[CLOSED PR] Reworks wraith, adds specialization paths; Harbinger, Plaguebringer, T...

[swinglow20]

I agree with zjdtmkhzt, about skull production. To further that point, it would be risky acquiring the skulls anyway purely because it will cause a mess and generate corpses. Which two of the three wraith types will LOVE in that brief window they'd have before you finish assembling the skull. Assuming you don't use it right away anyway. 

I can see a lot of risky gambles being taken on both sides in that situation. Which equals fun, imo

Ooh, i didnt think about the corpses, thats actually a really good counter

[Bartimeus]

Here's a few things i've coded recently that i'd like input on;

Harbinger's summoning portal

Works a bit differently now. First off you have to be manifested to create it. It cant be created in space or in a wall. When you create it you are given the option of a couple different critter choices and "random". Those critters vary in power, going from an agressive bat to a skeleton and even a brullbar.
The portal starts inactive for 30 seconds then starts up. With time, it slowly grows in intensity, and emits more and more light to show the crew its around. The creatures aren't spawn near the anchor, but instead spawn in a 3x3 radius around the anchor, expanding up to a 7x7 radius as the anchor gains power. Destroying the portal kills all the creatures it has spawned so far.
Each creature has an internal "weight". Spawning bigger creatures means that there is a longer cooldown in between summons, so for instance you can get a skeleton every 30 seconds, but a brullbar every 2 minutes approximately. The weight also counts towards a "critter cap", that increases as the portal gains in power. So for instance if you spawn skeletons you can get up to 7, while brullbars, being much stronger, can only be 2 per portal.
Being near the portal as wraith gives you increased point generation to make it enticing to defend. You can't have more than one portal at once, but you can replace your old one, although it starts at power level 0 and will have to grow up.

This new behavior is meant to avoid the issue of mobs all spawning on top of each other and being "quarantined" by welding the doors for instance. I'm currently thinking of adding a punishment to the wraith if they let the portal get destroyed, and perhaps making it so that every "spawn tick", the summoning circle checks for nearby people and tries to spawn the critter somewhat close by.



Some people emitted concerns over trickster being a bit weak, so here's two new abilities i gave it to make it more viable;

Fake sound

The trickster can now pick any location and play a sound of their choice from a list. A simple power, but one that i think will really get people to second guess themselves. The sounds include gunshots, death gasps, c saber noises, explosions and more!

Rune trap

The trickster can now place rune traps around the station. There cannot be more than a certain amount of rune traps on station, and they cant be within 3 tiles of each other, nor can they be placed in space or in a wall. The trickster has to be manifested to place down a trap, and when they do so they get a choice of which type of trap they want. There is a variety of traps with a range of effects, ranging from randomly teleporting someone, setting them on fire, doing some damage, injecting them with rajaijah to simulate madness, and more! Traps do not trigger if you "walk" on them, like with banana peels, but will spring into action if you run or sprint.

The traps spawn visible, then five seconds later become invisible up to "cloak" level, so thermals reveal them. However there is a way to spot them! If they are within sight line of a lit lamp, and that lamp is within 3 tiles of the trap, it doesnt go invisible, or gets revealed if it was! The trap goes invisible again if it is in darkness. The wraith can therefore make the traps sneakier by placing them in maint, or by using their abilities to break lights or sap apc power! This also has the effect of overall increasing darkness on the map, which is something that fits trickster. Trickster has a fair lot of abilities that could trick people into going to check out a situation, by playing a fake sound, or using illusions, and trick them into tripping the trap. Of course making sure that the lights are not all broken is a simple counterplay that makes the engineering department, or anyone willing to make light tubes, more useful! If you see the trap, hitting it with any object will destroy it.

Hopefully this should be enough to give Trickster a way to more directly interfere with people, without being overpowered, and with fair counterplay.

[DioChasek]

If there is a harmlube as a rune trap it truly would be the most devious choice.

