Some thoughts on wraith

[Mouse]

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?

[Zamujasa]

One thing some of the later Disgaea games did was add the ability to use "mana" (points gained from killing enemies) to enhance skills, which boosted their power but also raised the SP cost by a bunch. So you'd go from having "Fire" to "Fire +1", and it'd cost 4 to like, 16. So in this case "Command" might throw more things, or throw them harder, Decay would eat more stamina or even force a short knockdown, that sorta thing.


As for the more spooky things thing: Admin buildmode has a "Spook" option, would be hilarious to tie it in and add more spooks. The ability that does various spooky stuff is very good and it would be fun to encourage more of that.

[Drago156]

I think this would be the right place to say that the poltergeist created from Wraiths could use with some work, as they are now the game likes to be inconsistent on how far away you can go from your portal and the actual wraith, and often times a place where you think you can reach just gets you yelled at and damaged as well as (quite laggily) teleported away. I think if there was some kind of indicator as to how far your portal border reached as well as where the wraith was, these would be less annoying. I also think that maybe letting poltergeists be inside the range of any portal would be pretty neat and allow the wraith to be a little more tactical with portal placements while being less restricting to the poltergeists.

[Nnystyxx]

I can confirm that when you get to high spookypoints, Wraith becomes a lot of sitting on your hands waiting. No other antagonist has that much of a sheer delay on being able to do anything of substance, and it gets really frustrating. Having really high points is almost a curse for succeeding because they're worthless

I also agree on the Decay stuff. Lean into the scariness. Goonlore and telescience zones have some truly unsettling shit in them; the Wraith should be more than just a slightly angry ghost.

[Roomba]

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.

This is the crux of the issue with buffing wraith. They are one of the least satisfying antags to fight - tediously sprinkle the station with salt, hope the wraith slips up somewhere in sight, and even when you beat it till it disappears you never know if it's dead, so you're constantly on edge. It's not scary, it's rote and boring. Unless something is done to make fighting the wraith less of a chore, people will react tp the new improved wraith in much the same way as the old one - calling the shuttle at the earliest opportunity.

(and no, giving the wraith more 'spooky' features does not actually make it more fun for those on the receiving end, only for the wraith.)

[Nnystyxx]

Seems to me like overall Wraith should have more actual interactivity in fighting it. Why not make Wraiths themselves unique beyond just their names? Perhaps they have particular things that weaken them beyond just salt, or perhaps learning their name grants you a measure of strength against them. Maybe crew could wear some form of trinket that blesses their body and renders them impossible for the Wraith to desecrate for points, or reanimate, in return for a slot?

Lean into the supernatural aspect of Wraiths. Make them feel less like a random event beating you up and more like a uniquely powerful, yet also uniquely vulnerable, threat.

[Recusor]

Im pretty passionate about wraith - Its probably one of my favourite antags at this stage, but i totally agree that there are some issues:

First id like to link to a couple of previous threads that have had good discussion. Not all directly relevant, but good to see what was previously discussed I think:

https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=12389

https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=11592

https://forum.ss13.co/showthread.php?tid=10305

Some of the things that were mentioned in the past that I always thought were a neat idea included having a summoning ritual of some kind that would be difficult, but allow you to choose when to engage it. If this were to happen, some kind of battle of wills would be cool, not sure the best way to implement.

Also, the idea of absorbing corpses seems lackluster. It leads to alot of waiting generally. A better idea might be adding a terror, or sanity meter, similar to christmas cheer perhaps? For every death on the station, or every one who sees a dead body, terror increases which helps with . For a successful cloning, or burial, or incineration, or other positive things, terror could decrease. Miasma would DEFINTIELY add alot, so leaving bodies out is bad. Maybe psychiatrist and drugs like haloperidol, ketamine, other "calming" drugs could help too. Using candles to combat somehow would be great too.

[Sundance]

One thing some of the later Disgaea games did was add the ability to use "mana" (points gained from killing enemies) to enhance skills, which boosted their power but also raised the SP cost by a bunch. So you'd go from having "Fire" to "Fire +1", and it'd cost 4 to like, 16. So in this case "Command" might throw more things, or throw them harder, Decay would eat more stamina or even force a short knockdown, that sorta thing.


As for the more spooky things thing: Admin buildmode has a "Spook" option, would be hilarious to tie it in and add more spooks. The ability that does various spooky stuff is very good and it would be fun to encourage more of that.

Personally I feel this is the best approach, this way wraiths could max out certain (but not all - should be a restriction to this, so it's strategic) powers, akin to blob. Improved powers shouldn't necessary translate to better cooldown / higher strength, but scarier and new abilities tied in with it.

This should be all powers imo, even drain / speak to mortals (forget the name) should have this ability to upgrade. I'd personally love to upgrade the speak ability so that I can constantly yab at my targets non-stop, trash talking them.

[aft2001]

Side note, Wraith is so rare that even though I've had it on for literally 3 years, I've NEVER been picked as one, despite having a low antag rate (I typically have most antag roles off, so my count of times having been an antag is much lower than others, resulting in me having a higher weight for the antag selection process)

Also giving Wraiths a more lovecraftian horror type style would be just ?. I LOVE the idea of making drains, sinks, and walls bleed and give off toxic miasma and even disease.



Additionally, I think the issue of wraith balance should center around Growing Weakness. What I mean by this is the fact that wraiths should become weaker and more vulnerable the more they use their more potent and powerful abilities - making you involuntarily pop into existence at worst, and temporarily decreasing your health if you apparate. The more WP you spend at once, the weaker you get, and the more easily you should be able to be countered. If you just haunt and scare the bejeesus out of the crew, you should be near immortal - but if you raise revenants and skeletons, emag borgs, etc. you become more easily counterable.

In addition, using certain abilities in certain circumstances should have a lower or higher WP cost - decaying a buttbot should have a much lower cost and resulting cooldown than decaying the AI turret controls, for example.

Upgrading abilities to reduce cooldowns and strengthen them would be cool, too.

[Mouse]

Bumping this because I have more thoughts on wraith and I'd probably end up linking it anyways.

One thing I've been thinking about is Haunt.  It typically only gets used early on by wraiths, since their WP regen will eventually outweigh what they get from haunting, and a corporeal wraith is incredibly vulnerable.  Even early on it tends to just get used in space outside the monkey pen on Cog1, to maximize WP gain while minimizing people actually noticing it.

What I feel wraiths need is incentives to use Haunt, and to do so in a way that actually involves them haunting.  For simplicity, it might be best to just fold all of this into being corporeal, so a wraith that moves over salt can also do things other than running around in circles as people chase it.

The first idea I have is to give corporeal wraiths an actual attack.  Touch someone to cool them down a bit, deal a small amount of burn damage, heal a bit, and maybe generate some WP as well.  That way, manifesting in the halls won't be quite the death sentence and/or farcical routine it is now, since you can fight back and the healing means that you can go toe to toe with an unarmed opponent.  I feel this will also give an incentive to manifest, since as wraith I often find myself waiting for the RNG to finish off someone in crit so I can eat them.  If you gave me a way to damage them directly beyond throwing stuff at them for minimal brute, I'd use it even if it made me more vulnerable.

The second idea is to make manifesting more noticeable.  In addition to the chat message, anyone who sees a wraith manifest could *scream.  Maybe they could have a small chance of dropping what they're holding from fright.

Also, I feel like corporeal wraiths should be able to move in space.  It just feels wrong that they can't.

Beyond this there's a few minor QoL things I think wraiths could use, like the toggle lighting/health indicator that ghosts have.  It makes sense that wraiths would be able to see in the dark and tell how close someone is to death.