Cultist Deconversion?

[SpaceInaba]

Bottom post of the previous page:

its been a while since I've seen a post with a scrollbar

[Oldman Robustin]

Memeswords became a "Cult Master Only" option in the PR. They still have a 20m timer before even the master can forge them. I might tweak the order of the special procs so that they happen at the beginning, not the end, of the attack - since that's what allowed some people to get dusted while "standing up" - the attack actually hardcrit them and then immediately dusted them before the crit animation kicked in. Im still open to an assortment of minor nerfs but I still dont see the sword as a problem yet - cultists are having fun with it but at the end of the day someone with even a flash/slip/stun, let alone a gun, has the advantage in that fight. I would absolutely favor an assistant with a bar of soap over a bastard sword cultist in a fight. Not to mention the big cooldown "spin" takes a full second after starting before it does damage, while slowing the user down, I simply don't see the sword winning many real fights. I do see the sword used to chop up unarmed people in the halls and I got absolutely buttblasted a couple days ago when the cultists set up a sliptrap on the main path to the summoning site and like 15 fucking peopole got slipped n' sworded, but that goes more to slip balance than the unsurprising ability to kill people who have slipped in front of you.

Edit: Also I added a client check to the sac rune in my PR, so you won't be able to convert braindeads anymore.

[Wyzack]

Both cult modes are garbage and have been since their inception despite every attempt to make them not totally fucking suck dick

[Karp]

a balanced 50% ratio doesnt mean its fun or well balanced, not to mention that trying to balance to a 50% winrate results in a stale game being created

Cult is in an absurd state and using it losing to justify buffing it more is criminally insane and should get you fucking locked up in a gulag

The only limiting factor to how awful cult would be is if the cultists have a hundred hours vs 10 hours played and giving one person the ability to become a walking god as a gamemode is a bit dumb

I understand that you want your baby to be able to compete but being forced to powergame to survive isn't fun, nor should it be required especially when the cult has unlimited respawns and you effectively have the limited number of people who might latejoin

[Oldman Robustin]

Please keep shitposting coherent at least. Walking god? 100 hours played? Christ dude try again when you sober up.

There is also the deep depressing irony that the only side that has to powergame to win right now IS THE CULT. You try setting up on station with no space base or lavabase during highpop and tell me how it plays out for you. If you play cultist like a casual, normal person might - you will get your shit absolutely pushed in by casual, nonpowergamey, security. I mean TWO out of THREE of the other team modes having a fucking WAR button that is basically “valids identified, begin powergame.exe” but i suggest you take a shotgun, something deliberately given to sec on every map, and you start raving about powergaming?

Get a fucking grip.

[Karp]

i play for fun lol









but you seriously cant sit here with a straight face telling me that stun talismans, manifests, blood boil, teleports, and global EMPs are balanced

the only resource required by the cult is paper and if one cultist has any idea on what they're doing sec will have to effectively go full lethal and bumrush the cult or get steamrolled my manifest+talisman spam

blood cult ends up being a war of attrition where one side slowly gets stronger while the other side gets weaker 9/10

[EagleWiz]

Cult does one thing really right, and that is conversion. Cult conversion takes time, cult conversion takes several cultists, and sometimes the cultist gets fed up and just murders you and stuffs your soul in an artificer. This is pretty much the one saving grace of blood cult - its frequently not worth seeking out the cult to try and get antag superpowers, so the converts are typically genuinely unwilling.

As for cult being OP - not really? Blood boil requires a level of preparedness and coordination that blood cult usually doesnt have, and when they do have it they would probably win even without blood boil. The paper is only a little better then old school hide-in-bags stunprods, and manifest isnt that good.

[Oldman Robustin]

i play for fun lol









but you seriously cant sit here with a straight face telling me that stun talismans, manifests, blood boil, teleports, and global EMPs are balanced

the only resource required by the cult is paper and if one cultist has any idea on what they're doing sec will have to effectively go full lethal and bumrush the cult or get steamrolled my manifest+talisman spam

blood cult ends up being a war of attrition where one side slowly gets stronger while the other side gets weaker 9/10

You see there's just certain things I see in a post and I immediately assume its not to be taken seriously.

When I play cultist I generally TRYHARD and I haven't drawn blood boil OR EMP in over a year. In October those runes appeared 27 times in 57 rounds. And if its anything like my experience in the past those 27 runes were all misused and/or futile. EMP rune requires 9 invokers to hit the entire station and I have NEVER seen that pulled off. Bloodboil in particular is the reigning kind of "theoretically strong" - "practically useless" - the damage comes in delayed pulses now and doesn't even crit, and even when it did instacrit it was still rarely used.

Same story with manifest, I agree its OP but its also not that common or effective. There's usually a big communications struggle with the ghosts who comes in beyond clueless and hilariously unrobust. I've given the manifest rune a significant nerf and nerfed off-station teleportation in my PR anyway since im anticipating that blood magic will generally make up for the weakening of cheesier tactics.

And I still strongly dispute the attrition point. Cult won't whither as badly as a failed revolution but its close. If you take out a cult's leadership you win any "attrition" battle, the cult devolves into an incoherent string of "WHERE IS EVERYONE? WHO IS STILL ALIVE? WHERE DO WE MEET? WHERE IS OUR BASE? WHAT DO WE DO?" as the survivors are slowly picked off. I've been reading cult logs for weeks and its amazing how a string of like 3-5 arrests or kills will typically send a cult into tailspin.

