Miauw wrote:ThatSlyFox wrote:Gun Hog wrote:Miauw wrote:why do these threads always turn into "we should revert every balance change ever made and this will magically improve tgstation"
Because certain balance changes failed to improve the game, and instead detracted from it. Therefore, reverting them would be an improvement.
Pretty much this. Not all merges are good for the game.
and yet nobody ever provides arguments as to why, or which merges specifically
and people using departmental items for traitoring IS good, but how much were those really nerfed?
Well let's see. Spray bottles have a delay now, R&D can't be used for anything antagonistic but BoH and AI boards, unless you have an emag/you're a traitor specifically or magically convince the HoS/Captain to provide you with firing pins from the fucking armory. I suppose you could try to convince cargo to spend a shit ton of points on it (good luck), which then you could open with an armory ID. So that's pretty much entirely gone for any non-traitor antagonist. Telescience was removed that used to be able to be used to do all sorts of stuff (acquire equipment 'legally', steal the armory albeit with obvious sounds and visuals, etc.), to be replaced with the experimentor - something essentially useless that will, more times than not, kill you, and if you manage to get something useful, chances are it will kill you before you can use it nefariously.
Medbay has nerfed genetics (far more disabilities than before, so it takes much longer to find powers when it was already the longest taking research-oriented job on the station). OD/addiction mechanics entail that you can't abuse chemistry to give yourself buffs like you could in the past, given how crippling they are. Buffed upgrading (bluespace RPED esp.) means that cloning ends up upgraded much earlier than it usually was, meaning people are constantly being brought back into the round at an insane rate, and you can't even kill anyone permanently without taking out the cloner itself due to autobackup and the 5-10 people who go to back themselves up, often including high priority targets (heads). To excaberate this, those same people will cry murder on you post-cloning, so you can't even ditch em subtlely. Even if you take out the cloner, at that stage R&D will simply make a new one, either from tech storage boards or from R&D, so what's even the point?
Then there's cargo. Cargo was nerfed in only one way, there's now a transit time between the station and Centcom, which effectively doubles the time taken per shipment. This also means that it's harder to sneak in illict gear and such between shipments without killing all your collegues. Other than that, business as usual.
Then there's security who has, as previously explained, spammable bullshit AoE flashes that renders any strategem and equipment null if you don't have sunglasses, which come in very limited, and competitive supply stationwide. In the past, you weren't disoriented by the AoE flash (so you could operate by memory), but also the bulb would long since have burned out after the first few consecutive flashes, instead of lasting for 10+ consecutive spams, crippling the antagonist. Regardless, this means confronting an officer in combat, rather than bullshitting them, requires a specific piece of equipment, which is just bad design. Flashbangs you can, at least, go around the corner, and they require prep-time so you know one is being used anyway, while flashes have no cooldown and can be used without warning. Just put them back to their old-fashioned regular stun, seriously. Helmetcams are in a similar vein where there's simply no counterplay (you can turn them off, but by that time they'll already know the assailant and where you are, even if the victim only managed to get a 'HELP' off, given that the warden, more often than not is looking at cameras anyway), and hence they're ridiculously poor design.
Fast atmos means that flamethrowers, an atmos mainstay, are entirely useless as territory denial devices, for causing chaos, or even in combat. Seriously, the flame dissipates almost instantly on default settings (rather than lasting for quite a while), so you can't even keep an officer on fire with the residual flame while abusing the atmos or CE hardsuit, meaning the officer will have time to leisurely arrest you and roll around on the ground. It's pretty much a flat nerf, and it makes them almost entirely useless. You can use more fuel, of course, however, this has the nasty byproduct of only permitting a couple shots before reloading (with very bulky plasma tanks) or heading to atmos to refill, and even then it still quickly dissipates. It's also a fairly major nerf to plasma fires, making them last much shorter periods. On the plus side, it buffs hull breaches substantially.
Mining, do I even have to talk about mining? Skill requirement is rock-bottom when it used to be decently high, the mining rewards are a massive joke (stims, the primary long-term reward doesn't even work in hardsuits), and 100% of the job relies on R&D and robotics being nice enough to spare you with some equipment or an item. A good litmus test to determine if a job is rewarding, is to ask if an antagonist would want to perform it, in some capacity for the inevitable boons. What do antagonists even get from mining for 20 minutes, other than a jetpack you can steal from EVA with a single hacked door? Some brute resistance from goliaths, at most, but given the clunkiness of hardsuits and helmets being connected to the main body of hardsuits, in conjunct with the stim rewards no longer working in hardsuits, means that the brute resistance is effecitvely useless, since you'll want to be running with your hardsuit in your hand most of the time as an antagonist for the speed and evasiveness benefits, which, in stun-centric combat, is the most important trait. Now, if stims worked in hardsuits again, and we removed the stupid muh realism change that you can't injest food/pills through a hardsuit helmet/mask, and the stims provided by the machine aren't weighed down by OD/addiction mechanics, it would actually be worth using stims for both mining as a non-antag, and for doing things as an antagonist.
It's worth saying that having antag rolls before job rolls also entails that security has gotten alot more robust and populated overall, compared to the past. It was a drastically needed change, but definitely consider it in the scope of balance.
Then there's slowspace, which means that disabling the gravgen is basically an invalid strategy for non-AI antagonists, especially hardsuited antagonists to get around weight and speed restrictions of most folks in engineering/atmos/mining with hardsuits. Jetpacks don't propel you anywhere near as fast as zero-grav used to, and they force you to occupy a hand with your backpack which is a crippling nerf for being able to, as antagonist, be disarmed by a single assistant to have someone discover all your traitor gear. The super fast speed also meant that everyone could easily outrun taser bullets and whatnot, so it would overall make things more chaotic for security to handle. It also meant, on the flipside, that combating someone with a jetpack in space, an open area where chances are, you aren't going to hit your mark on your first few taser shots, it's actually possible for some poor guy with no hardsuit dragged out there to actually
win, since they were unrestrained in speed from injury, and all it took was for them to get just a wee bit too close. Basically, slowspace just buffed jetpack-wielding antagonists from space to an insane extent (as Rob Ust demonstrated), but nerfed them heavily indoors, which is really the opposite of what should have happened. Probably my most hated change since I've started playing here. It should be evidence enough that the AI and power issues have become the only things that actually disable the gravity generator since the change.
Oh yeah, and there were also a couple flat traitor nerfs. The ebow, an old murderboner mainstay has become a one-shot joke instead of a rechargeable nighmare for security. If you miss, an officer will get two taser shots in in the meanwhile, which tilts things far toward security. C4s no longer can be planted on people. Parapens and parasting no longer exist, so that there's almost zero risk or fear of death being adjacent to someone else.
Probably forgetting some other stuff, like self-surgery being removed, or positronic brains meaning that you have a constantly growing validhunting cyborg army (that can be subverted, I suppose, but it does add vastly more power to the AI monolith unless the roboticist is specifically a traitor and emagging them).
Oh yeah, one more thing. Handheld suit sensor suites means that, now, instead of only having the AI and maybe CMO and a head on-and-off looking at suit sensors, you now have several medics on top of that spamming that button every minute or two to find something to do, thus resulting in security/medbay response to the area even IF you kill someone quietly who just so happen have their sensors on.
