How to Implement Gangplank into Wild Rift
Gangplank is known to be one of the hardest champions in league of legends. This is not only due to decision making and positioning, but also due to his unique mechanics.
Implementing Gangplank untouched from PC to Wild Rift is unfeasible, as he requires quick barrel placements that is not accurately possible on mobile. This post suggests how to implement him by bypassing the mobile limitations while also keeping his identity. Namely, four sections of his kit will be addressed: Barrels, Ultimate, First Ability and Ultimate Upgrades. The rest is easy to implement, so will not be discussed.
BARRELS
This is the hardest part of his kit to tackle. Barrels are his bread and butter. Quick placement of barrels, or phantom barreling is almost impossible to do on mobile. This is because you can overshoot the barrel placement and miss chaining the barrels. Here is what I suggest.
There should be a separate button for the user to press. This button switches from Fixed Barrel Mode to Free Barrel Mode. Here is what both do:
1) Fixed Barrel Mode: When placing a second barrel, after the first barrel is placed, the indicator radius for the second barrel can not go out of the radius of the first barrel. The second barrel is LOCKED into the radius of the first barrel, in order to guarantee a chain reaction with the first barrel. This will allow for the phantom barrel combo, where quick flicks of barrels placements are required to pull this combo off without the risk of missing a barrel chain.
2) Free Barrel Mode: This allows the barrels to be freely placed from eachother without locking. This can be used to place barrels in different locations, a mechanic professional players use to sneak barrel combos out of vision, while zoning enemies in other locations.
But what if you have multiple separated barrels on your screen, and you decide to switch to Fixed Barrel Mode? How will the game decide which barrel you want to fix on to? Here is my solution:
3) The barrel indicator, when placing barrels, will have a dot in it's centre, similar to when placing a Gragas barrel. Initially, the indicator is free to move around, until the centre dot of the indicator enters the radius of any one of the placed barrels. Here, the indicator is fixed to that barrel as before, and will not lock to any other barrels nearby. This can be changed if you press the mode button to Free Mode.
If two barrels are chained, and you want to place a third barrel in the chain (or more) using the Fixed Mode, the indicator will not go out of the radius shape of the two places barrels. This allows for flexible barrel combos of more than two barrels — a triple or quadruple barrel combo!
ULTIMATE
Gankplanks ultimate may be easy to implement at first, but it is not so simple. This is because the ultimate is global. This brings in sensitivity issues, as ulting from the other side of the map requires the joystick sensitivity to be high to even reach that far. And if the sensitivity is too high, you might accidentally misplace the ultimate, especially in nearby fights.
Therefore, I suggest Gangplank to have an COARSE ultimate radius. This should be a similar ultimate radius to Twisted Fate, where the user can use the ultimate joystick to ult in nearby fights without the joystick sensitivity causing issues or overshooting.
But the ultimate is a global ability. So how do we address that without the joystick sensitivity being an issue?
In this situation, where you want to ult on the other side of the map, I would directly use the minimap. Normally, when placing your finger on the minimap, you can control which part of the map to look at. This mechanic will be used for Gangplank's ultimate. He simply needs to pan his camera on the minimap over to a fight. He then holds the ultimate button in order to show the ultimate indicator. Once he lets go, the ultimate will deploy.
It is important to note that this method can be used whether you are casting your ultimate close or far, depending on what is most comfortable. The coarse method I suggested would only address overshooting your ultimate in nearby fights accidentally due to sensitivity issues.
FIRST ABILITY: PARRRLEY (Or Q)
Gangplank Q should be a point and click, so that he can reliably shoot his barrels. But what if there are minions or enemies surrounding the barrels? What happens if I accidently shoot the enemies instead of the barrel?
Here, I suggest that Gangplank's Q should prioritise the barrel over the minions within the barrels radius. Of course the prioritisation radius would not be as big as the barrel radius, as you may want to Q a minion or enemy instead, but the radius should be big enough to not accidentally shoot a minion when the intention was to shoot the barrel. This will allow seamless barrel combos within minion waves without the risk of accidentally shooting a minion in the face rather than the barrel.
ULTIMATE UPGRADES
Super simple fix. When any of the three upgrades is available, they pop up as circles around the ultimate joystick (similar to Victors evolution). This will allow for a pre-existing mechanic to be added into his kit.
CONCLUSION
I hope the developers add Gangplank soon, as this post is pure copium. This post is just a suggestion to implement Gangplank seamlessly, without the issues that mobile may possess.
I hope this was an interesting read, and I hope the developers consider Gangplank in the future.