Pathology improvements & suggestions

[Rain2025]

I've said this before in other places, but I might as well repeat it here again. This is my plan so far for how pathology can hopefully be somewhat brought in line:

• Remove mutating in the stat adjusting window to get symptoms, it is way too quick and it is a boring way to do things compared to the intended method of the dna analyzer.
  
• Potentially add other ways of curing that do not require pathology. (Curing with just suppressants or maybe something different). This will help people that do not want to learn pathology (for reasons that are completely beyond my understanding :^)) and it will also make it possible to cure pathogens if the pathologist that made them blew up the machines.
  
• Make it so you can only have a limited amount of spreading symptoms on a pathogen, so people can protect themselves more adequately (airborne transmission->get internals, etc...) rather than always needing the whole set of gear. In addition, remove white shoes as a kind of needed protection because that is hella dumb.
  
• Potentially also limit the amount of non-spreading symptoms a pathogen can have. This can also serve to rebalance the different microbodies so Virus isn't the best in pretty much any situation. (So maybe a bacterium can have loads of symptoms, but can only go to stage 3 while a virus could go to stage 5 but you could only put one tier 5 symptom on it. Something like that). For the purposes of the dna analyzer, there could be a kind of microbody that can carry an unlimited amount of symptoms but cannot advance past stage 1 or something. Maybe fungi, fuck fungi.
  
• Add more interesting beneficial symptoms, most of the current ones are just passive healing, which is really boring. Of course, this is much easier said than done.
  
• Make it so a health analyzer shows the general amount of beneficial vs harmful symptoms a pathogen has, so people can tell if a pathogen is harmful. This should reduce the amount of times that I get fucking murdered am falsely arrested.
  

I agree that limiting the types of transmission is a good idea (hence my permability co-efficent comment) and definitely think the Health Analyzer could at the very least use an additional upgrade to scan for pathogens generic if not the exact symptoms. I don't know that I agree with unupgraded health analyzers should have this function though as it is kinda a specialized type of thing to look for; technically your first option with pathogen defensive measures can and should be prevention and mitigation; it's just currently we have no real options to detect pathogen activities because until someone broadcasts over radio we have no idea a pathogen is loose.

Also personally I think the whole "suppressant" thing could use a rework - something along the lines of a vaccination for unaffected crew that can take the "cure" in prevention or absence of symptoms to prevent ever developing the virus (obviously once it's properly diagnosed and treated to begin with). Not to "steal" any ideas but /tg/ has a real solid virology system that has similar traits to goons pathos so maybe people could draw comparisons between the systems and come up with a goon-unique system that works in an equally efficient capacity to /tg/'s virology. Again not to steal the system directly - but to draw inspiration for a potential set of changes.