Kick Ability for Archers / Purchasable Kicking Boots

I'm gonna propose a lot of stuff related to this idea, but keep in mind I don't necessarily think it should ALL be added.

Basic Idea
At the moment, archers are really really easy to kill if you're a knight, mostly because of the large moving hitbox of their swing attack, which instantly kills an archer. They drop like flies, and most of the time knights don't even have to try to kill them, or might kill them accidentally. Hopefully with this change they would be a BIT less easy to kill, but still fairly fragile.

Basically what I'm proposing is for archers to have an ability activated by spacebar that would make them do a melee kick that would knock enemies back (and stun them?). This would preferably be in a certain direction, so you could kick people up, down, or just backwards. This would mostly just be another tool to keep people at a distance, but could also be used as an aggressive support tool to kick an enemy or two into your team. It would of course have a cooldown, maybe 5-10 seconds (although it would be hilarious to see a bunch of archers kicking people around against walls with no cooldown), and maybe do a bit of damage (1 heart?).

What would be nice is if this kick collided with a knight's swing attack it would act like a shield and cancel the knight's swing, allowing the archer another second to get away. It would also introduce a bit more timing-based combat, for if the archer could dodge a swing and then kick the knight while he's charging to get a bit more room.


Purchasable Boots
It might be a bit too much of a buff to give every archer this ability from the start. We could balance this by making boots a purchasable item. They would take up TWO inventory spaces so there would be a trade-off - you'd have to pick between boots and special arrows.

You would buy them either at the Archer Workshop or maybe a new workshop like a Cobbler's Shop (which could be made with the standard 50 wood or maybe with a bit of gold). It might be a bit weird to have to make another workshop just for boots though. In TTH it would probably be another workshop / research option.

If the boots were purchasable then maybe it would be nice to have some visual indication of which archers had the boots and which didn't - a little sprite change to make the boots a bit scarier looking.

Also you could buy two pairs of boots to put them on your hands and drop the bow and just kick people all day errday


Other Ideas (related to kicking of course)
Kick Vaulting
I guess this is a stretch idea - it would almost certainly make this a lot harder to implement but it's cool to think about and would give kicking more uses. Kick vaulting would be if you kicked a ground/wall/shield and jumped at the same time to leap really high into the air. Archers have grapple, yes, and can swing around like goddamn trapeze artists but knights are the ones that get mad air time. And sometimes there just isn't anything to grapple :/

Upwards Kick -> Arrows Combo
Perhaps you could kick while charging a shot, and perhaps shooting an enemy that you knocked up would do double damage.

Kicking to Stop Fall Damage
Could either be similar to kick vaulting or maybe just make you do a little "double jump"-like thing in the air to slow your fall.

Kicking Bombs Away
Bit more survivability for the poor defenseless archers (fuk boms)

Momentum Based Kick Damage (lol)
I can see the awesome dragon kicks already - imagine being launched from a catapult and smashing someone's face with your foot, watching them explode and fly everywhere...

Edit! - Break blocks with kick
This would give archers a way to break blocks too, like the knights have. It could be inefficient or it could break wooden blocks with like 2 kicks. Maybe it could even damage stone!


TL;DR - Let archers buy boots to kick people away from them or towards their team, and to block knights' swing attacks

Thoughts, additions, criticisms, complaints, etc are welcome and encouraged!
Let me know what you like and what sounds like a good idea, and also let me know what would literally destroy the game and how terrible and stupid the idea is!

 

I was thinking it would encourage more archers to play at a medium range, or at least give them more options. It's better than having ~75% of archers just sitting on their safe little archer perches spamming arrows, but I guess it's at least kind of fun to dodge arrows (?).

You do raise a good point about archers meleeing knights. I think kick would probably have to interrupt arrow charging because if it didn't that would be a guaranteed 3 melee damage + big stun, which would be annoying.

And yeah, there are already ways for archers to get bombs away from them, but they're both usually pretty unreliable.

 

I... what?

 

I looked up "people with shields on their feet" on google images and I didn't really get what I was looking for...

But the boots in question would probably have metal soles, or just be made out of metal. And who cares if the archers break a few ankles, they can walk it off.

 

Magic boots! (or see "shields on feet" comment)

I was thinking more in terms of gameplay than realism.