plasma2 achieves unsatisfactory results in combat

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The Plasma Inductor has a secondary fire option that ejects a slow-moving, man-sized projectile that sucks enemies into itself. This projectile does not begin to do so right away, so if it is fired prematurely, an enemy can run through it unaffected, prompting the user to carefully space themselves out in order to fully utilize its effect.

On paper, this idea is great as it allows for interesting, varied strategies, and it sounds like a fantastic defensive tool to protect yourself from rushing enemies. However, it often fails to suck enemies into itself, even at full charge. This is not noticeable nearly as much with bots as they tend to follow a certain movement logic that does not make it easy for them to dodge plasma2 shots. When used against players, they will often run through it when parkouring or, sometimes, may even just walk away, especially if the shot isn't dead-center on them. Very often, this also leads to situations where plasma2 actually helps the enemies get closer to the user with minimal damage dealt, since it may slingshot them towards the player instead of holding them in place. This makes plasma2 vastly ineffective at trapping enemies within itself as they easily ignore the basic effect of the weapon, which is the pull it has. Even within the proposed most optimal scenarios, like using it in hallways or cramped areas (which we also tested), it is not that effective for the exact same reason.

There is also a slightly smaller issue with this weapon that I think is worth pointing out - it's extremely prone to accidentally sucking the user in at full charge unless they're already backing away. This is an issue directly after firing it, I completely understand that you should not be running into your own projectiles in this game. It's very easy to avoid by already moving backwards and parkouring away once the weapon is fired, but nonetheless, it's very inconvenient and unintuitive that that has to be done in order to avoid getting killed by your own weapon.

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The next parts of this post will be mostly speculatory.

The slingshot effect may be existing because of how the attraction mechanic works, which is that the pull does not happen every frame, but rather every few frames. This allows ample opportunity to let a player get pulled in while they're entering the plasma2 bubble, accelerating them, and with that gained speed, they fly outside of the bubble's range without getting sucked back in. I may be wrong, however, regarding whether this is the direct cause of this secondary's problems or not.

I propose a few solutions to this. They may not be correct, but I think it's worth bringing them up:

- Make the attract effect better, but in a way that doesn't allow people who stupidly run into the projectile to escape.
This is the primary issue I and several other people who recently tested this gun have with plasma2: stun mechanics can be extremely annoying, but if my enemy decides that running into a big, glowing ball of death is a good idea, shouldn't they be punished for that instead of getting flung towards me? Out of all the times that I have personally used this alt fire, I have only managed to catch a live player inside of it 3-5 times. It's possible, but extremely tricky to do, and you're most likely to catch yourself in it, anyway. If there is a way to make the attraction effect better suited for dealing against enemy parkour (or just movement in general), that could potentially solve this.

- Remove the attraction effect or make it milder, instead giving the ball more damage and a bigger radius.
If the attraction mechanic ends up being too annoying to fight against, perhaps it may be better to do away with it entirely and turn it into an area denial tool that works better at clearing out hallways. Either way, the purpose would be similar: it'd tell people to not run into the big, glowing ball of death before them, because it's going to kill them quickly.

- Amplify the slingshot effect, turning plasma2 into a mobility tool. (funny)
When we were playing around with plasma2 variables in a public server with a bunch of other people, Rabidbutton managed to accidentally create a disastrous abomination of a weapon that sends you directly into the sun if you run into it for a split second. While far from a balanced effect, I thought throwing it out there that slingshotting around the map with this thing could be an extremely interesting direction to take the alt fire in. It may be a little strong for CTF gamemodes if seriously considered, however.

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In addition, I would like to suggest giving the lower charge levels for this weapon some sort of niche use. As it currently stands, the effect is nonexistent at the lowest charge levels, almost never damaging opponents nor attracting them, and anything between that and full charge is very weak, basically never worth using. Maybe making it impossible to fire plasma2 until a certain charge level is reached would also help?

It may also benefit this weapon to show better that it's being charged (rather than just the noise it produces while charging, which can occasionally be cancelled out and completely surprise the person on the receiving end). However, I want to point out I'm using very low graphics settings for Red Eclipse, so it may be irrelevant to higher ones.

As a small note, I believe it may be worth experimenting with kickback for the alt fire a little bit, both as a possible solution to the attract effect sucking the user in if they don't take any countermeasures, and to give it a cool parkour utility.

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• Version and build: Big Bang Beta 2.0.9-9

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After some further testing, it is entirely possible that the effect may also be heavy influenced by ping. Testing plasma2 on servers with ping lower than 150 ms (more specifically, 50-70 ms) revealed that it proved to be way more effective at trapping enemies, even when still not that consistent. It's hard to judge offline due to bots moving in very predictable ways and nearly always getting caught.
Either way, a matter that should be investigated. John posted some videos on the Discord server demonstrating that.