Antagonist handholding AKA Heretics

[johnfulpwillard]

One thing I never enjoy with Antagonists is its handholding, it's lame when someone has no way to fend for themselves unless they fully prepare to deal with you, and I think that consistently Heretic is the grossest one.

I'm gonna put comparisons between Traitors, Heretics and Wizards to show off what I mean.

If a Traitor is attacking you with a stun weapon, it's usually a stunbaton, contractor baton, sleepy pen, or maybe some other misc things they can make up with. These all have a delay of either requiring 2 hits, or chems to process, etc. If they are attacking with lethals, then you can still try to run away, slip them, shove them, baton them, whatever you have at your disposal.
If a Wizard attacks you, it's usually an explosion, rod form, Mjollnir, all of which are loud and instant. This is fine, Wizards are rare and meant to be a one-man army, and since they are loud as hell, they typically don't have the opportunity to destroy your ability to keep playing the game.
If a Heretic attacks you, you are dropped to the ground, if they shove you once then it's over, you are stunned and forced to watch yourself slowly die, completely unable to do anything to something that feels completely out of your control, because their attacks are a mix of stun and damage, meaning that once you are mansused then they keep stunning as they slowly kill you, something that gets worse and worse as the game goes on, yet similar things are done for no other Antagonist in the game.

If you attack a Traitor, they have to make their own way out of their problems, either with freedom implants, combat stims, disposals, etc.
If you attack a Wizard, they can use Ethereal Jaunt which is limited by how far you can move especially if you're stamcritted or slowed beforehand, their teleport scroll, which is 3 time use (not taking into account the one they need to tp to the station in the first place), or their teleport ability, which is a drain of their 10 wizard points and they yell out the location they teleport to when they cast it.
If you attack a Heretic, they use their knife in hand and instantly teleport to a random location with no tell to where, after which all they need is to get a glass shiv and some crushed can or bar of silver or whatever else to get another use.

If you are a Security Officer trying to get information on who your target is, then...
If it's a Traitor, you can get obvious information like "They are a desworder/contractor/infiltrator", things you can easily figure out on your own, and try to prepare to deal with, like grippers, experimental surgery to combat stuns, shields, space protection.
If it's a Wizard, you can get obvious information like "They have fireball/rod form/ethereal jaunt/mindswap", things you can easily figure out on your own, you can try to combat like in the case of mindswap, if you see 2 people sleeping then you know what happened.
If it's a Heretic, you can get information on their general path, but you can never know what they got from their alt paths, which makes fighting against a Heretic impossible unless you read the wiki/code and know absolutely everything about heretic, its paths, sidepaths, and all potential counters it may have. If you stun them, you may get a hardstun and bleeding from their invisible innate ability to block incoming attacks, or you may not.

If you are trying to conceal your identity...
As a Traitor, you have to spend TC to get a chameleon kit, agent ID, forge yourself well or impersonate a crewmember, all things that requires your precious TC to start and effort to pull off, or an Infiltrator suit which costs TC and takes your belt, suit storage, helmet and glove slots, meaning no use of kravs, reactive armor, magboots/noslips, a massive downside in general to other items you may have collected.
As a Wizard, you can mindswap into someone, which can backfire, take off your robes, which can also backfire, or just not bother cause you're a Wizard.
As a Heretic, you get a pair of eyes and a glass shard, and now you can use your innate spell that gives you a temporary Infiltrator suit at will.

Then this gets even worse if you lose to them...
If you lose to a Traitor, your body may have a calling card on it or have HMS, but you can easily be recovered and healed, Cargo being able to give you a fix of cures, unless you're thrown in the supermatter/incinerator, all things the Traitor intentionally has to go out of their way to do and is not asked of them to do any of it.
If you lose to a Wizard, your body can be missing limbs, be on fire, be blown up to gibs, but Medical is still able to fix all this, you may have different limbs, a different body, burned off wings, lacking a tail, but still alive and able to go back and fight the Wizard.
If you lose to a Heretic, congratulations you now are unable to do anything against the Heretic for the rest of the round due to the permanent phobia they give you, on top of usually worse traumas as well.
Even more annoyingly, Traitor's Hereditary Manifold Sickness objective has been disliked in general because it's giving a permanent downside just as a side thing Traitors do, yet somehow this is accepted for Heretic despite people with HMS still being able to look at the Traitor's general direction without being hardstunned.

And if Security is feeling merciful and perma's you as an antagonist...
As a Traitor, you have to break out on your own and use your codes to build yourself a new uplink, requiring a lot of work and you get none of your gear back.
As a Wizard, you have to break out on your own, find new robes, and depending on what Security did, find a new tongue through the aid of another player.
As a Heretic, you can give yourself a new living heart from prison botany, giving you all of your equipment back. If you even wanted to, you can also make a monkey cube and get your amber focus in there as well.

