Problems with naive solution: Overpoweredness, overused-ness.
Possible solution: Team combination skills - skills that require several players to equip them, and they only activate when all the players use the skill at the same time. Further restrictions may include:
- Easy interruptability, interrupt any of the players and the entire skill fails.
- Long casting times
- Single use only, or long recharge times.
- (for wa's) Adrenaline required by all participating players.
- Other tricky requirements that need coordination or special conditions to fulfill.
Examples:
- Multicharacter multihitting combination attacks. Eg. Requires 3 warriors to activate, 10 adren each. Each must hit skill within a short time frame, on a single target. One player does a fancy multihitting move, the second does a giant swing that knocks down, and the last does a coup de grace on the downed opponent. Large damage, target is stunned for the entire combination. Why should Air Elems be the only spikers? :P (I know, I know, there are other spikers too...)
- Energy Shield. 3 monks stand in a loose formation. Whilst they maintain an enchantment, a half-spherical energy shield appears between them. Enemy characters and projectiles cannot pass through the shield. The casting Monks remain outside the shield. If any of the monks move, runs out of mana, or dies, the shield ends. Enemies must kill or disable one of the monks to bring the shield down (or just move away and camp). The idea being elems and other squishies remain in the shield and cast spells.
- Phalanx. Requires several characters with shields, standing a short distance from each other. Movement rate is slowed by 75%. Enemies cannot pass between or through them, and any enemies attempting to do so are hit for some damage, and knocked away+down. Projectiles passing through the formation hit the phalanx characters instead. Phalanx ends if players use a skill, or move too far from each other.
- "Big" versions of current spells. Eg. 4 Elems casting a long spell that results in multiple lightning strikes against all enemies in a large area. 4 Necros raising 1 large high level bone horror without the need for a corpse. Or raising minions from all nearby corpses at once. "Pincushion", several rangers rapidly fire arrows at a single target
And that's just the single-class stuff - I'm sure there's plenty of creative ideas for cross-class or cross-skill line combination skills. (There's many past RPGs that feature similar ideas, so we could borrow some
Also there could be smaller 2 people combinations, or huge 6 or 8 people combinations. For example, a 2 person combination involving an elem and a warrior, which results in a souped-up version of Conjure Element being cast on the warrior for 30 secs, without the weapon requirement. etc. Or a 8 person combination that has a 10 minute casting time that summons a giant dragon that comes down and kills all the enemies instantly and wins the game. Hmmm, maybe not :P
Edit: And how could we possibly resist a 8 person combination, that causes all players to become drunk? Requirements: Players must stand in a circle without any armor on. Casting time: 1 minute. Casting animation: Dancing!