[Harry Wizard]

I like the manifest to create trap/portal idea. Definitely a good method to achieve that goal of giving the wraith more reasons to make themselves vulnerable for crew counterplay. I WILL fill the armory with skeletons.

Will the Harbinger portal check to see if the minions it spawns will end up in space? If we put it in maint near a wall unlucky RNG might just dump half of them outside in space. If that is intended I guess it would force the wraith to take riskier portal placements for better minion spawn location yield. But it would be kind of annoying.

[Bartimeus]

I've made it so that minions cannot spawn in space or in walls, so there's no risk there.

Also i've made it so that manifested wraiths can now open any door that isnt bolted, welded or unpowered. This shouldn't give them a sizeable advantage in chase considering they can't close it behind them, and they can already open doors by using their "decay" and "open doors" spook abilities.

The main reasons i've done this is to allow the wraith to be a bit more cheeky with his manifests and be able to hide into maint instead of just being stuck into a corner. Also this allows trickster wraiths who are currently hidden as a crewmate to open doors in a more believable manner, since beforehand they would just be stuck in front of the door without any way to open it without clearly outting themselves as a wraith.

[zhagsten]

Hello, I was reading recent PRs and found this project interesting, but I have a couple concerns.

The first is about Trickster's mass emag ability. I fear it's a bad idea. The effects of emag are very specific and work well with an antag who wants to work their path to an objective, but may cause more complicated chaos than confusion if used by an entity that doesn't care about actually emagging things, particularly if it's on an area and not a specific target. It's a Pandora box, with effects as benign as opening doors and others with a lot more consequences like freeing a cyborg. Some with tangential effects that may have unforeseen consequences in the way people play it, like I don't know emagging hyposprays. It's probably more tricky to balance than a summon that attacks spessmen.

The second is the possession ability. I think it's a dangerous idea to make a player lose control of their character and force them to watch it. There are some really strong "crowd control" effects in the game and they can be frustrating already. But they are short and so there's timing that the controller may miss, so you can hope to get out of it, and if not, your fate is sealed rapidly (death/thrall/absorbtion...). How much time is "awhile"? I think the difficulty to use the ability (long casting time) shouldn't be a reason to remove player control for too long. I think it should actually be short, pushing the wraith to think quickly on how to capitalize on it (venting the character, attacking others with their available weapons, destroying a counterplay item...).

Finally, I would like to add another idea for the Trickster, more in the idea of confusion : the ability to change the appearance of an object. Maybe something like first you use it on an object to store its appearance, then later you use it on another object to make it look like the previous one. Or swap the appearance of random items in an area. There may be restriction like a held item for a held item.

Good luck with the project.

[Bartimeus]

Thanks a lot for the valuable feedback!

I do think mass emagging might be worth reworking in to a new ability, both to make it more "interesting" to use and deal with. Im not sure if it would truly be tricky to balance, but it's on the whole fairly uninteresting compared to the other abilities the other wraiths currently have. I'll consider reworking it to something more suitable and interesting.

On the possession ability: It's extremely strong, yes, no doubt. However the wraith does have to expose itself if it wants to earn the possession points needed to take control of someone. Currently the possession lasts a minute and a half, and prevents suicide while you possess someone so that it doesnt end up in a "just kill this person" type of ability. You can still crawl out of an airlock however. I'm still toying with it a little in terms of balance but it's likely going to be difficult knowing exactly how powerful this ability is until it's been playtested im afraid.

And finally the last idea you have for an ability does sound like a lot of fun, and would be doable, i'm just not sure if it would be a "strong" enough replacement to mass emagging. There are already some concerns raised on how trickster might be a bit underwhelming for classic (although they now have quite potent traps), so i'll check out if this replacement would be sufficient without tanking it's viability too much.

[Kotlol]

Insted of mass emag, why not go with a "glitch" version.
Like doors opening and closing whenever.

I remember the rare moments where a door closes on someone and it does mass damage and is hilarious but doesnt kill, but this is rare.
Standard emags just "break the door open" but it would be more fun for a trickster to break the restriction of the door and close it while someone is in it.

