Lantern Powers in Context to DCUO - Theory Crafting

Woah there! Put the pitchforks down. Though I would love more powers in this game and I know we already have 3 colors already in the game, this is merely a what if and how would it be implemented in the game in a balanced scenario.

As I mentioned before, we have 3 colors in the game already: Red/Rage, Yellow/Fear, & Green/Will.
These breakdown to only 2 classes: Tank(Red) and Controller(Yellow/Green)
What is left is Orange/Avarice, Blue/Hope, Indigo/Compassion, & Violet/Love. (This would not count White/Life and Black/Death, as they would probably be hard to portray in this game properly.)

Lets breakdown each of the Emotional Spectrum and base it on what has been observed in the comics. (Don't worry if you've never read a comic, you can still play along!)

Orange/Avarice - Because the nature of the "greed" element of this color, Larfleeze will only allow one ring to exist. If others do, he would fight to steal them back. In the comics, there have been several "living" ring bearers. Lex Luthor being a big one who wore it during the big Spectrum event, but there were a few of his constructs who were brought back to life that also wore the ring. (In his solo series.)

• The powers that orange lanterns are capable of doing is basic light constructs, but also when you defeat the enemy, you can capture their soul in the ring. When doing so, you can bring them back as Orange constructs that have their minds intact. (Though can't go against the ring bearer.)
• Controller role I think is the most fitting for this. It would be a pet class, similar to Earth and Sorcery. I can also see this as a Necromancer power, like you would see in other games. Where if we defeat an enemy, we can have more pets (up to a number allowed) and the enemy can be converted into a generic "shadow" of them. To avoid complex models and what not. This would because our powers are incomplete, like the other lanterns. We can only unlock so much with the exobytes that we were given.

Blue/Hope - I feel this would be considered the polar opposite of Orange, because it's about giving Hope to others. There have been many Blue Lanterns.

• Blue/Hope was meant to be working in tandem with Green/Will. Where the presence of one would empower all nearby Green rings. Also, when nearby a Green, it unlocks the ability to do constructs. (Always thought this was a weird stipulation.)
• Healing role would be best suited. (To be honest, controller because of the empowering part, but they already classified Will/Fear being controller and the redundancy would be too much.)

Indigo/Compassion - These are a little different in terms of ring slingers. They are built on the idea of compassion not only for others, but for themselves. Most of the Indigo Tribe are convicts with terrible atrocities that they could not handle mentally. So the Indigo light gives them peace of mind while they make amends for their crimes.

• They have the ability to teleport and can use other colors powers. They also have the ability to heal other beings.
• Healing role would be the best suited, but I think it should have powers that are actually different color constructs. Like it could drop a blue circle of healing, a green 4man group shield, a red pulsing aura on themselves for damage or healing overtime, etc.

Violet/Love - Pure love is strength. They spread their love with a totalitarian approach, by destroying hate and fear.

• In a way, they are similar to Will with power constructs, but they can also encapsulate their enemies in conversion crystals.
• Tank role would be the best suited, IMO. (I know a lot of people would give me hate for this reasoning.) They have the ability to utilize love to overtake their enemies. I can see this being a unique tanking. It might be able to introduce a type of shield tank similar to ice that can also create crystal prisons.

If you are interested on why I think White and Black Lanterns wouldn't go well in DCUO is because:

White/Life - Has the ability to utilize every spectrum lantern power freely as well as the ability to resurrect the dead. It would be kind of a jack of all trades role that wouldn't do it justice to have it set to a specific class.

Black/Death - To be honest, they don't really utilize anything with their rings other than increased strength and the inability to be destroyed outside of White Life energy. It would essentially be your power with the black ring. It could be neat to have sort of an iconic Black Ring option. Maybe an artifact that gives you the black ring and increases your stats or something, but yeah...

Tell me what you think. Criticize me, agree with me, disagree with me, have your own ideas, but just don't be mean in doing so. Have fun!

In before the "THIS ISN'T LANTERN UNIVERSE ONLINE OMG!$#!#$!@" comments.

For good or ill, a lot of that would greatly depend on the flexibility of DC. They haven't seemed to ease off too much on their protective nature regarding the ringslingers, and it's very easy to imagine a lot of those ideas being quashed because of lore.

Personally speaking? Blue for Healing would be right up my alley, so that's where my vote would go.

