How to balance the rise in popularity of pathology

[gandalfphysicist]

Pathology's biggest advantage for a while is that hardly anyone knew how to use it and hardly anyone touched it. In the past few weeks, a lot of people have picked it up and have been showing how devastating it can be (myself included).

Now that people are finally starting to look in it's direction, plagues are becoming more common and a large portion of the player base has been raging against the existence of pathology. And as someone who really enjoys working with pathogens, it's extremely unsettling to see the metagrudging and general hate this is causing.

So I have a suggestion to fix pathology's biggest problem: curing

First: curing a pathogen requires an in depth knowledge of pathology.

Second: all of the main means of curing pathogens are in the same place pathogens are made: pathology.

Third: it is almost impossible for someone infected to create a cure if the manufacturer of the pathogen in question knows what they're doing.

Here's my solution.

Limited single use instant cure emergency injectors: these could be located in the medbay and armoury (two in each). Instant cure, no pathology knowledge needed, balanced out by its rarity.

Next, immune boosters: these would be the most common prevention measures for diseases. Stick one of these in you and the advancement speed of all pathogens inside you are halved and also rolls a chance to send pathogens with a low enough suppression threshold into a remissive state. This'll buy enough time to CDC a cure or find one yourself.

Hopefully something along these lines will be implemented in the future as pathology is suffering from a lack of reliable counterplay so much that people would rather bomb pathology at the beginning of the game than deal with it, which is making life hell for people who love pathology as well as those infected.

[Wisecrack34]

Haven't played for a while but have felt pathology needs a rework, this would be a good rework to test out.

[aft2001]

I fully agree with indirectly nerfing the strength of pathology's impact on the station due to its rise in popularity. Also, the cure-alls should absolutely be very rare. However, there should also be symptom inhibiting reagents, as to buy people time to synthesize a cure or order them from the CDC (provided it's not broken, I dunno if it still is or ever was). They wouldn't cure the disease, but they'd suppress the lethal/dangerous/really annoying symptoms, while giving you some other symptoms (vomiting, coughing, sweating, etc.), so that you're obviously infected, but hey, at least you're not dying!

Immunity boosters would be interesting as well. There absolutely should be drawbacks to this as to prevent powergaming. They should throw your immune system into overdrive, causing reagents to deplete far faster inside of you, allergic reactions to be much harsher (so histamines are a lot more deadly), and even give you temporary allergies (perhaps to some medicines?). The immunity boosting reagent would probably deplete VERY slowly as well.

It's important to ensure that the hard work that pathology requires to make a successful pathogen remains worth it, as over-nerfing will lead to pathology becoming very unpopular, thus ruining an interesting mechanic. Playtesting is likely required for these fixes.

Making Pathology able to help the station should also be a part of this fix, for a big reason: It's largely a way to fuck over the station (like Toxins is), or to practice fucking over the station. As such, people expect nothing good to come from pathology, and the element of surprise may be completely gone as soon as people start coughing. If beneficial symptoms were available, then people wouldn't be as suspicious of pathology. That and another way for the station to benefit from an existing department/game mechanic is always a good thing!

[gandalfphysicist]

There are actually plenty of beneficial symptoms: sunglass glands, brute healing, burn healing, oxygen conversion, oxygen production, ethanol processing, and a bunch of others. The problem is that their effects aren't very noticeable because they're usually just small regeneration effects, so people don't typically notice beneficial symptoms when they are going viral, which is making people think all pathogens are bad. (Id suggest reading the symptom list on the wiki)

Though the main issue with creating regen pathogens is actually that it's fairly difficult to aim for them due to pathology's random nature. It would be nice to be able to do something to a pathogen to make beneficial symptoms more common though. Or maybe just start with low teir brute/burn healing unlocked.

[aft2001]

Perhaps make it so that all of the beneficial symptoms (except maybe some very rare/powerful ones) are always available and are noticeable, such as from messages saying "You realize that you're not breathing anymore, and yet your lungs are still filled with air." But, as to not stray from the original topic, a reduction of the severity of plagues should be implemented.

[gandalfphysicist]

That would be perfect. I feel like pathology's power is good as is though. It's super difficult to learn, it's time consuming, and it's heavily random, I do think disorientation should be moved to T4 or T5 though as it's a hard CC disable.

Nerfing pathology itself would more likely kill it entirely than balance it, that's why I suggested preventive measures and more counterplay as opposed to flat buffs and nerfs.

[Frank_Stein]

I think making the targeting system of pathogens more complicated might work, so that you can't just infect the whole station in one go. 

Maybe tying the pathogens ability to infect to traits in the player character. Things like genetic qualifiers like blood-type, hair color, sex, or certain mutations present in their DNA like accents or obesity

Part of dealing with a pathogen could involve figuring out the common link between sick crew so you can identify who is at risk.

---

Also, orange juice should have immunity boosters

[Flaborized]

I believe the reason most people don't like pathology is because seemingly every round someone is doing patho some horrible hellplague is accidentally or "accidentally" released. Nonantag pathogens are more often a problem than hellviruses made by baddies.

