Unique: Captain Talisa

[BobIsDead]

Captain Talisa is a harpy pirate captain. She appears on the lower levels of the shoals, surrounded by a crew of fellow harpies. Her gimmick, as it were, is that she commands all harpies in range, making them lose their batty flag and just focus on mobbing the player. If she is killed, the nearby harpies revert back to their normal nature.

Other than that, I'm thinking she deserves a really fetching pirate hat. By which I mean, she is guaranteed to spawn with a hat, which has a chance of being magical and a smaller chance of being the legendary +3 Captain's Hat {Acc +3 Dam +3}. Though I'm just spitballing ideas there. The main crux of the idea is that she's a harpy who fights by getting other harpies to gang up on the player, just when the player is starting to think that they've got the hang of them.


EDIT: Some additional ideas to make this unique more interesting.

1) Calls more harpies from across the level. Basically, Captain Talisa will hang back whilst her crew fights and will, at random intervals, call for back-up. This causes the closest roaming harpy on the level to make its way towards the fight taking place. It keeps the minions coming, but sets a natural limit on how many can be called overall.

2) Give Captain Talisa some personal guards. Whilst her crew attacks the player, three to six elite harpies hang back around her. They can just be bigger, hardier harpies or can be "cannoneers", using magical attacks from range.

3) Just place her somewhere other than the shoals. Have her appear in the main part of the dungeon with an entourage of harpies, maybe in a vault containing some gold. This grants the player the chance to see (and to combat) harpies outside their usual environment.

[duvessa]

Seems easier to just generate some harpy skeletons instead.

[reaver]

Seems easier to just generate some harpy skeletons instead.

Well then it wouldn't have the interesting "Kill the unique -> Harpies swarm you a bit less" dynamic.

I don't think this is a good enough idea on it's own to support a unique, but maybe if it was combined with something else it would be fine. I have no idea what this "something else" would be.

[Patashu]

Seems easier to just generate some harpy skeletons instead.

Well then it wouldn't have the interesting "Kill the unique -> Harpies swarm you a bit less" dynamic.

I don't think this is a good enough idea on it's own to support a unique, but maybe if it was combined with something else it would be fine. I have no idea what this "something else" would be.

Casts inner fire on harpies then LCSes them

[Hirsch I]

or it could just LCS you for more scaryness.

[BobIsDead]

Yeah, reaver, I thought about adding something else in too. Maybe she goes hunting for a new crew once you've destroyed her old one? Or she uses an offensive spell such as Iron Shot? Or she uses Blink Other to keep the player away from staircases and other avenues of escape? I had a few other ideas, but most of them felt clunky and as though they don't mesh well with the idea of getting attacked by a horde of harpies.

[khalil]

Their booty is food, and her scurvy dogs have the old floor eating behaviors enabled!
Kill the captain before it's all gone! The cowardly runts won't have the spine to eat after that!

[Piginabag]

In my experience, harpies are either a) tabfodder or b) inescapable blenders of pure death, depending on my characters species/background.

That being said, every one of your ideas sounds annoying

[and into]

Well, a good question to ask is, how would Captain Talisa be more dangerous than a pack of harpies that happened to spawn right next to a merfolk impaler or Donald or something? Also, ideally uniques don't just make things more dangerous, but do so in a somewhat novel way that causes you to value tactics differently. (Of course it is difficult to get just the right balance; if a unique changes things too drastically, or simply disallows certain tactics completely, that's actually less interesting and at least for certain characters will just be annoying rather than challenging.)

Not sure that's helpful. I don't have any concrete ideas, myself, for a unique based around spawning with a harpy pack.

[khalil]

If you didn't understand my idea before, here is it in english:
She and her minions spawn in a vault containing lots of food.
She and her minions have the ability to eat food off the ground like old harpies. (They still don't get to steal food from your inventory.)
Kill her to get her minions to stop eating, thus gaining you a bunch of food, including a few royal jellies and ambrosias.

[BobIsDead]

Thought about this some more and came up with a vaguely workable idea.

Captain Talisa once raided the Abyss, plundering great power from it. By this I mean, she gets to blink herself and her allies closer to you or away from you. The idea is to offer threats to hardy melee characters as well as squishy ranged characters.

Against tougher, melee-focussed enemies, she has her harpies hit and run, attack the enemy and flee, using blinking assistance if required. Against squishier characters, she and her harpies swarm in and surround the target, again, blinking about the place if necessary, making evading or escaping them more difficult than usual. As proposed earlier, killing her would send the harpies back to fluttering around semi-uselessly.

Captain Talisa, herself, would be only a slightly above average harpy, likely having heightened magical resistance more than anything else. Maybe she'd hit harder too (possibly even having the distortion brand on her attacks, but that's just an idea), but she'd mainly be a threat due to her ability to give her fellow harpies moderately complex commands.