/tg/Station 13

Bottom post of the previous page:

After the last few rounds I played or observed, I'm more convinced than ever that holos need a serious nerf or change.

1) Stuns and non-damaging effects on the parasite should transfer to the owner. No question about it, the stun immune just makes it so the parasite can shield its owner from stuns allowing them to get away easily.

2) Remove parasite dragging. The abuse here is insane. Parasites move faster than normal human mobs anyways, the 3 hit crit followed by them grabbing the victim and dragging them away while slapping them is retarded. Its worse than Xenos and EVERYONE bitches about that. Flip side is if the owner goes into crit/stunned/cant stand then the parasite drags them and fucks off towards medical. There is no way to counter this especially when the parasite is faster and stronger than human.

3) The drawbacks still feel nonexsistant. Unless its a laser squad coming for the tator getting his valids, there is nothing else on the station that can even stand up to him. I literally watched a parasite rip through zombies last night and the sci trator didn't even seemed damage after going through half a dozen mobs without even having a gun. He might have had a first aid kit or hug box, but that only definitely would not out heal any damage the zombies would have done to him if he had just gone at them with an e sword. And he gets a constantly stimmed e sword wielding buddy that deals way more damage per click than anybody else can produce in melee. They can smash down walls to grant easy access to the armory, also known as the only thing that can stop parasites, and as far as I know Ion blasts and emps have no effect on these things, even though they utterly rape borgs and other synthetic creatures like drones and swarmers.

1) Stuns and non-damaging effects on the parasite should transfer to the owner. No question about it, the stun immune just makes it so the parasite can shield its owner from stuns allowing them to get away easily.

Why does a taser need to the perfect counter to everything in the game? The parasites can't stun you, you can't stun the parasites.

Davidchan wrote:Parasites move faster than normal human mobs anyways,

False

Davidchan wrote:the 3 hit crit

that deals way more damage per click than anybody else can produce in melee

Again, false. The absolute strongest parasite does 20 damage, with zero chance of knockdown or knockout. Edaggers and spears are both better (at 18 with knockdown) or chainsaws (at 21 with knockdown).

Its worse than Xenos

How the fuck are 15-20 damage hits worse than unlimited stun hits from a creature that actually does move much faster than a human?

also known as the only thing that can stop parasites, and as far as I know Ion blasts and emps have no effect on these things

See my above comments about EMP. And how would EMP help as a counter if its only the armory and parasites are apparently unkillable once they take away the armory?


It's hard to take feedback seriously when half of it is wildly exaggerated or just plain made up.

I love how fucking bad people are at the game.
STUN THE USER. KITE THE USER. KILL THE USER. HOLOPARASITE DISAPPEARS FOREVER.

Stun the user. Be set on fire. Try and kite the user, but fail because you're wounded from the holoparasite and from its user, as well as being on fire. Fall into crit, as the user gets up, finishes you off and loots your body.

Bluespace wrote:I love how fucking bad people are at the game.
STUN THE USER. KITE THE USER. KILL THE USER. HOLOPARASITE DISAPPEARS FOREVER.

Good luck doing that with the basically instaheal parasite healing its host while dragging it away.

Also remember that you can't just crit the host, you need to kill them which with the wet fart laser guns we have takes AT LEAST 10 shots.

Its not impossible to kill someone with a holoparasite by stunning and dragging them, but its certainly not easy with that parasite around.

The parasite is just a multitude stronger than any other traitor equipment.


Removing parasite dragging would probably be the best change to make.

Kor wrote:

Davidchan wrote:Parasites move faster than normal human mobs anyways,

False

I'd say this argument is really down to preparedness.
Stand gets the drop on target and lands a single punch, target is now too slow to escape.
Target using a duffel bag, hardsuit, or some other item with slowdown? Even slower.

Secondary problem here is this is all assuming the fight will be taking place in the main hallways, high chance if you're in your department that you won't have anywhere to run anyway. Like hell you're gonna open and get through the door before you get beaten down, and even without the stand that's STILL an advantage for dude with an esword, revolver, whatever.

He was more prepared than you were. Even if that all the difference was just not taking a duffel bag or some other minor detail.

The solution? Never stand (pun intended) in your department, or wear a spacesuit, dufflebag or other slowdown gear. Drag your bag of possessions behind you, with a spear on your back and stunprod on your belt. When someone comes within two tiles of you, stunprod them and run before they get up and holoparasite you.

