Changeling sting testmerge feedback

[Lefinch]

The PR itself if you want to comment there or get detail.


I'll dip in first on this as I've seen some discussion on discord and it always just evaporates into the ether after, and we've just come out of a testmerge period for it.

I'm pretty heavily in support of how it turned out! I saw some really interesting dynamics develop from having multiple stings to use in a round. I'll try and break down thoughts into bulletpoints so it's not too long. Hopefully others will pipe up with their own feedback if they haven't in the PR itself. 

• I think for RP (and classic to a much less degree given the neurotoxin tweak) worked out great. There's still plenty of time to chat with people before stinging and it demonstrably removes the loud deathgasp that's very hard to pretend I don't hear from two rooms away. People can still scarper if they want though that's hampered by neurotoxin's effects too. Win win, we lose capulettum's very long decay time but to be honest I always felt you don't really ever have time to spend talking to your meals anyway for fear of a visitor. Not something I've personally had a problem with but people mentioned its a plus not to have I paraphrase "half the crew get smelling salts the moment someone gets eaten" Again, never actually seen much of that myself. 
  
• Neurodepressant seemed to work pretty well though less to say here. I feel like there might be room to tweak its own cooldown slightly, but I think if this does get implemented we might have to find a balance on it over time as people get used to it being in a Changeling arsenal.
  
• Madness toxin is great, I agree it should cost something to get and I agree with the lengthy cooldown. I saw a couple of really high quality deployments of it that turned situations truly chaotic. I would strongly recommend attempting to maintain that in a subsequent merge. I'd rather it be tweaked than outright removed too.
  
• Hemotoxins seems like something that didn't cause any immediate problems or huge advantages that I saw. I was trying to watch closely given we've made bleeding in general more serious but it just didn't crop up during the test merge for me. Maybe others will have had seen it in action more to comment.
  
• I Do think this combination make Changelings in general more dangerous, even outside of more skilled hands. I don't think that's a bad thing, I do think that there would be a general adjustment to how a potential changeling threat is treated both by the crew and security as people adapted: certainly less willingness to be suckered in for a meal. However, this section is extremely speculative on my part. 
  
• I really liked it
  

[Asterion0]

Got changeling once during the testmerge on classic, and took the opportunity to exclusively mess around with the new stings (sadly couldnt use madness as I was busy stinging people and not killing them).
Most notable is that the hemotoxin sting is obscenely obvious, to the point you almost always are outing yourself using it (I was already outing myself so it was less an issue) but I also didnt try to repeatedly sting someone, which is likely more lethal than dispersed stings.
The neurodepressant was actually fairly strong, exclusively because it lulled people into a false sense of security even when they faced the early neurotoxin effects. I was even able to use it once on an HoS, and then sting them for real a second time and escaped once they fell asleep after opening the door on accident via misstep (this was probably extremely luck based but still)
As for the removal of LSD sting, I honestly didnt notice until after the round, since it's honestly always been fairly useless except for outing yourself. Even just neurodepressant on its own honestly does more than lsd could ever really do IMO.