At its worst, Heretics can get 1-2 sacrifices and suddenly can't be batoned, can't be arrested, can't be perma'd, instantly stuns you in one hit, among other abilities they get, mix that in with its complete insane amount of paths, I've grown to dislike this antagonist from both sides. The only way I get satisfaction from ascending as a Heretic is if I intentionally cripple myself and don't bother using any of my abilities or stuns, and the only way to beat a Heretic is with cheap moves like syringe guns or because the Heretic is new and doesn't know every intricate detail about it. I believe they are the most handheld antagonist in the game as of current, beating Wizard among others. Heretics being used as the loophole feature coders use to throw in fantasy content and buffed up stuff makes it a hellhole of feature creep overbuffed handholding I've seen since shadowling.

[TheRex9001]

Heretics are a very difficult antagonist and its seemingly even harder to balance. The spot heretics is in right now is tricky, they lack a lot of more fun gimmick gear and are mostly all geared around murder despite this they lose a lot. At least in my experience heretics are very quickly outed and killed instead of being the ascension murderbeasts you describe here. The sac trauma sucks and I think everyone agrees with this, the eldritch organ idea has been floated around but never (to my knowledge) been attempted. Ideally this antagonist could use a rework and I have a few ideas floating around but no document. As probably the target of this due to coding the latest path I'd say heretic is in dire need of a rework but its not something I think a single coder is going to manage to tackle well unless they work together with others. Do you have any propositions for fixing them? Or do you just want to throw them out of the codebase?

[datorangebottle]

One thing I never enjoy with Antagonists is its handholding, it's lame when someone has no way to fend for themselves unless they fully prepare to deal with you, and I think that consistently Heretic is the grossest one.

This seems like a complete misevaluation. Comparing Wizard to Heretic should result in Wizard being the far stronger result in every situation.

If a Traitor is attacking you with a stun weapon, it's usually a stunbaton, contractor baton, sleepy pen, or maybe some other misc things they can make up with. These all have a delay of either requiring 2 hits, or chems to process, etc. If they are attacking with lethals, then you can still try to run away, slip them, shove them, baton them, whatever you have at your disposal.
If a Wizard attacks you, it's usually an explosion, rod form, Mjollnir, all of which are loud and instant. This is fine, Wizards are rare and meant to be a one-man army, and since they are loud as hell, they typically don't have the opportunity to destroy your ability to keep playing the game.
If a Heretic attacks you, you are dropped to the ground, if they shove you once then it's over, you are stunned and forced to watch yourself slowly die, completely unable to do anything to something that feels completely out of your control, because their attacks are a mix of stun and damage, meaning that once you are mansused then they keep stunning as they slowly kill you, something that gets worse and worse as the game goes on, yet similar things are done for no other Antagonist in the game.

If a traitor attacks you, they don't instantly kill you, which is fine- their tools require less effort to acquire and they're meant to be sneaky fucks with a wide variety of objectives.
If a wizard attacks you, they typically instantly kill you(especially in the case of Disintegrate), which is fine- they're meant to be able to take on the entire station and have it be an even fight.
If a Heretic attacks you, you have less of a fighting chance than with the traitor, but far more than with the wizard. This is fine, because their tools require a higher degree of effort to obtain and they're meant to be ritualistically murdering people to gain power.
The Heretic directly compares to the Changeling, where they can cryosting you and whip out an armblade, and at that point you can't really fight back or run away, because you're extremely slow and taking damage over time from being cold.

If you attack a Traitor, they have to make their own way out of their problems, either with freedom implants, combat stims, disposals, etc.
If you attack a Wizard, they can use Ethereal Jaunt which is limited by how far you can move especially if you're stamcritted or slowed beforehand, their teleport scroll, which is 3 time use (not taking into account the one they need to tp to the station in the first place), or their teleport ability, which is a drain of their 10 wizard points and they yell out the location they teleport to when they cast it.
If you attack a Heretic, they use their knife in hand and instantly teleport to a random location with no tell to where, after which all they need is to get a glass shiv and some crushed can or bar of silver or whatever else to get another use.

The Traitor can also whip out an item and just teleport away; see the syndicate teleporter, which is just as risky as the knife smash but far less limited. Their tools are more reusable and versatile in general. Laugh all you want, but the door card is good.
The Wizard can use his abilities repeatedly and without risk; the only thing he pays is the opportunity cost of spells he could have had in his repertoire.
The Heretic's blade smash comes with problems; they get teleported to a random location(dangerous and extremely inconvenient locations included), and it consumes a resource they can only carry so much of at a time that also happens to be one of their primary weapons. After which, yes, 'all they need' is a glass shiv and some resource, which is far more work than a wizard or traitor would have to do.