... wait, that was just an innocent mime trying to give you a hug.

Kor wrote: Why does a taser need to the perfect counter to everything in the game? The parasites can't stun you, you can't stun the parasites.

Why does every new antag introduced need to be outright immune to basic combat and robustness? You can't stun the parasite. You cant trip the parasite. You can't weaken or slow the parasite. It always comes at you like it's at 100%, no slow down or faltering on its end until you deal enough damage to kill the host, this same slow down heavily effects you throws the balance of combat completely in its favor as you can not interrupt or disable the parasite..

Where as every time it touches you induces a bit of pain, health drops low enough, you're in yellow/orange and moving to slow to escape.

Kor wrote:

Davidchan wrote:Parasites move faster than normal human mobs anyways,

False

So why am I at full health, wearing a jumpsuit and no emcumbering objects and the parasite is always fast enough to run up behind me and punch me, regardless of me moving in a straight line away from it.

Kor wrote:

Davidchan wrote:the 3 hit crit

that deals way more damage per click than anybody else can produce in melee

Again, false. The absolute strongest parasite does 20 damage, with zero chance of knockdown or knockout. Edaggers and spears are both better (at 18 with knockdown) or chainsaws (at 21 with knockdown).

It definitely deals more than 20 damage. Again, I've gone from full health to critted in under 3 hits before. So unless my HUD is lying to me after I've eaten food or the spreadsheet stats are not fully reflecting how much damage the sprite puts out per hit.

Kor wrote:

Its worse than Xenos

How the fuck are 15-20 damage hits worse than unlimited stun hits from a creature that actually does move much faster than a human?

Kor wrote:
Xenos can be lasered, damaged and wounded to a point where they limp off or die relatively easily. Sprites dont have this and since the murderbone handbook is: Step one loot armory, Step 2 loot medbay with healing items, Parasite can focus on dealing damage kamikaze style while host can help by shooting into the fray or just constantly apply synflesh to themself as their parasite takes damage. You can double your damage output or just focus on combat healing yourself to keep your stun-immune buddy alive. The single method I've seen to remove a parasite without actually having a gun to shoot the host was a scientist throwing a telecrystal at the host and spacing him by RNJesus.

Kor wrote:

also known as the only thing that can stop parasites, and as far as I know Ion blasts and emps have no effect on these things

See my above comments about EMP. And how would EMP help as a counter if its only the armory and parasites are apparently unkillable once they take away the armory?


It's hard to take feedback seriously when half of it is wildly exaggerated or just plain made up.

Wildly exaggerated and made up? I'm literally just retelling my expierences with the damn things. The only time I've seen a parasite fail is when it the parasite was just insanely unroubust and happened to be fighting a traitorling in HoS gear. Every other time they just rip through and murder anyone.

They don't suffer any kind of slow down, can freely drag their host at full speed even if the host is wounded and soft crit, for 12 TC they are insanely powerful especially if the host cheeses and uses the parasite to break down walls to get more gear they otherwise wouldn't have access to.

Removing Parasite dragging and adding stun transfer to the host would go a long way in just allowing people to survive the damn things by issue of being able to run away outside the radius of the parasites influence.

TheNightingale wrote:The solution? Never stand (pun intended) in your department, or wear a spacesuit, dufflebag or other slowdown gear. Drag your bag of possessions behind you, with a spear on your back and stunprod on your belt. When someone comes within two tiles of you, stunprod them and run before they get up and holoparasite you.

... wait, that was just an innocent mime trying to give you a hug.

Or you missed the part where anybody with an esword/revolver/also a stunprod and a toolbox can do just about this same.
This one is just way louder about it and can save your ass if you get tazed/stun prodded.

Not that you SHOULDN'T be suspicious of a random greyshirt in your department if you're say... xenobio or something.

Saegrimr wrote:

TheNightingale wrote:The solution? Never stand (pun intended) in your department, or wear a spacesuit, dufflebag or other slowdown gear. Drag your bag of possessions behind you, with a spear on your back and stunprod on your belt. When someone comes within two tiles of you, stunprod them and run before they get up and holoparasite you.

... wait, that was just an innocent mime trying to give you a hug.

Or you missed the part where anybody with an esword/revolver/also a stunprod and a toolbox can do just about this same.
This one is just way louder about it and can save your ass if you get tazed/stun prodded.

