Something to keep in mind about the angled Laser Blaster, which has both upsides and downsides, I guess:
The L2 vertical Laser Blaster is the upward counterpart to the Digger, much like the Fencer is our upward counterpart to the Miner.
In L2, while the maximum non-splat fall height is increased compared to regular Lemmings,
one potential danger about the vertical Laser Blaster is that you can create a lethal drop when you're just trying to blast the crowd out. With Diggers, this can often be avoided because the entire crowd will gather in the Digger shaft and go down together with the Digger - with the Laser Blaster, however, this is not possible, and might be used for additional challenges.
A diagonal Laser Blaster always breaks the fall, at least as long as there is enough terrain. Of course, if the distance between the ceiling he blasts into and the ground the lemmings from above will land on is larger than splat height, the Laser Blaster can't do anything to change that. But he generally won't accidentally create splat height where there was none by removing too much terrain, resulting in too much of an uninterrupted vertical drop.
Even a non-Shimmier friendly Laser Blaster shaft that is very steep (e.g. 6:1 or even more) will have the lemmings passing through it from above repeatedly switching back and forth between Faller, Walker, Faller, Walker.
Thus, dropping through a Laser Blaster shaft that is in any way diagonal can never result in a lethal drop, whereas dropping through a Digger shaft can easily lead to this result.Just something to keep in mind. I think this is yet another thing that would make a diagonal Laser Blaster more useful - but also more powerful, i.e. potentially broken. It also increases overlap with the Fencer a little more, since Miners and Fencers are usually the skills you'd prefer if you want to ensure a safe passage down by creating a slope, compared to a Digger. The Laser Blaster would thus join the list of "safe drop" skills, leaving only the Digger and (possibly) the Bomber as "high risk" methods of creating drops.
But if you say that the Laser Blaster would be the last skill we get, ever, full stop, then I must oppose the Laser Blaster. I know what kind of levels I like to create, and the Laser Blaster is too situational for my level design, due to its similarity to the Fencer, which I also don't use much. It's not the same as the fencer, but it's not different enough for me to be interested at the expense of the Slider.
I understand where you're coming from, because Laser Blaster and Slider are my two clear favourites.
If we're considering two skills for projectiles (destructive and creative), I'd of course love to see the option of having the other two as a combination as well (Laser Blaster + Slider). But I think namida has already stated that the "2 for 1" deal can only work for projectiles specifically, because a lot of the coding would be the same (including the arc of the projectile's trajectory), and the only thing that would change are the sprites and the attribute "destructive" vs. "creative". Slider and Laser Blaster, in contrast, are two very different skills.
At least with the diagonal Laser Blaster, we don't have to worry about possible interactions between Laser Blaster and Slider that we are now going to miss out on. (In L2, for example, you could create a vertical shaft with the Laser Blaster, and then send a Slider down that shaft, since Sliders require perfectly straight walls, just like Climbers.)
A lot of my love for the Slider stems from its interactions with Shimmiers and Jumpers.
Having been crowned the "King of Shimmiers" by Flopsy recently (with him historically being the "King of Blockers"
), of course I favour anything that increases the potential of this particular skill, which I believe was the best addition to NeoLemmix in a long time.
Hence,
if I had to choose between a vertical Laser Blaster and a Slider, even though I agree with IchoTolot that lasers just seem to have this natural "cool" factor to them that the child in all of us prefers,
I would probably still prefer the Slider because of its greater interaction potential.However, the idea of a 45°-angle Laser Blaster changes this, because such a Laser Blaster would indeed provide interactions with Shimmiers as well, just like the Slider. And not just any type of Shimmier interaction, but a very particular one that is hard to achieve otherwise:
Since a Shimmier can't perform any destructive skills (aside from bombing), the only way to carve a Shimmier tunnel into a ceiling to send a Shimmier into would indeed be from the distance, i.e. from the ground. Obviously, this is something that the Fencer can't do either, a) because it requires the fencing lemming to stand on solid ground, and b) because the resulting tunnel is too narrow (at least without additional support from a Basher going down the Fencer tunnel from above).
Thus, this particular proposal for the Laser Blaster poses some serious competition to the Slider in one of its main dimensions of appeal. Which makes the choice a lot harder.
I'm not saying I'm dropping my support for the Slider yet. But let's say if the Laser Blaster were to become the final skill instead of the Slider, I would at least not be unhappy about it.While I have repeatedly argued against comparisons between the Slider and the Floater in the past, comparing the Slider more to a downward Climber instead,
I will concede that, in direct comparison with the Laser Blaster, the Slider's behaviour indeed seems to be easier to emulate with our current NeoLemmix tools than the (angled) Laser Blaster's behaviour. For example, a couple of levels I created for my L2-inspired pack "Lemmings Hall of Fame", which could use an actual Slider, of course, currently tries to approximate this behaviour by using one-way fields in combination with Floaters, anti-splat pads, or updrafts. This locks Slider usage into specific locations within the level, of course, and doesn't allow for any transitions from Jumper to Slider or Slider to Shimmier, but at least it's a start for breaking falls and turning the lemming around.
In contrast, I had to create a classic "send a pioneer ahead and laser-blast the crowd out from below" level, which is very typical of Lemmings 2: The Tribes, I wouldn't know how to do it. Possibly with a Bomber from below, but that's hard to enforce (why wouldn't you simply bomb from above? Bombers don't care about one-way arrows, after all). Or with a Fencer. The latter is something I tried to do on a level from Lemmings Open Air, but that level has been giving me one backroute after another. So that isn't easy to enforce either.