New Ability Concept: Ricochet
Hello there! @saydie here, playing Splinterlands every day!
One of the main gameplay mechanics that spices up Splinterlands is the various abilities that each card possesses. These abilities give various perks, not only to the card that it belongs to, but also to its ally units, whether it is to increase the speed and damage of cards or provide support, such as increasing the card's armor or restoring its health. There are also abilities that place negative buffs on the opponent unit instead, like making them slow or unable to heal. On other occasions, it completely changes the behavior of the card, like melee units can attack regardless of their position. My point is that card abilities make playing Splinterlands much more fun and interesting and with the newest Splinterlands Contest, we are challenged to create a new ability, and for my entry, I had the concept for the Ricochet ability, which I will explain in this post.
Ricochet Ability Concept
As of the writing of this post, there are about 113 card abilities in Splinterlands, not including the new abilities that will come with Escalation, and cards can have up to 5 abilities, depending on their rarity and level, plus the abilities that Archon could give to its units. Because of the increasing number of abilities, the number of possible strategies also increases, making the game more fun and deep.
Anyway, for my new ability concept, I had the Ricochet ability, which has the following description.
| Ability | Description |
|---|---|
 Ricochet | (Only applies to range and magic attacks) When a range and magic unit lands a hit on a target, it will randomly inflict the same amount of damage to any of the target's adjacent units. |
The ability was similar to Blast, but unlike Blast, which inflicts only half of the damage, Ricochet will inflict the same amount of damage to the adjacent unit, but at the same time, only one of the target's adjacent units can be affected by the ability, unlike Blast, which will inflict damage to both of the target's adjacent units.
If I put this into an analogy, it is like a bullet that, after it hits the target, it bounces and hits another target.
Other Abilities Interaction
It was not a secret that many abilities would have certain effects on other abilities when they interacted with each other, and for Ricochet, here are some interactions that I think should be noted in the off chance that the ability was implemented in the game.
 Shield  Void | Just like any regular attacks, the damage from Ricochet will also be halved when the affected card has a Shield or Void. |
 Blast | Only the first attack will trigger Blast. The Ricocheted damage will not cause Blast damage. |
 Deflect | Ricochet will ignore Deflect, and will inflict the same amount of damage to the target's adjacent unit. |
Closing
And that was it for my idea for a new ability. I have not thought that far ahead, how would Ricochet behave at play, and have not considered all the possible abilities interaction, so I can't really tell if this ability could be implemented in the game, but this ability might open up for better abilities ideas in the future.
Thank you for reading my post, and see you on the next one!
Splinterlands Free Assets
This were assets that I edited using Adobe Photoshop and more of this assets were available in this post for anyone who likes to use them.
All the image that I edited here belongs to Splinterlands.
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Thanks for sharing! - @mango-juice
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