If you are a Security Officer trying to get information on who your target is, then...
If it's a Traitor, you can get obvious information like "They are a desworder/contractor/infiltrator", things you can easily figure out on your own, and try to prepare to deal with, like grippers, experimental surgery to combat stuns, shields, space protection.
If it's a Wizard, you can get obvious information like "They have fireball/rod form/ethereal jaunt/mindswap", things you can easily figure out on your own, you can try to combat like in the case of mindswap, if you see 2 people sleeping then you know what happened.
If it's a Heretic, you can get information on their general path, but you can never know what they got from their alt paths, which makes fighting against a Heretic impossible unless you read the wiki/code and know absolutely everything about heretic, its paths, sidepaths, and all potential counters it may have. If you stun them, you may get a hardstun and bleeding from their invisible innate ability to block incoming attacks, or you may not.

Nearly every antagonist in the game has this issue.
If you're figuring out these things on your own, you're directly in combat with them already and have a high chance of dying just because they whipped those tools out.
If you're hearing them secondhand, the heretic has an equal chance for their 'invisible' passive to be revealed as a wizard does of people learning that they have disintegrate or fireball.
Changeling, Nukie, Cultist, Traitor, and Wizard. The only ones that don't are the blood brothers and revolutionaries, because they don't really have abilities. Heretics even have the grace of being more predictable- once you figure out that someone is on the Flesh path, you know a large number of abilities they are forced to have if they want to ascend, and you can deduce this based on the effects they're applying and the spells they're using. Nothing is stopping a Wizard from keeping a spell off-cooldown for emergencies, or a traitor from having a telescopic baton in their storage implant(or just having an uplink implant) outside of the cost of their abilities and tools.

If you are trying to conceal your identity...
As a Traitor, you have to spend TC to get a chameleon kit, agent ID, forge yourself well or impersonate a crewmember, all things that requires your precious TC to start and effort to pull off, or an Infiltrator suit which costs TC and takes your belt, suit storage, helmet and glove slots, meaning no use of kravs, reactive armor, magboots/noslips, a massive downside in general to other items you may have collected.
As a Wizard, you can mindswap into someone, which can backfire, take off your robes, which can also backfire, or just not bother cause you're a Wizard.
As a Heretic, you get a pair of eyes and a glass shard, and now you can use your innate spell that gives you a temporary Infiltrator suit at will.

The chameleon kit is cheap and effortless, leaves behind no evidence, and is as versatile a disguise as the Changeling's innate ability. Its only flaw is that it's vulnerable to EMPs.
The spell is blindingly obvious to everyone who sees it that there's a heretic around, and it slows down a large part of the sandbox just by being up. Also, getting a set of eyes is a non-miniscule amount of effort; if you aren't a specific role that has biogenerator, genetics, or morgue access, you have to steal them from somewhere or craft flashlight eyes(if they're still even in the game). By the time you can just print a set of eyes, you're extremely far behind on your heretic'ing if you don't already have a focus.
The wizard should have almost no reason to hide their identity outside of a gimmick.
Meanwhile, a Changeling can just stand next to someone for less than a second and be able to instantly turn into them at no cost. My memory's telling me it can be any one of up to like ten people at a time?

Then this gets even worse if you lose to them...
If you lose to a Traitor, your body may have a calling card on it or have HMS, but you can easily be recovered and healed, Cargo being able to give you a fix of cures, unless you're thrown in the supermatter/incinerator, all things the Traitor intentionally has to go out of their way to do and is not asked of them to do any of it.
If you lose to a Wizard, your body can be missing limbs, be on fire, be blown up to gibs, but Medical is still able to fix all this, you may have different limbs, a different body, burned off wings, lacking a tail, but still alive and able to go back and fight the Wizard.
If you lose to a Heretic, congratulations you now are unable to do anything against the Heretic for the rest of the round due to the permanent phobia they give you, on top of usually worse traumas as well.
Even more annoyingly, Traitor's Hereditary Manifold Sickness objective has been disliked in general because it's giving a permanent downside just as a side thing Traitors do, yet somehow this is accepted for Heretic despite people with HMS still being able to look at the Traitor's general direction without being hardstunned.

I don't think anyone likes the heretic trauma. It's garbage, the minigame doesn't make sense, and I preferred it when they just dropped all your organs to be used as ritual materials.

