I personally think the design of cursed cannon balls could be made more interesting.
Right now some cannonballs are almost useless and others can totally change a fight: stuff like anchorball on galleons, peaceball when taking a broadside from bigger ships and obviously the jig and weary balls.
I don't personally like the way these works, I don't think these are fair, specially if you get to stack them by playing for long session. When me and my friend who I duo on the sloop with play reaper, we tend to play for at least 3 hours, stacking resources and server hopping when needed. Quite often we got enough cursed cannonballs to anchor our opponents and stun-lock them until i boarded an killed at least one or two people on their crew. We tend to keep these balls just for strong opponents and this usually gives us quite an edge at the start of the fight. Since all you need to use the effect of a cursed ball is to hit the shot, we can easily get close to the enemy ship for an easy shot and don't care about the ship diff as it doesn't matter if we are on their broadside as long as we got a ball to prevent them from firing (peace, weary and jig balls).
I think that new cursed balls should be added (or the current one be reworked) keeping in mind two aspects:
- The cursed cannon balls should decay over time, let's say you drop them in specific occasions and after then the magic inside the cursed cannon balls starts to slowly deplete until it turns into a normal cannon ball (would take about 2 hours i think? would need balance). This would prevent hoarding these balls and incentivize players to use them and not just hold them until they log off.
- The user would need to play properly in order to benefit from the cursed ball.
For this I'll make an example of what I mean, don't necessarily take this example as a suggestion or something that I think it's already balanced as this might even be a little weak right now, just get the idea:
Frostball: upon hitting a ship the frost ball freezes a small area of the hull while also slowing players who were to close too the hit (optional idea, also: being on fire prevents this).
The part of the hull which is frozen for a bunch of seconds will be more fragile, a cannonball hit on a frozen part of the hull will instantly open a tier 3 hole.
Basically hitting the ball by itself doesn't do anything, you also need to hit the same area again during that small window in order to benefit from its powers. Let's say the area is large as two holes, if you play correctly you can open two tier 3 holes with a total of three cannonballs (the Frostball+2 cannon balls).
Another idea is to give more interactions or some kind of counter-play for the opponent, little examples:
Ballastball becomes the Heavyball:
Upon impact, an Heavyball penetrates the hull and land inside the ship (basically upon hitting the enemy ship a bigger, black opaque cannonball spawns inside the enemy ship). The cannonball is now treated as a chest (you can pick it up and drop it, but can't get it in your inventory or stick it inside a cannon again. This said, it would also be cool to see two ship exchanging the same ball until someone misses), it also emits a specific sound to help players finding it. As long as this cannonball stays on the ship it has similar but weaker effects to the Ballastball, slowing down the ship and allowing for more water to pour into it. Players should try to quickly spot it and try to get it off their ship as fast as possible.
Helmball becomes the Vineball:
Upon hitting a ship, the Vineball allows for vines to grow from the base of the anchor, cannons and capstan (maybe just one part if that's too powerfull, or even extend this to barrels too to also replace the Barrelball, depends on balance), making it impossible to use them. In order to free these parts of the ship from the vines you'd just have to damage them enough (60 HP?). Also, using a firebomb to set the vines on fire would instantly destroy them; this way Galleons would be able to instantly free a broadside at the cost of momentarily setting on fire 1 or 2 cannons.
We could also make Phantom cannon balls more interesting: these are basically just a reskin of base cannonballs that looks like phantoms, what if, upon hitting a ship and in addition to opening one hole, this cannonball also spawns one phantom on the opponent ship? This might get too broken tho, with the quantity you get form an OoS voyage: imagine facing a Galleon that got like 8 of these lul.
What do you guys think? I foresee people complaining about the cursed cannonballs decaying and I can see why, even tho I think it would be more balanced. But I hope that you guys like the idea of making these more interesting to use and have a more interactive counter-play.