Especially hilarious when a clown wants to sneak into science to make lube , the wraith then glitching the door, opening it, but closing it the moment the clown steps in and gets squished. THATS COMEDY!

[DioChasek]

On the other hand the mass emag on a fresh crate of robots ordered in cargo now that is a truly epic prank. All of a sudden you have a floor bot tearing out floors, a medbot on an injection rampage, a securitron wigging out on people, a firebot charging people, and a cleaner slipping people. Truly chaos in a single power click.

[Harry Wizard]

If there was a way to trap doors so they slammed shut on people or vending machines just 'happened' to tip over and smash someone walking by that'd be fantastic. In that same vein, getting N20 and plasma tanks to open themselves veeery slowly with creaking sounds to let people know somethings up with them.

[Kotlol]

If there was a way to trap doors so they slammed shut on people or vending machines just 'happened' to tip over and smash someone walking by that'd be fantastic. In that same vein, getting N20 and plasma tanks to open themselves veeery slowly with creaking sounds to let people know somethings up with them.

Also would be a fun trickster thing to curse someone with HORRIBLE BAD LUCK! Where they can haunt someone so long that every door hurts them, every vending machine lands on them and they just have to rush to the chapel to pray for a god to save them XD

Eitherway it just seems like a fun way of harming someone.. of course this abillity would have a long cooldown so you can't just spawn squish someone or flood medbay with 10 harm victims.

[Bartimeus]

Cursing people with bad luck or transforming some items so that they malfunction sounds fun in theory, but it sounds very similar to what you can already do with decay and im afraid that it'd become a bit redundant.

Currently im trying to come up with an idea for trickster that would involve light and shadow. I considered the following:

-Making a lightless area do damage or brain damage to whoever is in for a while unless they flee or turn on the lights. Sadly it didnt sound too exciting.
-Cursing someone with light or darkness weakness, so that they slowly burn either in the light or in the dark depending on the spell. But that sounds more bothersome to deal with that actually fun, not counting the fact you could probably harass someone and keep spamming it on them in a corner to essentially prevent them from moving.
-Swinglow proposed an ability that would cause a disorienting AOE in an area if it is dark enough, complete with shock emanating from the broken lights and a possible chance for a heart attack, for instance if they stay in the dark too long.

Ideally, i'd replace mass emagging with an ability that involves darkness, heart attacks/failures or both!

[glowbold]

tossing an idea out, only kind of sure it’s feasible:

Creeping Dread
When cast on a person, they get a new ‘disease’: Creeping Dread. When in darkness, they increment a Dread status effect timer. At certain Dread thresholds, they get chills -> tremors -> hallucinations -> hyperventilating (oxy/light brain) -> heart palpitations -> heart attack. This disease can be communicable when both people are in darkness, but standing with others in a lit room reduces the Dread counter and will slowly push the ‘disease’ into ‘remission’.

Drinking luminol/lumen, staring into a pen-light, or hopping in a tanning booth would be good cures.
—

This pushes the crew to actually fix the dang lights, makes it easier to force crew to move around (into your other japes (rune traps)).

For the wraith, it rewards keeping the station in darkness and plays up the “nerves on edge” feeling i think trickster is going for.

[Harry Wizard]

Cursing someone with temporary clown hands would be pretty great. I'd love to watch surgeons stab their own eyes out or the chef stab himself. Again -temporarily-.

Maybe the darkness weakness could help cause those hallucinations that inflict brain damage- it'd be a good signifier that 'HEY I AM NOW AFRAID OF THE DARK' and that they were actually being affected by it.

[Harry Wizard]

I just thought of another method of counter play with the wraith that doesn't directly involve exposing it. Anointing a corpse with Holy Water should defend it from being skeletonized/consumed/revenant for a short period.

As I understand it (but somehow never realized) formaldehyde can do something similar. But I've honestly never even noticed anyone doing this.