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Ideas for a wraith rework
#1
Spooktober is coming, and what better time to put some work in on everyone's most/least favorite antag, the wraith?  I've had a thread about this before, and I'm probably going to rehash some if not most of it, but I've got some new ideas as well, and I'm going to lead with them.

First off, the extreme difficulty in actually fighting a wraith turns many people off.  It's fun to play, less so to fight.  I'd rather not completely remove its ability to avoid getting attacked if it wants, since I feel like there's a niche for an antag that's intended to be survived rather than defeated, so my personal opinion is that the best way to make wraith more engaging to fight is to give it more incentives to actually manifest.  Ultimately, this means buffing manifested wraiths, and therefore wraiths in general.

The big thing I was thinking was abilities that wraiths could only use while manifested.  At the moment I've got two ideas.
Pestilence Cloud - this ability summons a smoke cloud of a randomly chosen but dangerous poison/disease reagent, centered on the wraith.  Potentially able to kill a whole lot of people, but it puts you at risk since you have to be right in the middle of them to get the most effect out of it.
Ectoplasmic Shell (better name tbd) - this ability can be used to provide you with a sort of force field that absorbs a certain amount of damage before failing.  As long as it's up, it reflects projectiles, so egun spam and the like can't be used to effortlessly take you out, and it also gives you a melee attack.  Like, some sort of glowing sword or scythe or something along those lines.  Hurts like hell, causes bleeding, can sever limbs.
I'd also suggest having the WP gain from Haunt scale with your WP regen, so it still provides a meaningful bonus after eating a bunch of corpses.  Of course, this runs into the "million WP and nothing to spend it on" issue, so if that's implemented I'd recommend having abilities upgrade to require more WP but have a shorter cooldown at certain WP or WP regen thresholds, as I suggested in the previous thread.
Having the Haunt manifest and the "walked over salt" manifest function identically w/r/t WP regen might also be a good idea, it seems like it'd be simpler code wise but I don't code so maybe it wouldn't.
You could also have manifested wraiths leave trails of miasma as they move, just for style.

I also have a few ideas for abilities for wraiths to use any time, manifested or not.
Corrupt - pretty much a cosmetic ability.  When used a number of tiles around you gain appearance changes - floor tiles become void tiles, walls bleed, things that shouldn't have eyes start having eyes, that sort of thing.
Infect - when used on a player, it puts 20u of spiders in their bloodstream.  When used on an npc mob like a monkey, it puts 20u of a random chem from the following list into the bloodstream: Spiders, spider eggs, corrupted nanomachines, venom, strychnine, or rajaijah.
Rend Space - when used, it causes a dark anomaly to randomly spawn somewhere on station.  Potentially very destructive if people are busy/not paying attention/lazy.

With regards to currently existing abilities, I feel that the cooldown for poltergeist could be reduced, and/or they could be given greater reign to move around and do things - flockminds can spam flocktraces, so there's some precedence for an antag that can effectively duplicate itself, albeit in an antag that's still in development.

I realize that some of these ideas could make wraiths significantly stronger, and would likely require extensive playtesting, but I can't think of a more appropriate time to try out buffing the spookiest antag than the spookiest month.
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Messages In This Thread
Ideas for a wraith rework - by Mouse - 09-05-2020, 01:45 PM
RE: Ideas for a wraith rework - by Studenterhue - 09-11-2020, 01:20 PM
RE: Ideas for a wraith rework - by TheMaskedMan2 - 09-17-2020, 12:41 PM
RE: Ideas for a wraith rework - by Frank_Stein - 09-17-2020, 05:10 PM
RE: Ideas for a wraith rework - by Mouse - 09-18-2020, 06:06 AM
RE: Ideas for a wraith rework - by Dickles - 09-17-2020, 06:40 PM
RE: Ideas for a wraith rework - by Frank_Stein - 09-17-2020, 07:25 PM
RE: Ideas for a wraith rework - by Wisecrack34 - 09-17-2020, 10:54 PM
RE: Ideas for a wraith rework - by Sundance - 09-18-2020, 08:36 AM
RE: Ideas for a wraith rework - by Mouse - 10-01-2020, 04:32 AM
RE: Ideas for a wraith rework - by Kira - 10-07-2020, 09:59 AM

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