Knockback for a melee class that uses all of it's skills to get close to a player didn't make much design sense (at least to me). it's like giving the opponent a gat-away-free card. It's also impossible to detect any form of Entity <-> block collision. So any ideas that are based around this are simply not possible. (which I know you're aware of) -
Eh, I see your point. What of causing Root? Adjusted to the right duration, it would have the opposite effect- Giving the user time to close in on the enemy.
Alternative for Quake - when you land from a jump instead of taking damage you deal a percentage of that damage to nearby entities. (Jump would no longer prevent damage, although that portion doesn't always work with lag)
It would be a passive skill rather than a castable and would trigger anytime you take fall damage.
It would end up being similar to ironfist in use.
Well, there's good and bad there. If I ended up hurting everyone nearby when I took fall damage, I wouldn't want to use it in town or with non-partied friendlies, and If I'm wandering through the overworld at night low on health or whatnot I don't necessarily want to aggro nearby monsters, particularly Endermen.
Could you perhaps make a separate skill that records fall damage, deals damage to the surrounding entities based on that, and heals the user back up, either all the way or partially? The Dragoon would need to be able to handle the fall damage he wants to inflict, but it's not going to cripple you for taking advantage of big drops.
For anything like this, can it be a division problem instead of a set percentage? A skill could deal 30 damage to one target, 15 to two, 10 to three and so on.
Dragonskin - because of how minecraft handles damage, we can't actually add armor - we can flat reduce the damage, or adjust it by some arbitrary amount. but pseudo armor isn't an option as minecraft runs all those calculations not Heroes at this time (we might do stuff with armor later)
Ok. Still, that would be fun to see. It's more subtle and in line with Minecraft as a game.
Refined idea for HolyLance: Requires a shovel in hand to activate. If wood, stone, iron, or diamond, your attacks to do 1.25 times the normal amount of damage, and every hit landed on a player or mob with the shovel heals the user for 1/2 the damage dealt and inflicts a miniscule Root effect on the target (the intended effect is that the victim can move in short bursts if they try to run away). If used with a golden shovel, all nearby players or those in a party with you (or nearby players in your party) take 4 less damage per hit and every hit they land with any weapon they own heals them for 1/4 the damage they inflict. As for duration, idk. I would say that the solo effect is shorter than the party effect. This has enough healing potential to remove the need for Dragonskin, I think.