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+--- Thread: Why was derringers nerfed? (/showthread.php?tid=4789)
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Cirrial - 05-20-2015
A4Brogan Wrote:words
what the fuck is wrong with you to refer to someone like this
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Marquesas - 05-20-2015
I know I'm about to validate everything you say about me but this discussion is starting to show that radbows may be a bit too cheap on the telecrystal side.
What my 'technobabble' uncovered is that an unintended side-effect of the armor piercing code was that the damage was amplified at least twofold for most gear. Effectively, if that bug was fixed first before the removal of the AP property, we'd be having this very same discussion.
Make no mistake, initially when introduced on shroom, a derringer shot was 60 brute, non-AP and even then it would effectively kill the target, and that was prior to bleeding. Granted, crit is somewhat more survivable now, but it still packs a punch enough that someone left there will die, I just don't believe that any item or ability should be an immediate death unless it's up there in the top tier. I think we veered far off-course.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Grayshift - 05-20-2015
At present a single styptic patch heals 200 brute damage, if Convair's figures are accurate. High levels of brute and burn damage, short of triggering instant death, are very easily healed by anyone carrying a medkit. With brute/burn so ephemeral, in order to be effective a derringer needs to guarantee a kill. If a traitor wants to spend 2TC for a shot at a certain, nearly quiet kill, that sounds fine to me. Permitting the victim the chance to survive even after a derringer is successfully employed breaks the purpose of the item.
As for the ridiculousness of "AP Proof Armor," I think realism can take a long walk off a short pier in a setting like SS13 when it gets in the way of gameplay. When a captain loses the disk to a derringer attack in maintenance, it's not fun or engaging for the rest of the crew, or even for the syndicate team, hence my suggestion.
Finally, radbows are nasty items and perhaps a touch too lethal. There was recently a topic on them. I think they're fine as is, but if a change has to be made I think lowering their payload is more fun than just making them cost more. More easily survivable at 15Gy (keep 30Gy for pointblanks), or apply damage falloff as other shots do. I'm not sure where the breakpoints for where the really nasty rad effects set in, but 20Gy very clearly keeps a subject in the red zone for a long time even with a constant potassium iodide drip.
All of this assumes that whatever the hell AP ammo is supposed to do is fixed. Those damage formulas have had me squinting and quizzically tilting my head for fifteen minutes now as I tried to fathom how someone thought it was a good idea.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - DyssalC - 05-20-2015
Grayshift Wrote:At present a single styptic patch heals 200 brute damage, if Convair's figures are accurate. High levels of brute and burn damage, short of triggering instant death, are very easily healed by anyone carrying a medkit. With brute/burn so ephemeral, in order to be effective a derringer needs to guarantee a kill. If a traitor wants to spend 2TC for a shot at a certain, nearly quiet kill, that sounds fine to me. Permitting the victim the chance to survive even after a derringer is successfully employed breaks the purpose of the item.I don't quite believe styptic patches do that, but things change frequently and that might actually be a thing now.
However, if that's the case, the problem isn't the Derringer not being powerful enough, it's the patch being too powerful.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Grayshift - 05-20-2015
40 brute up front, 150-160 more over the next 40 seconds or so. Just doublechecked. I suspect the last person who changed the bloodstream effects of styptic/silversulf didn't take into account that patches also dump their chemical load into the bloodstream. So yeah, patches are very powerful right now.
Even if patches are toned down, if derringers are made as weak as to allow a target to limp away or call out, the only clear advantage they would retain over a straight revolver is their initial quietude. Drawing a revolver from a backpack is nearly as fast and nearly as deadly, and comes with considerably more ammo and capacity. *winking a derringer out is far more useful for the fastdraw capability than protection from random searches, which don't really happen on goon.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Paineframe - 05-20-2015
Wouldn't two 125-brute shots put you into extremely deep crit with a fairly high chance of killing the target near-instantly?
Anyhow, as I read it, the reason Marq nerfed the derringer was that, before his change, derringers did half damage against unarmored people and triple damage (plus negating the armor's protective effects) against people wearing weak armor.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Nubcake - 05-20-2015
Yes, currently patches are now the most efficient method of applying touch chems, especially since the changes to spray bottles and applying chems from beakers, though specially formulated iv mixes can still be better.
Armour calculations aside, here are my thoughts on possible ways to go with the derringer:
It is absolutely an assassination weapon, and a disposable one at that. What i suggest is that, owing to the type of weapon it is and the method in which it is used, that it do a variable amount of damage whilst also keeping the damage falloff. I suggest a point blank derringer would therefore do anywhere from 65-100 damage per shot regardless of armour or protection. Also, the stun would be slightly longer on lower damage shots and shorter on higher damage ones.
This to me, makes the weapon more fun and risky to use, rather than an almost guaranteed 2 shots 1 kill.
On the subject of radbows- i think the damage falloff should be much more significant, because what sort of range could a tiny crossbow you can hide in your pocket have? Perhaps a slight decrease in Gy delivered, but not by much.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Grayshift - 05-20-2015
I don't think lethal weapons apply a stun when pointblanked anymore.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Frank_Stein - 05-20-2015
I dunno. A derringer is either an assassination weapon in which case I think the low cost is too cheap for a guaranteed kill or an ace in the hole weapon, in which case it's probably fine.