I don't think DBG would have an issue making the powers, but you are right about them having issues maybe with what roles go to what. They were more strict with Fear/Will being Villain/Hero specific, but things changed before Rage came out. Which is also why we got God knows how many lantern colored auras in the game. lol

Edit: DBG/SOE also had a 3 role release going too. Where they were introducing a new power new role in a cycle. Controller > Healer > Tank. They abandoned this I think when they ditched Serums and made Atomic a tank.

The main challenge of an extra lantern role is: how to explain the same role being both hero and villain? This was easy to do with green/yellow lantern because Yellow is a carbon copy of the green ring. Red also works because, in the cartoons, there was a good red lantern and, in the comics, Guy Gardner made a good red lantern corps. But what about the others? No other corps swing on both sides of morality, and no other corps are equals like Green Yellow.

Recently, however, we got a new hope: violet lanters with ultraviolet corps.

I THINK we could have very nerfed versions of white and black rings, as they both have the powers of all corps. Considering that, canonically for the game, rage/fear/light players are deputies of their respective corps with pre-loaded constructs, we could have imperfect copies of the white/black rings.

The colors are actually Neutral in Lantern Lore. Heck, even Sinestro Corps is Lawful Evil. (Rule by fear.) At the time of the creation of DCUO's first class, I think they said that DC wanted the separation because they saw it as evil and later was changed.

I think all roles can be benefited in both hero and villain. A villain can justify their Hope for things easy and a hero can be very greedy.

Black and White were the only ones they've ever given a categorical "nope" to when it comes to powers, though. Any other power suggestion or request got the "we have no plans at this time" line. Black and White Lanterns were a hard no.

I don't disagree with you, but how to explain a blue lantern villain helping Lex against Superman or siding with the Joker to set police officers on fire? Also, members of the Indigo Tribe are brainwashed to become alien monks of the sorts.

But, on a second thought, I can imagine Star Sapphires in both sides.

And I would LOVE to be able to play a blue lantern and/or a healer lantern, tbh.

Indigo Tribe is true neutral, to be honest. They will help both hero and villain side if it works within their scope of what they have compassion for.

Again, the emotional spectrum is neutral. You are chosen (or converted) to the color based on how much of the emotion you have in you. Supergirl was a Rage lantern for a moment, so was Mera. Batman almost wielded Yellow. It goes on. If a villain has a lot of Hope in them, I can see the Blue Lantern Ring choosing them.

The White and Black Lanterns could work, IF it was ever an option. DCUO could create a Super Class. White could be Hero and Black a Villian or vice versa. Black and White are polar opposites. The Super Class could have a role for tank, heal or dps. An example of this is in ESO. Both Lanterns can raise the dead and do almost everything the other can do.

The Black Power is way more powerful than you give it credit for:
As a conduit of power from the black range of the emotional spectrum, the Black Power rings have a number of abilities akin to those of other Lantern Rings.

• Reanimation: Black Power Rings attach to corpses and animate them, whether they are regenerated or simply mobile corpses is unknown.
• Animation: A Black Lantern can will objects to move how he or she wants.
• Artificial Intelligence: The ring acts as an "on-board computer," telling the wearer what they need to know. It can either respond out loud, or silently directly to the wearer's mind. The ring also translates nearly every language to and from the wearer, which is why the Corps can communicate with each other.
• Burglar Alarm: A Black Lantern can coat anything with the rings beam and thus, if anyone other than himself touches it, his ring will glow, alerting him to the possible theft.
• Communicator: The rings can act as a personal communicator between Black Lanterns. They have also been seen connected to telephones.
• Costumes: The wearer of the ring may create any costume they choose, based on their personal preferences, whenever they choose. The ring projects the costume over any clothes already worn at the time.
• Energy Projections: The rings can also project beams, form protective bubbles and force fields, and fire destructive blasts. Sometimes, depending on the wearer, the beams and blasts make sounds.
• Energy Constructs: The rings can construct anything the wearer can imagine from hard-light energy, as long as they are willing to make it. The more determined the wearer is, the more complex and intricate these things can be. The constructs can even be so complex as to form working machines, computers, and even people.
• Flight: The rings allows the wearer to fly in atmosphere or in space, and can achieve incredible speeds, moving from planet to planet in a matter of hours.
• Invisibility: The rings can make the wearer or anything else invisible.
• Matter Manipulation: A Black Lantern can use their ring to manipulate nearby matter, such as water, for various purposes such as a construct that acts like an energy construct but can block something yellow and may serve a purpose that an energy construct couldn't perform.
• Mind Control: The wearer of the Ring can use it to plant post hypnotic commands or control a person.
• Mirages: The rings can create mirages/illusions.
• Phasing: The rings allows the user to go through walls.
• Probing: The rings can probe the Lantern's or another person's mind, allowing him to uncover memories or the person's thoughts.
• Temperature Control: The rings can increase or decrease the temperature of anything, even something as large as stars, or even create bubbles of intense heat or cold, even down to Absolute Zero.
• Transforming: The rings can transform anyone or anything, be it into an animal, altering their state of appearance, or their size.