Not that you SHOULDN'T be suspicious of a random greyshirt in your department if you're say... xenobio or something.

If you get hit ONCE with a stun while having an esword/revolver/stunprod its gg for you. However if you have a holoparasite people not only need to crit you, but they need to KILL you in order to neutralize your combat effectiveness.

Chaos is a bit too good at crowd control but I think it is more needing to transfer more damage since people are just using healing chems to tank the lower transferred percentage of damage while they juke people and have the holo light em up.

I suddenly realized the horror that would be a traitorling with a parasite.

I find that parasites seem a lot more balanced with the recent changes Kor made, especially permadeath to dust if killed.

People seem to have a better idea of how to deal with them now and they seem to work pretty well.

Incomptinence wrote:Chaos is a bit too good at crowd control but I think it is more needing to transfer more damage since people are just using healing chems to tank the lower transferred percentage of damage while they juke people and have the holo light em up.

Chaos got nerfed heavily a couple days ago, hoping its less ridiculous now. Might even be too weak to kill people reliably now.

CPTANT wrote:I suddenly realized the horror that would be a traitorling with a parasite.

I realized that a couple months ago and blacklisted changelings from using the injector

Davidchan wrote:stuff

I dunno why you continue to argue with me how much damage they do when

A) I coded them, I know how much they do

B) The code is open source and anyone, including you, can easily verify how much damage they do

https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-statio ... uardian.dm

Here's a secret advanced strategy to kill people with holoparasites:

Throw spears at them.

That requires having a spear beforehand, and only the most powergamey greytiders make and carry around spears. If you know there's a holoparasite and have time, sure (it's probably better to have a laser gun though). Otherwise, good luck with that.

Throwing a spear at the holoparasite isn't too effective - it can't embed in them. Throwing one at the host would mean they'd have to stop and take it out eventually, but they'd still have time to finish you off first.

TheNightingale wrote:That requires having a spear beforehand, and only the most powergamey greytiders make and carry around spears. If you know there's a holoparasite and have time, sure (it's probably better to have a laser gun though). Otherwise, good luck with that.

Throwing a spear at the holoparasite isn't too effective - it can't embed in them. Throwing one at the host would mean they'd have to stop and take it out eventually, but they'd still have time to finish you off first.

Spears do 25 brute when thrown, and depending on the parasite, it might take more damage than the host will, so tossing spears at it and running away forever should kill the host relatively easily assuming you can keep grabbing the spears back again. You can put one on your back and two in your hands for 75 damage. If they have a standard parasite I think the damage block on them is either 25% or 40% so that'll still do quite a lot. Either way, if you can hit the owner, hit the owner with the spears since you'll likely embed and make him take a stupid amount of bleeding damage, so unless he's in cryo he's fucked.

I really do think it's a problem that you simply can't fight parasites in melee. Especially chaos parasites, unless you have a laser gun you're fucked.

i have killed people with holoparasites as a clown before
it's literally as easy as stun, drag the user away before parasite can, and keep bashing him as you drag
the holoparasite will not be able to catch up and cant do anything about it and the user is stunned and cant do anything about it
once user dies, parasite dies too
it's not even difficult

Turns out as of a day ago that someone redid how movement works and all simple animals move way too fast now. Parasites, wraiths, etc go at max movespeed.

Hopefully fixed or reverted soon

Wait wait wait. Does that mean jugs are faster now too? Fuck.

I edited the server config to slow all animals down by 1 so it should be balanced out until we get a real fix

What if the changeling swaps form with the person with the holoparasite would the holoparasite serve the ling now or the other person but cant kill the ling since its on its orginal body

I still think holoparasites should be no-drag. Healing parasites dragging away their host will spamming heal is just nonsense.

I thought those things had a teleport spell for a reason.

Again, I reiterate my statement about unrobust traitors needing combat options.

Whatever drawbacks there are to adding holoparasites, its minor compared to the benefit we get now that the 80% of shitty players who make up the average traitor round are capable of inflicting death and destruction rather than emagging their objective in the first 5 minutes and then sitting on an escape pod or getting their shit slapped while trying to figure out how to reload an ebow.

Parapens used to fill this role, it took way too long for us to get a replacement for the unrobust traitor to actually antagonize the crew, don't fuck it up again.

Oldman Robustin wrote:Again, I reiterate my statement about unrobust traitors needing combat options.