I like the idea of giving the crew more means to actually deal with a pathogen, but I feel as if pathology players may not like a change like that. If you spend 40 minutes+ of your antag round on a boring, RNG-based system where you sit at a computer and press buttons to create some hellplague, you're going to want some results, and by what is essentially nerfing the ability of pathology to do its thing you make pathology an even less worthwhile way to spend an antag round.

Maybe there could be some sort of 1TC traitor item for docs that you could somehow put into your pathogen to make it immune to whatever common "easy way out" tools the crew has. It'd makes nonantag pathologists less of a huge annoying problem by making curing their pathogens easy and simple while still allowing sneaky traitors who want to use pathology for evil to do so without countering their diseases becoming too easy for it to be worth doing.

[aft2001]

I really like the idea of making hellplagues something really only traitors can create

[Wisecrack34]

Flaborized's idea is good, please do that (Maybe add a form of mutadone alternative that only temporarily defeats the traitor'd hellvirus and too many units can make you immune)

[aft2001]

A few TC for a sample of Syndicate Pathogen with a special gene that prevented curing, outside of Pathology Curing, would indeed solve a lot of the issues here. The sheer havoc you can unleash is well within the amount of effort one has to put into Pathology to create a hellplague, not including the threat of depowering or dying horribly or having Pathology somehow ruined during a round.

[Spoodle]

I think it'd be beneficial to make pathogens harder to catch. Hell, biosuits barely work half of the time, right? Don't you need internals?

[Technature]

Part of learning pathology is learning how to cure diseases.

If more people are learning how to do this, more people need to get off their damn ass and actually make this shit go away!

[Erev]

Hi there! Old Path nerd here. This comes and goes in waves and I know I've posted on this before but here we go.

Cures:
Cures are actually super simple and require very few chemicals to be tested. This information is not only located deep in the files of the latest Goon release but now also on the wiki.

There is also already an 'instant cure' option. Talk to your local QM and be ready to send a sample.

Transmission:
Late game it can be really hard to transmit diseases due, most often, to people gearing up amd turning on internals to deal with the gaping holes in the station. As a good murder disease takes time (and luck! more on that later) to make this often stalls a traitor pathologist's disease in its tracks - it has for me. If you see someone sick, cover up!

That being said there was an old bug which got fixed then reverted back to bugged again which meant that glass walls did nothing to stop the spread of pathogens. I don't know if the bug remains but I suspect it does and that could be another large part.

The last part is that there are chucklefucks out there - usually the captain for some reason - that just like spreading diseases. They should be dealt with.

Additional Considerations:
With the current system a good murder disease is entirely luck based. I've gotten two T5 symptoms as a traitor before just to have them both be beneficial 40 minutes into the round. The RNG is infuriating and when you get something special you want to suicide by it often (typically with monkies or friends alongside you). The glass bug or idiots wandering in can causw this to get out and... well... yeah.

Similarly it is really hard to make a good pathogen because you are stabbing blindly at it. I've managed it a couple times before but it is rare and the symptoms are rarely ever noticed apart from sunglasses. The effects being noisier and more powerful would help, as would the ability to steer towards good or bad symptoms.

The metagrudging is, sadly, a real thing. The RNG and the fact that certain people will act up if I was in or around Path made me give that life up for Mechanics (along with learning most there was to learn). The admins have had to step in on occasion.

Path has gotten several nerfs to date. These include symptom stacking, the CDC cures, and the slowing of the Pathogen Manipulator. The only real buffs it got were the ability to synthesize a new sample for budget cash and removing a 2.5% chance each splice or manipulation that the pathogen would simply poof and disappear - even if you did things 100% correctly.

The Immediate Future:
I would like to see more good symptoms in the futures. Ones that are stronger, ones that are different. I'd also like them to be more notable.

I would also like to see the ability to steer a pathogen towards good or bad symptoms while doing analysis. Got a promising start on a symptom line? Looks like its 40% good, 40% neutral, and 20% bad stuff. It'll help everyone reach their goals faster and without too many tears. It also means you can crack down easier on people making and releasing bad shit because they should know better.

I do not beleive the latest Pathology fad will last long. I suggest giving it a bit of time to run its course and talk to those that are going past the threshhold of being little shits with it. Hitting it again with the nerf hammer will only make a niche and most often unrewarding system worse to use.

The Far Future:
I want to see another Pathology rewrite. I have ideas for this that include station funds, different z-levels, and more. I want people to travel and find symptoms in computer databanks and in dead bodies and rank up those symptoms selectively. I want a cap on how many symptoms and of what severity are included - and a way to expand that cap with hard work, dedication, and/or being a traitor.

Conclusion:
Pathology as but is isn't in the best shape right bow but it is not in need of the nerf hammer. It needs tools to help make it a productive part of the station through guided symptom finding and/or a rewrite. Don't judge it too harshly too quickly.

[Frank_Stein]

I want people to travel and find symptoms in computer databanks and in dead bodies and rank up those symptoms selectively.

We've got all sorts of molds growing on the station that might be a way to harvest pathogens.

Maybe also pulling them out of people that ate spoiled food, or the food itself?

Would also get pathologists moving around the station, both interacting with other people and giving them an excuse to spread things