Unique Powers & Abilities

Each new Lantern Corps Ring has unique abilities. For Black Power Rings, these abilities include:

• Reanimation: Black Lantern Rings descended upon the worlds and claimed the loved ones that have been lost. They will forever hunger for those who still feel. When the Blackest Night began, the Black Lantern Rings found their bearers, and when the Black Lantern Corps is ready...the dead will rise.
• Emotion reading: Black lanterns can read emotions of each individual living being as a colored aura (Red = rage, violet = love etc.). When a Black Ring was worn by Superboy Prime, it scanned his entire body to find what emotion filled him the most.
• Restoration: A Black Lantern Ring can restore the body of its host if the body is destroyed or damaged as long as the ring is in tact.
• Weakness: A peculiar weakness of the Black Lantern rings and their host is that beings who are incapable to feel emotions, or unwilling, will be completely invisible to the Black Lanterns up to and including Nekron himself, Scarecrow, Cyborg Superman, Renee Montoya and Lady Shiva managed this feat. Unnatural beings such as Etrigan were also proven to be invisible. Also, the Black Lanterns will be abandoned by their rings if forced to feel emotions themselves, or come into contact with the energies of Dove, resulting in the Lanterns self-destruction. Finally the powers of the Red Lanterns proved to be one of the few things that could damage a Black Lantern beyond repair.

An odd event occurred when Superboy Prime put on a Black Ring and it scanned his body for all the colors of the Emotional Spectrum, and when he reached to the red of rage, the Black ring turned into a Red Ring of Rage.

A lot of what you mentioned about Black were underutilized in the comics. For the most part, the feeding off the emotion and utilizing the same powers the host body had is all they did.

A superclass would be interesting, but I'd like to see them clear classes altogether before introducing an all in one class.

That is even better, we have TWO lantern powers that could be added as healers, in special indigo tribe, that does seem to have healing powers.

Yes, I am excited about this. I would love a healing lantern.

I'm afraid, however, that the lore shows that the emotional spectrum MIGHT seem neutral, but, in practice, it's not that simple:

Green Lanterns are powered up by the will that is born within the mind when the individual overcomes his personal fears, usually "I won't let my object of fear stop me".

Yellow Lanterns are powered up by the fear felt by a person who is intimidated by someone else, which is why Batman was once chosen by a yellow ring, same for Injustice Superman.

Red Lanterns are powered up by the rage that comes upon losing someone you love, which is why Ran-Korr and Dex-Starr got their rings after watching members of their family die.

Orange Lanterns are powered up by the avarice that comes when someone wishes to have something and fears losing it, which leads them to angrily defending their stuff. Remember: orange = yellow + red.

Blue Lanterns are powered up by the hope that comes from prayers, which is why pretty much all blue lanterns are religious.

Star Sapphires are powered up by the obsessive love, that makes someone treat their loved ones as their property, on the very style of "If you can't be mine you can't be anyone else's". No wonder Carol Ferris wanted to take or kill Hal Jordan, until, years later, their corps reconsidered their methods.

Violet Lanterns/Indigo Tribe are powered uo by the compassion that comes from caring so much about someone else as if they were one the same, regardless of how you are attached to that person.

This is why I think it is very hard to choose a new lantern power.

How can someone brainwashed and forced to feel blinding compassion set a police officer on fire?

How can someone who prays for everything to be alright help Eclipso to set loose the Spectre so he can start reaping souls at random?

I am not saying it is impossible, at all. After all, we can have, like, a cult leader who believes that the world will be a better place if Circe turns everyone into bestiamorphs, we can have an orange lantern helping others with personal gains in mind. Of course we can. This is comics, fictional universe, anything can happen if justified enough.

The challenge is to justify it enough.

But don't take me wrong: I WANT a new lantern power.