Whatever drawbacks there are to adding holoparasites, its minor compared to the benefit we get now that the 80% of shitty players who make up the average traitor round are capable of inflicting death and destruction rather than emagging their objective in the first 5 minutes and then sitting on an escape pod or getting their shit slapped while trying to figure out how to reload an ebow.

Parapens used to fill this role, it took way too long for us to get a replacement for the unrobust traitor to actually antagonize the crew, don't fuck it up again.

I still say the solution to traitors having a lack of punch is increasing TC. Personally I would say to ~24 TC to start with.

CPTANT wrote:

Oldman Robustin wrote:Again, I reiterate my statement about unrobust traitors needing combat options.

Whatever drawbacks there are to adding holoparasites, its minor compared to the benefit we get now that the 80% of shitty players who make up the average traitor round are capable of inflicting death and destruction rather than emagging their objective in the first 5 minutes and then sitting on an escape pod or getting their shit slapped while trying to figure out how to reload an ebow.

Parapens used to fill this role, it took way too long for us to get a replacement for the unrobust traitor to actually antagonize the crew, don't fuck it up again.

I still say the solution to traitors having a lack of punch is increasing TC. Personally I would say to ~24 TC to start with.

It might help a little, and I've always supported more TC for traitors, but as long as all the traitor gear requires some technical skill it won't do much for the unrobust.

Changelings have infinite health/unstuns/emps/built in sword/extra lives etc already, and you still see many players either act timidly and do nothing or die horribly, so I dont think a straight TC boost would help much.

It would just let the powergamer killing spree crowd buy extra stuff on top of their adrenals and make the average player a bigger pinata.

There was talk a while ago about doubling the TC amount but also doubling the costs of most, but not all, of the items. It would allow traitors to get their robust gear while also having extra room for bricks of C4 or noslips or whatever else they need since we'd have more wiggle room as far as prices go.

Fun fact, since holoparasites are linked to a body instead of the owner's mind, a changeling that manages to swap forms with them now has their very own holoparasite. I'm assuming this is an oversight due to how injectors aren't suppose to work on changelings in the first place but I think you deserve it if you manage to hold out long enough on a user to swap.

I'd be impressed if someone managed to get a stand user to hold still long enough to do that yeah.

If it becomes a regular thing somehow I'll add further checks.

Well, first round I played in ages, I'm the warden and traitor mime busts into the armory.

Shoot at him with lasers, get three hits on him but he gets lucky with a taser I didn't realise he had.
Armory door shuts though so I think I'm saved, when suddenly one these gay bastards pops in from nowhere and crits me in no time at all (thanks for paper thin armor, Kor)

I then watched as the mime would stun people with a taser and then his stand would beat the crap out of them whilst the mime was free to run off and dodge any return fire
If the stand got into trouble it just blinked back to its master who'd already ran off.

He managed to kill all of security and a bunch of other people doing this, even saw him take out two armed opponents at the same time - TWICE.

-------------
How is this different to taze and lase or taze and sword etc etc?
Difference is you have a second player playing the part of your very own pocket hulk bodyguard, with all the advantages that gives - such as being able to do two things at once (whilst his stand was beating to death one guy the mime was tasing the other opponent, who they both then beat both of the downed opponents to death), the advantage of numbers - its much much harder to engage two opponents at once, especially if you're alone, and it gives you a few precious split seconds where your opponent hesitates as they decide which of you to engage and even after that their focus is going to be split between the pair of you, lowering their reaction times and aiming. Or allowing you to use your stand as a diversion as you retreat around the corner... where your stand then insta teleports to you.

--------------
In their current state they'd fit more as a wizard ability than a secret agent tool.

The biggest bit of bullshit is the way the stands can instantly zap to their masters, giving them a better escape tool than wraiths have. If the master is smart and runs off it means your opponents are never going to be able to damage you enough to take down your master from transferred damage or be able to do direct damage to your master.

Malkevin wrote:Well, first round I played in ages, I'm the warden and traitor mime busts into the armory.

Shoot at him with lasers, get three hits on him but he gets lucky with a taser I didn't realise he had.
Armory door shuts though so I think I'm saved, when suddenly one these gay bastards pops in from nowhere and crits me in no time at all (thanks for paper thin armor, Kor)

I then watched as the mime would stun people with a taser and then his stand would beat the crap out of them whilst the mime was free to run off and dodge any return fire
If the stand got into trouble it just blinked back to its master who'd already ran off.

