Rebalance artifacts

[Mouse]

I am firmly of the opinion that 0 cooldown ranged multitarget instastun artifacts that deal crit-level burn damage in two hits should not be something that can spawn.

[Drago156]

@zjdkmz-whatever the rest of it is

for real though arts are dumb, fix dat. restrict them to only one function and minimum 10 second cooldown IMO for non-weapons.

[zjdtmkhzt]

I don't really see how having different functions would be oppressive, seeing as that would make the artifact more unreliable if anything.
Cooldowns for attack wand artifacts could certainly be made longer, right now they can fall linearly between 2.5 seconds and 90 seconds, the floor here could be a bit higher.
There is also a 5% chance for them to not have a cooldown at all, which could certainly be removed if one is concerned with things such as "balance". :p

But I'm not the artifact police, anyone is free to make a PR if they think that'd be a good change.

[Rilor]

I think considering the randomization, the odds of you finding a powerful weapon artifact with no cooldown are so low that i dont really see this as a major problem

[CommaIndividual]

Eh, I wouldn't consider arts able to be consistently powerful to the point of needing a nerf. They certainly don't have the regularity of Telescience, Toxins, or Chemistry.
All my own opinion though.

[Rilor]

why most rounds (in my experience) you dont get an artifact that has any practical use at all

[Technature]

More rounds than not I see a healing artifact sitting outside of medbay waiting to be slapped by the dying.

I know there's not a lot with a practical use but they're there.

[Lady Birb]

There is also a 5% chance for them to not have a cooldown at all, which could certainly be removed if one is concerned with things such as "balance". :p

I think considering the randomization, the odds of you finding a powerful weapon artifact with no cooldown are so low that i dont really see this as a major problem

Eh, I wouldn't consider arts able to be consistently powerful to the point of needing a nerf.  They certainly don't have the regularity of Telescience, Toxins, or Chemistry.
All my own opinion though.

why most rounds (in my experience) you dont get an artifact that has any practical use at all

For those not aware, right before this thread was posted there was a round on 1 where a certain robust player got a no cooldown instant KO lightning artifact as a traitor and proceeded to kill literally the entire station except an afk guy in a locker. I would suggest removing the 5% chance of no cooldown and capping lightning artifacts at 2 hits to stun, since we did the same thing for melee artifacts and we have been removing most one-hit stuns in general.

[Rilor]

thats a lot of bad luck

[Drago156]

So I'm gonna come back to this after a discord discussion we had, where ZJD informed me of how ridiculous some of the numbers are on arts. They are absolutely busted when they do roll successfully, and I can't count on even five hands the amount of rounds I've played in the last two weeks where someone had brought in or bought 20+ arts reliably and consistently... Artifacts are rather easy to come by in a number of ways, whether it be the ones spawning in artsci, those in debris and z5 that get telesci'd in half the time, the ones dug up by mining, the actual tons bought from QM, or from 15 or so spawning from a radstorm. They're far more common and easily acquired than I think people are realizing, and chance means fucking nothing if you have numbers, because you can brute force chance that way, very easily.

I'm also not a fan of powerful arts having anything below a 10-15 second cooldown, such as forcefields, teleports, ranged shocks, or gibbers. These are the arts that are incredibly life saving or ending with a mere button click, and that shouldn't be spamable IMO. Make people think more on how they plan to use their arts instead of just ending up with antags that spam kill or block everyone with an art or the griefers that do majorly irritating shit and just consistently get away because of their instant charge and many use artifacts.

[zjdtmkhzt]

Accidentally deleted my message here, so I'll be brief.^^

You can really only buy like 5 artifacts or so from QM, and the amount you get back from sending artifacts out is quite low as well, so I think you are overestimating the ease of getting one of these really strong artifacts.

That doesn't matter though, it's still kinda dumb to have melee artifacts potentially do 150 damage a hit and to have lightning artifacts with 0 cooldown, so I made a patch that should hopefully address this.

https://github.com/goonstation/goonstation/pull/4291

As for teleport and forcefield wands, I think those are fine as they are for now, especially for forcefield wands the ability to make several walls is pretty important in my opinion.
We can make another patch for those when Camryn Stern depopulates cog1 with them. :p