That's where I started with a "hopscotch" idea, where the player jumped from pool to pool to gain buffs. I realized this mechanic was difficult to implement in a first person shooter as the the only place you could place pools are in front of the player, otherwise they wouldn't see them. This kept sending them forward into enemy territory which led us to our next iteration.

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I wanted to incentivize players to play aggressive but the downside is the player can die more quickly, increased armor was a great way to combat it. A surrounded perk with where you gained more armor the longer you were surrounded. this felt more like a buff you get from exotic armor then a weapon. From here I changed from bonus armor to bonus damage, this felt more impactful from a weapon and allowed the player to kill enemies much more quickly, helping with the issue of dying too often.

 

While it did help, it didn't fully address the issue. One of the main problems we identified with the weapon was wanted to think of ways to close the gap. This is where the mass grip idea came into play.

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Due to time constraints and tech concerns we pivoted back to the surrounded damage but added in the ability to overflow the mag. This created a fun gameplay loop with melee and prevented further downtime with A) needing to reload in combat, and B) to have ammo in the clip when the melee buff was active.