He managed to kill all of security and a bunch of other people doing this, even saw him take out two armed opponents at the same time - TWICE.

-------------
How is this different to taze and lase or taze and sword etc etc?
Difference is you have a second player playing the part of your very own pocket hulk bodyguard, with all the advantages that gives - such as being able to do two things at once (whilst his stand was beating to death one guy the mime was tasing the other opponent, who they both then beat both of the downed opponents to death), the advantage of numbers - its much much harder to engage two opponents at once, especially if you're alone, and it gives you a few precious split seconds where your opponent hesitates as they decide which of you to engage and even after that their focus is going to be split between the pair of you, lowering their reaction times and aiming. Or allowing you to use your stand as a diversion as you retreat around the corner... where your stand then insta teleports to you.

--------------
In their current state they'd fit more as a wizard ability than a secret agent tool.

The biggest bit of bullshit is the way the stands can instantly zap to their masters, giving them a better escape tool than wraiths have. If the master is smart and runs off it means your opponents are never going to be able to damage you enough to take down your master from transferred damage or be able to do direct damage to your master.

I was that holoparasite and i'm the best don't balance around me.

I've said it before, stands are currently the best item in the uplink for mass murder. It'd be nice if Kor rebalanced them so they actually did different things than be unstunnable punch ghosts, but I know he's not going to.

Main rebalancing needed I think is to increase the amount of transferred damage all over the board. The Standard halves any damage and pretty much is the strongest choice for a medical based regen build of murder. The holo doesn't make them quite as tough as they might seem but to be a fair bit is this regen meta build to outheal any damage the holo takes. Holo taking 3-4 OR MORE lasers to the face and the summoner is barely hurt next you look at him? Yeah he healed all that damage through a virus or chems or whatever. The medical parasite is rarely taken because the heavy stun immune syringe immune chem immune bleed immune tanking the combat types provide plus their greater offence outclasses it, and it is also the only one that can transfer a GREATER amount of damage than it receives when in the healing mode.

Can we just remove the standard parasite? As it stands these are just better eswords, so making these actually have some kind of different thing about them than just being a punch ghost would be awesome.

Looked into it and I was wrong healer mode just transfers equivalent damage.
Standard 50%
Bomb 60%
Ranged 90%
Chaos 80%
Healer 100% healing mode 70% Damage mode

I've actually done swap bodies+holoparasite trick today, and it was an entertaining little experiment. However, your holo dies the second you swap forms, so that was a bummer.

Incomptinence wrote:health regen

Problem with balancing them around assuming health regen exists is they'd be pretty trash without it. Maybe they can do some snowflake shit like cure a users viruses, though I've never much cared for healing vriuses existing at all.

And I thought one of the stated goals of goofchem was to stop people dosing up for infinite health regen?

The last time I had to deal with a regen holo guy I knocked him down and ran like hell while beating him, but I'll try and think of a code solution.

Change the user's damage values to 150% for most holoparasites, and 100% for healing. Suddenly, shooting the holoparasite is actually a pretty good idea - if you can survive it and the owner.

Malkevin wrote:Well, first round I played in ages, I'm the warden and traitor mime busts into the armory.

Shoot at him with lasers, get three hits on him but he gets lucky with a taser I didn't realise he had.
Armory door shuts though so I think I'm saved, when suddenly one these gay bastards pops in from nowhere and crits me in no time at all (thanks for paper thin armor, Kor)

I then watched as the mime would stun people with a taser and then his stand would beat the crap out of them whilst the mime was free to run off and dodge any return fire
If the stand got into trouble it just blinked back to its master who'd already ran off.

He managed to kill all of security and a bunch of other people doing this, even saw him take out two armed opponents at the same time - TWICE.

-------------
How is this different to taze and lase or taze and sword etc etc?
Difference is you have a second player playing the part of your very own pocket hulk bodyguard, with all the advantages that gives - such as being able to do two things at once (whilst his stand was beating to death one guy the mime was tasing the other opponent, who they both then beat both of the downed opponents to death), the advantage of numbers - its much much harder to engage two opponents at once, especially if you're alone, and it gives you a few precious split seconds where your opponent hesitates as they decide which of you to engage and even after that their focus is going to be split between the pair of you, lowering their reaction times and aiming. Or allowing you to use your stand as a diversion as you retreat around the corner... where your stand then insta teleports to you.

