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.