy reactions (a common theme in the mech). Gave it a stronger version as a crit effect. Finally, gave it a flat 5 damage to fit the theme.

Time Dilation: Time Dilation is really really cool, one of the features that I honestly did not want to touch at all. The only thing that I did change about it was swapping it from being LL1 to being LL2 (swapping it with Bullet Jump). I was afraid that something like a Raleigh or Sherman could quickly dip into it and get more than what an LL1 dip may be worth. This does not show up on the google doc as I couldn't figure out how to change their positioning and had swapped over to mainly working on the .lcp (hence why I reccomend reading the .lcp)

"Thorn" Heavy target pistol: This follows the same trend as "Rose," the critical effect I wanted to make special. In my current campaign, a player (named Rose coincidentally) is running an aux build, and as a part of it uses a digester nexus (from eden rising) to deal +1 damage on all of the aux attacks. I thought it could be interesting to make "Thorn" do something similar, waiting to find a weakspot in the armor to shoot a "thorn" into that constantly drills every time the target takes damage.

Snubnose Mod: I love the idea of changing a weapon type to get more out of it, so this looked great for it. My only problem with it was that it just made it better on reaction attacks (which is usually going to happen with overwatch unless your build is really wild). I decided instead to give the gun threat to even the playing field a bit, make it feel more like a shotgun. I also made it where it could only apply to aux and main weapons, that way it fits the theme of the licence a bit better.

TLDR: I thought the original design was really cool, but tried to dial it back a bit using Atlas as a baseline while using some theming from Raleigh to build it back up.

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