Personaly, after a lot of discussion in this forum, I think a nice power would be having Hope as healer for heroes and Orange being healer for villains. Because the greedy would see everyone as his underlings and thus, want them to continue fighting and kicking to do your bidding. Would be especialy fun to see it in the skills's description if, in the villain side, they always address other players as "Minions", "slaves", "pawns", etc. Plus its great for roleplay.

But I also designed the ENTIRE Star Sapphire as a neutral healer power and, hey, any feedback is welcome:
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dcuo/index.php?threads/star-sapphire-violet-lantern-healer.318849/

Being underutilizied in comics doesn't mean they couldn't make it work. Their versions of almost everything is watered down from the comics. We could probably divide the first list into thirds and apply an ability to each role. They already have two lantern powers (Green & Yellow) the opposite color but same abilities. They wouldn't be an all-in-one class. Trolls would still be needed. Green or Yellow for that.

It really has to do with viewpoints. You can be pure of heart but also the worst murderer ever. Would you consider Peacemaker a hero? His form of justice is to kill anything that goes against that justice. Which is in his head. He still is considered a hero and was created as such.

If an Indigo lantern chooses to help set a police officer ablaze, it could be looked at as a swift death to make sure they don't suffer as they reach goal of compassion.

I think you are trying to create a black and white scenario when (which is ironic to say) the spectrum is definitely grey. With how they do their reasoning doesn't change that fact. The only reason why they were polarized in the comics was because the initial creation put them hero or villain. Things changed and so did the lore. I don't see a need to justify why a color was added to the game, just gives a player a chance to create their own lore.

They didn't abandon that release thing, they just switched things around. It was still three role thing: Munitions/Controller, Atomic/Tank, and then a year later worked in with the stats revamp came Water/Healer.

As for your ideas...i'm actually digging them. I would say Blue/Hope for healer and leave Indigo out...OR make them the same and give the player the option to pick which color they want to go with (and have to buy a color swap from the marketplace if they change their minds). But yeah...I like it. Maybe some day.

Since the lore of DCUO has to deal with TBWL and in the comics Batman is a Black Lantern who is morally good. He resurrected Jonah Hill, as a zombie of course because he’s dead lol in the comics Darkseid controls Roy Harper who we all thought was a Black Lantern but is actually an Omega Lantern. But definitely Black Lanterns can be used for good. It’s up to the writers to choose that.

Lol I wish there was a still a dislike button. Sorry not sorry.

I know, you would prefer Violet healer. Feel free to put what you would change in my list.

And I always was trolled by the dislike button. People would dislike my posts just because it was my post.

Unfortunately I stopped right there, with a big old "nope" coming right to mind.

Been through a game where a Super Class of sorts existed for a while, Star Wars Galaxies. Initially you had to go through an unlocking process to gain access to Jedi, and to reflect the process and MANY extra steps a player had to go through Jedi were always top of the heap. No matter what, Jedi always had to be (I think) about one-and-a-half times stronger than other combat profession combinations. And more than a few power-gamer types flocked to it mainly because of that.

That ended up meaning that any time a non-Jedi combat profession got an adjustment, so did Jedi to maintain their place. Which also meant Jedi got a lot of criticism (some fair, some not) for how much attention it kept getting from the dev team, inevitably leading to a lot of hate directed towards that part of the game.

That changed with the NGE, and while there was a LOT of bad that came with the NGE, one of the long-term positives was that Jedi was made a starting profession. It was brought in line with all the other combat professions and put onto a relatively level playing field, and quite a bit of the hate directed towards the profession dissipated.

It's very tough for me to see any upsides in trying to put any kind of Super Class in. There's just too many possibilities of power-gamers exploiting it, the game balance the devs intend for the game being thrown off and a lot of unnecessary and avoidable drama over perceived and actual favoritism taking place.

I came up with an alternative version , instead of the powerset, make a new movement mode based on the lanterns.

As a basis, take not traditional lantern corps, but a spectral ring (there are two of them in comics, one was created by scientific methods, the other by magic), absolutely anyone can use it, it is fueled by your emotions and creates constructs of different colors, depending on your emotions.
The movement mod has 6 normal powers and 2 supercharges, if each normal power is combopower, then we can create at least 12 constructs in total.
Different colors can be made in several ways:
1. Different color for different construct....
2. The color of the constructs depends on ... for example, the main color in the palette, or the color of the eyes ...
3. Separate movement mode color skins in the market...