Though, to be honest, a mind-slave implant isn't much more expensive and can certainly be used as an guaranteed kill if you tell them to jump into the gibber.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Marquesas - 05-20-2015
We can revert to AP and see what happens with the fixed armor piercing. I promise no buffs, however.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Grek - 05-20-2015
IMO, the Derringer is a bad item. The fact that you can hide it in worn clothing just makes arresting security strip you of everything (including headsets!) once they've got you cuffed. That's a shitty meta. The fact that it's 1 telecrystal per shot, and you need both shots to actually drop someone means that you can't rely on it for assassinations. So if I had my way, I would redo it as two items:
First, fold the escape usage into the Freedom Implant. The implant would now let you instantly bust out of handcuffs like normal, but as an added bonus, you can shoot a .41 round out of either finger. If you *wink with an empty (or handcuffed!) hand, it shoots one bullet at whatever you're mousing over, doing roughly 60 AP damage. Wait for the officer to drag you half way to the brig, out of side of onlookers, then wink twice and bust free of your cuffs to escape. Freedom implant cost gets upped to 2 telecrystals to compensate. The fact that it's an implant and you can use if while cuffed means that strip searches and headset theft won't help.
Second, add in a new up close murdering people option: the Thompson Jr. For 3-4 telecrystals, you get a loud, pocket-sized SMG. Ten round clip, burst fires five .22 bullets each click. Essentially, a non-silenced, burst-fire only version of the .22 pistol. Comes with the same ammo count as the .22 pistol, and yes you can get more from vending machines. While .22 bullets are easily stopped by body armour, the bleeding and knockdown from being hit by five bullets at once will keep someone down long enough for you to either knife them or put them in a stranglehold.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Noah Buttes - 05-20-2015
I've never had any trouble with radbows. The cooldown is long enough to render them a niche assassination weapon.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - A4Brogan - 05-20-2015
Cirrial Wrote:A4Brogan Wrote:words
what the fuck is wrong with you to refer to someone like this
You would too, if you saw how he reacted to someone violently killing themselves (This actually happened. Check on tg's unofficial imageboard. Paprka is that bad, and I had to deal with that kind of person for an extended amount of time.)
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - Mageziya - 05-20-2015
Let's talk cost efficiency. The purpose of the derringer, from what I can tell, is to make someone drop the fuck dead. While technically with two uses, it functionally has only one use. It is designed to kill. Making it "fair" utterly defeats to purpose.
Now, let's talk parallels. A poison bottle only costs 1 TC, though often requires a 5 TC sleepy pen for maximum effectiveness. A poison bottle can hold enough poison to directly kill 0 to 8+ people. At optimal efficiency, plus the sleepy pen, a poison bottle ropes in a whooping 1.333 TC per kill. While the poison roulette and decreasing cost efficiency with multiple poison bottles justify the 1TC price, but that's just an example of kill to TC price ratio.
I've been mainly silent with this nerf-train, as stepping out of line and pissing off admins isn't exactly best for long term health, but now is the time for me to speak.
Items that are designed to kill should be good at doing so. Making fights "fair" goes against the fundamentals of the game, where the person who's done the most preparation to make fights as unfair as possible wins. Players that are new to this game are warned that they WILL die and it will likely be unfair. Fights will never be fair in this game, and attempting to make them so will accomplish nothing. The idea of ruining people's rounds by killing them is problematic, because it's misapplied. If you died, so what? You can try again next round, unless you're antagonist. This is also why traitors greatly benefit from paying TCs for kills and other antagonists benefit from free stuns, because if they die, they almost certainly not get a second chance for a long period of time. If an antagonist dies, their round is actually ruined, if a normal person dies and they really wanted to play as their role, unless it's a gimmick role, they can just set the job to favorite and enjoy it next round.
This entire nerf train seems to be built around ripping up structure that's already in place. The goal of nerfs is creating fair fights, more interesting rounds with "more subterfuge", and longer rounds. The attempts to do this involve removing stuns, and then nerfing things designed to instantly kill. The problem is that most of the stuns aren't exactly causing problems or are disdained by players. (Changling spit was the one exception, but the problems it's nerf causes are a whole other subject.) Stun batons and Tasers aren't broke or overpowered, Wizards (The vast majority of which are inexperienced due to having only the chance to play a once in a blue moon.) need their stun missiles to stay alive, Shambling abominations need their screech to stay alive. The problem with subterfuge is that the game doesn't reward it. It's not game mechanics that make subterfuge unrewarding, but the player base. You can successfully hide your identity's connection to crimes, but why bother with all the extra time and effort if you're easily capable of getting away with crimes without hiding your identity? You can do this because people simply don't care if someone screams over radio that you're killing them, because it's not their problem. (Lo and behold, the bystander effect.) On goon, longer rounds just means more people are dead and that the dead need to wait longer for a new round. Short rounds are good, because they make death less consequential. Basically, long rounds are bad, because of the concept of "round-ruining" to non-antagonists would genuinely apply if death meant having to wait and hour and a half to play again. Not to mention, but most people also don't have enough time, or want to spend that much time playing the game.
And that's my 2 cents on the whole Nerf-Train. Well, scratch that, more like 50 cents.
Re: Why was derringers nerfed? - BaneOfGiygas - 05-20-2015
Along the same lines as what Mageziya's saying, just look at all of the other instakill stuff (or stuff that's really close to it) that's strewn about the station and can be ordered by traitors. The gibber, any airlock exposed to space, mass drivers, the crematorium, chokeholds, crusher units, a whole bunch of different chemicals, egg+bible, man eaters, the conversion chamber (in a sense), mindslave implants (also in a sense), the trash compactor, teleport guns, trick revolvers, and all of that's not even counting the stuff that's very, very lethal, like the cyalume saber/butcher knife/red chainsaw, emagged medbots and floorbots, the hunting rifle, plasma fires, the list goes on and on and on. All of these technically have counters and/or are very situational, but nerfing something for the sole reason of being instant death seems silly when you have all of this other instant- or near-instant-death stuff running around.