[onleavedontatme]

That round earlier where we aggressively metagamed the command report and raided the mining base and lucked out to destroy the space base all within the first five minutes and still had all of security slaughtered by constructs +swords by the time our red alert shuttle docked is a pretty good example of what I was talking about

[Oldman Robustin]

I had mixed feelings about that round to be sure. But it was also hard to gauge because the closing minutes saw 2 connection-ending lagspikes. I myself was killed in brig hallway after being frozen for 30+ seconds, I tabbed out to check the server status only to hear the dreaded "THWACK THWACK" of a sword while my game was minimized. We saw multiple officers go braindead due to "no connection" lagspikes and that probably left them ripe for sacrifice into constructs

I forgot to check the post-game report but my understanding was that there were only a couple human cultists left and that charge on the shuttle was pretty much their last hurrah - they were still gunned down within seconds. Prior to the lagspikes I was extremely confident of our position. The only reason I even had the shuttle red-alerted was out of a compromise with the Moth-Chef who had faithfully served security and out'd several bases/telerunes - he wanted to see the battlecruiser but we had already called it so to minimize any backlash over the recall I wanted it sent express. At that point the biggest problem I had faced in fighting the cult was when I called out a cultist in scimaint there were so many officers that showed up that our weapon fire was hitting 5 friendlies for every 1 shot that connected on a cultist.

It also illustrated the major downside of teleport runes. We were very diligent about sealing teleport runes with dense objects and we deliberately left some open to ambush cultists. There was even a tiff where an assistant I had implanted and armed (but not watered, calculated risk honk) was found standing next to a teleport rune. I stunned and searched him again but he pushed back when I tried to seal the rune, he was simply camping it with a taser. As captain I couldn't afford to do the same but yet when we were clearing the abandoned library base I had no less than 3 cultists come in one at a time and end up easy prey for sec. Lexia single-handedly wiping their mining operation is also a pretty accurate picture of how SEC WITH GUNS v. MELEE ONLY PAPERMONGERS plays out. If you know that everyone in an area is cult and feel comfortable shooting on sight, things get very ugly for the cultists.

That said the cult did show a lot of resilience and didn't easily break in spite of loyalists having a pretty robust lineup. It's a really tough balance to strike since nobody wants conversion modes dictated solely by momentum, either side should be able to make a comeback if properly planned and executed - but at the same time nobody wants a cancer that you can only temporarily suppress before it inevitably spirals out of control. I've pondered dozens of options for this dilemma, including having Nar'Sie grow impatient/dissatisfied if a cult becomes too small or ineffective - which would result in a bunch of pro-cult events (portal storm: constructs, meteors, etc.) but with a forced shuttle - with cultists eeking out a neutral or minor victory if they can prevent any survivors from reaching Centcom to warn about the Cult. But it all felt a little too heavy-handed, the code dictating the round's pace above the players and wouldn't sit well with people who just want to "beat" the cult and carry on a longer round where they can shuttle to Centcom with their heads held high.

The last pass in my PR reflects some of these thoughts, minor nerfs to the stun and moderate nerfs to the EMP. I'm considering cutting the EMP range even further since I think its fair to require cultists to be somewhat close to their target and not just draining weapons from people near the screen's edge. The teleport change is a big deal IMO but hasn't even seen a test merge yet - that change could be expanded so that space teleportation would indicate the direction of the space base or even briefly open a 2-way portal so that security could raid the space/lavaland base via the cultist's own teleporter network. I'm also willing to make "summon cultist" use the Lich mechanic where a trail of particles will basically point where they went - but I'm still not convinced that the cult, or summon cultist, is strong enough to justify that absent further testing - it could cause a lot of problems too since it would probably take months for everyone to realize that summoning someone would basically sell out your base and I foresee a lot of rounds shat on. Compromise might mean the effect only occurs if holy water is present in their system but my chief concern is how to make cultists aware of that mechanic through any means other than "repeatedly losing because sec stormed your hidden base and deadchat has to tell you how they knew where you were". Finally I am contemplating removing space/lava runes outright during lowpop, basically "Narsie has scant interest in such a sparsely populated station, you will only have enough power to use runes on-station where the veil is weakest. You will be unable to draw runes in space or lavaland."

I feel good about cult balance because I've got 100 levers I can pull and I don't think we disagree about some of the unhealthiest aspects of gameplay. We just disagree about when its appropriate to act against those mechanics. I'm just following a pattern of removing powerful, yet disliked, mechanics when the cult is doing well and pushing QOL-oriented changes when the cult is doing poorly. I "nerfed" summoning last year because the biggest complaint was that the game was basically over after "the" sacrifice, anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together could find some obscure corner of maint, seal it off, and draw the Narsie rune and bust out as many ghosts as necessary to summon while everyone is still trying to figure out where Port Aux Abandoned Storage is located. Right now time and data are showing that cult is struggling and space/mining bases are not a luxury that cults are using to coast to victory, they are a necessity when you're outnumbered 10:1 and the station has 80 people aboard with loyal (bloodthirty) assistants crawling over every inch of maint - and even with that advantage the cult is losing. Talismans were feeding that cycle because the cult is powerless without them and yet space is one of the few places where you could produce talismans in sufficient quantity to pose a threat without getting caught. I hope spells will help break that cycle by making the cult less base-dependent but I need more time and data to tell.