Goonhub
01-23-2020, 08:45 AM
On WP
Since WP regen grows exponentially, you will eventually reach the point where your WP regen outstrips your ability to spend it. Depending on how long you manage to stay alive, you can easily reach the point where you've got six figure WP and most of your time is spent waiting for your skills to come off cooldown.
My idea is to have some method by which you can significantly increase the cost of your abilities (aside from absorb corpse) but also cut their cooldowns. I'm not sure if a toggleable mode or having it automatically happen above a certain WP or WP regen threshold would be better. Having multiple levels of it might also be a good idea.
My suggestion for the numbers would be something like cost x10, cooldown x0.5, although actual playtesting would be needed.
On Rarity
Wraith seems to be a pretty popular antag, which makes it a pity that it's so rare. (For an idea as to how rare, I've had wraith on since shortly after I started playing in January of last year. It wasn't until this January that I ever rolled it, although I'd been made one my admins a few times before.) If the wiki is correct, wraiths only appear in Mixed (action) and Traitor, although the latter one is rare. One idea would be to allow roundstart wraiths on other game modes, such as Changeling, Vampire, Wizard, or Spy. Another would be to make mixed more common.
On Wraith Abilities
A good wraith is terrifying in a way that no other antag is. Part of that is simply because wraiths can only be killed if they make a mistake. No matter how clever you are, no matter how well-equipped you are, no matter how robust you are, if a wraith is playing carefully enough you can't do a damn thing to it. They are, more than vampires and lings, horror villains.
My suggestion is to turn that horror up a notch. Right now, decay either drains stamina or acts like an emag. Why not give it unique abilities as well? Decay a drain, or a showerhead, or a sink, and it starts spraying out blood, or vomit, or spiders. Decay a bush, and it actually decays, getting a nice rotten sprite and generating miasma. Decay a wall and it starts bleeding. That sort of thing.
Judging by their names and appearance (look at the sprite, they've got three eyes) wraiths are at least in part intended to be lovecraftian entities rather than mere malevolent spirits. Give them some maddening abilities, like making people hallucinate, turning tiles into void, making things grow eyes or mouths, that sort of thing.
Perhaps give wraiths (a very expensive) ability to generate or infect someone with a disease reagent. Corrupted nanomachines are always fun. So are spider eggs. Or just regular spiders, even though those aren't a disease. If all the monkeys in the monkey pen suddenly start vomiting spiders, then that's certainly horrific.
(More abilities would also help with the aforementioned WP issue, although I'd consider my proposed solution to that to be better.)
I'm sure there's something else I meant to put here but I don't remember. So, uh, thoughts?
Since WP regen grows exponentially, you will eventually reach the point where your WP regen outstrips your ability to spend it. Depending on how long you manage to stay alive, you can easily reach the point where you've got six figure WP and most of your time is spent waiting for your skills to come off cooldown.
My idea is to have some method by which you can significantly increase the cost of your abilities (aside from absorb corpse) but also cut their cooldowns. I'm not sure if a toggleable mode or having it automatically happen above a certain WP or WP regen threshold would be better. Having multiple levels of it might also be a good idea.
My suggestion for the numbers would be something like cost x10, cooldown x0.5, although actual playtesting would be needed.
On Rarity
Wraith seems to be a pretty popular antag, which makes it a pity that it's so rare. (For an idea as to how rare, I've had wraith on since shortly after I started playing in January of last year. It wasn't until this January that I ever rolled it, although I'd been made one my admins a few times before.) If the wiki is correct, wraiths only appear in Mixed (action) and Traitor, although the latter one is rare. One idea would be to allow roundstart wraiths on other game modes, such as Changeling, Vampire, Wizard, or Spy. Another would be to make mixed more common.
On Wraith Abilities
A good wraith is terrifying in a way that no other antag is. Part of that is simply because wraiths can only be killed if they make a mistake. No matter how clever you are, no matter how well-equipped you are, no matter how robust you are, if a wraith is playing carefully enough you can't do a damn thing to it. They are, more than vampires and lings, horror villains.
My suggestion is to turn that horror up a notch. Right now, decay either drains stamina or acts like an emag. Why not give it unique abilities as well? Decay a drain, or a showerhead, or a sink, and it starts spraying out blood, or vomit, or spiders. Decay a bush, and it actually decays, getting a nice rotten sprite and generating miasma. Decay a wall and it starts bleeding. That sort of thing.
Judging by their names and appearance (look at the sprite, they've got three eyes) wraiths are at least in part intended to be lovecraftian entities rather than mere malevolent spirits. Give them some maddening abilities, like making people hallucinate, turning tiles into void, making things grow eyes or mouths, that sort of thing.
Perhaps give wraiths (a very expensive) ability to generate or infect someone with a disease reagent. Corrupted nanomachines are always fun. So are spider eggs. Or just regular spiders, even though those aren't a disease. If all the monkeys in the monkey pen suddenly start vomiting spiders, then that's certainly horrific.
(More abilities would also help with the aforementioned WP issue, although I'd consider my proposed solution to that to be better.)
I'm sure there's something else I meant to put here but I don't remember. So, uh, thoughts?