--------------
In their current state they'd fit more as a wizard ability than a secret agent tool.

The biggest bit of bullshit is the way the stands can instantly zap to their masters, giving them a better escape tool than wraiths have. If the master is smart and runs off it means your opponents are never going to be able to damage you enough to take down your master from transferred damage or be able to do direct damage to your master.

Hi, I'm that mime. The problem with you and the rest of the crew was that you all aimed like idiots. You kept unloading your guns in my general direction, hoping to randomly hit me enough times for me to get crit, instead of holding your fire and aiming. I knew that if I just kept dodging, you'd eventually run out of shots and have to try to melee me, and then get nuked by my holoparasite. Everyone kept doing this up until the end where some guy named Sun got the cap's laser and cucked me.

Kor wrote:

Incomptinence wrote:health regen

Problem with balancing them around assuming health regen exists is they'd be pretty trash without it. Maybe they can do some snowflake shit like cure a users viruses, though I've never much cared for healing vriuses existing at all.

And I thought one of the stated goals of goofchem was to stop people dosing up for infinite health regen?

The last time I had to deal with a regen holo guy I knocked him down and ran like hell while beating him, but I'll try and think of a code solution.

Holoparasites are easy as hell to kill, just stun their owner and beat the shit out of them, or shoot at either of them with any weapon until they die. The other day I was warden and some holoparasite guy jumped me in escape and shot me like 3 times with a lasgun until I started dodging, pulled out my gun, and shot his stand that was running towards me like 5 times. I got crit, but the guy died.

That requires being able to hit their owner, being able to survive the holoparasite's attacks, and being able to drag the owner away before the holoparasite retaliates (which will probably slow you down). The holoparasites themselves have damage resistance, so not all the damage they take transfers to the owner. Good luck.

TheNightingale wrote:That requires having a spear beforehand, and only the most powergamey greytiders make and carry around spears. If you know there's a holoparasite and have time, sure (it's probably better to have a laser gun though). Otherwise, good luck with that.

Throwing a spear at the holoparasite isn't too effective - it can't embed in them. Throwing one at the host would mean they'd have to stop and take it out eventually, but they'd still have time to finish you off first.

TheNightingale wrote:That requires being able to hit their owner, being able to survive the holoparasite's attacks, and being able to drag the owner away before the holoparasite retaliates (which will probably slow you down). The holoparasites themselves have damage resistance, so not all the damage they take transfers to the owner. Good luck.

We should buff facehuggers to chestburst instantly, because gud players wear biohoods or hardsuit helmets.
We should make zombies do 100 damage per hit, because gud players don't fight them without a ranged weapon.
We should make water kill you when you slip on it, because gud players walk instead of run.

Gitting gud or not is irrelevant to the difficulty of a task.

Also yeah I don't want to have to powergame spears every round just to fight the inevitable holoparasites that are GOING to happen. We should really remove standard parasite, it's literally just a better esword since it can't be stolen, stunned, and makes you take 50% less damage.

What the fuck are you talking about

Standard parasite doesn't hit as hard as an esword, can't knock down, can't deflect projectiles, costs more, and doubles the area you can be shot by

It's neither better nor worse, it's a sidegrade

It can't be disarmed, stunned, and does 20 brute. This is functionally better than an esword because it cannot be taken or used against you.

>i tased this dude and didn't automatically win, please fix

get good lmao

I'm talking like crowds of assistants. One standard versus eight unarmed assistants, and the stand is gonna win if it's not retarded or in an enclosed space. The fact that numbers mean nothing against these (and for one stand, its strength is with crowds) is stupid because everything else about traitors are balanced around there being no allies to the traitor. If they get swarmed, they are dead, and these turn that around and it's shit.

Zilenan91 wrote:I'm talking like crowds of assistants. One standard versus eight unarmed assistants, and the stand is gonna win if it's not retarded or in an enclosed space. The fact that numbers mean nothing against these (and for one stand, its strength is with crowds) is stupid because everything else about traitors are balanced around there being no allies to the traitor. If they get swarmed, they are dead, and these turn that around and it's shit.

This is what really gets me about holo parasites - that they negate the core point of how the crew is supposed to fight enemies - the bum rush.

Does everything in the game really need the same counter strategy though?