As a Traitor, you have to break out on your own and use your codes to build yourself a new uplink, requiring a lot of work and you get none of your gear back.
As a Wizard, you have to break out on your own, find new robes, and depending on what Security did, find a new tongue through the aid of another player.
As a Heretic, you can give yourself a new living heart from prison botany, giving you all of your equipment back. If you even wanted to, you can also make a monkey cube and get your amber focus in there as well.

If security is thorough(and they should be, since they're giving you a heart transplant anyway), they'll have cut out your tongue as well, making spells more difficult. Also, if you have enough time to draw a circle in Perma without being noticed, the Warden isn't doing his job.
This is far from the least containable antagonist; the less containable ones are all destroyed ASAP because they can't be reasonably perma'd to the point that leaving them alive is stupid, such as Changelings and Cultists.

At its worst, Heretics can get 1-2 sacrifices and suddenly can't be batoned, can't be arrested, can't be perma'd, instantly stuns you in one hit, among other abilities they get, mix that in with its complete insane amount of paths, I've grown to dislike this antagonist from both sides. The only way I get satisfaction from ascending as a Heretic is if I intentionally cripple myself and don't bother using any of my abilities or stuns, and the only way to beat a Heretic is with cheap moves like syringe guns or because the Heretic is new and doesn't know every intricate detail about it. I believe they are the most handheld antagonist in the game as of current, beating Wizard among others. Heretics being used as the loophole feature coders use to throw in fantasy content and buffed up stuff makes it a hellhole of feature creep overbuffed handholding I've seen since shadowling.

I don't see how Heretics are more handheld than Wizards. Wizards are given everything they need to succeed, while Heretics have to work for it; the gear they work for is still strictly worse than any one wizard item.
Also, a large number of your complaints seem to be towards Blade heretics, which visibly telegraphs when it can block your attacks.

[Indie-ana Jones]

Honestly, Heretics for the most part are extremely bad at what they do. They have an abysmal ascension rate (5% or less iirc) and a stun hand alone nowhere near provides everything that a heretic needs. They're very loud and obvious, so they need a place to covertly do their magic (maint), which all jobs do not have access to. They need to breach into departments they don't have access to for some targets, which on different jobs looks more suspicious than others. They have to get access to rifts in order to get the balling rolling, which isn't always guaranteed. Their targets sometimes may never split away from other people, but Heretic has no tools for taking on several individuals until later into the round, assuming they survived that long to begin with. While you mention Heretic's stun hand, a vast majority of your targets as Heretic have stun batons or telebatons, where one hit from them either forces you to break your knife or lose your antag round, and that teleport *might* just send you into a major area where everyone will then beat the shit out of you. Furthermore, to get additional utilities to actually make you decent, you have to play a game of Fetch Quest(tm) which takes away time from actually being an antagonist.

Overall, from my experience on Sybil, you have to be one robust motherfucker, play on lowpop, or get lucky that a different antagonist kills your targets for you. Heretic vastly favors Assistants and Heads of Staff, who both have more leniency when doing suspicious things (Assistants are accepted to greytide, so breaking and entering isn't as obvious, and Heads of Staff are generally more trusted and have more access), whereas other jobs tend to suffer a lot more since Heretic behavior is a lot easier to notice from other jobs. I'm not a huge fan of it since a majority of the time, it is feast or famine and famine is waaaaaay more common than feast.

Alternatively, what a good number of stronger players do, similar to Changeling, is just use the antag as a murder pass. They don't really use any of their powers or progress their objective and just go around killing people, maybe using their stun hand but that's about it.

[GPeckman]

If a Traitor is attacking you with a stun weapon, it's usually a stunbaton, contractor baton, sleepy pen, or maybe some other misc things they can make up with. These all have a delay of either
[snip]
If a Heretic attacks you, you are dropped to the ground, if they shove you once then it's over, you are stunned and forced to watch yourself slowly die, completely unable to do anything to something that feels completely out of your control, because their attacks are a mix of stun and damage, meaning that once you are mansused then they keep stunning as they slowly kill you, something that gets worse and worse as the game goes on, yet similar things are done for no other Antagonist in the game.

You do know how the contractor baton works, right?

[johnfulpwillard]

This seems like a complete misevaluation. Comparing Wizard to Heretic should result in Wizard being the far stronger result in every situation.

I agree that Wizard should be stronger than Heretic, the comparisons I made is because I think Heretics outperform Wizard, and that sucks.

If a Heretic attacks you, you have less of a fighting chance than with the traitor, but far more than with the wizard. This is fine, because their tools require a higher degree of effort to obtain and they're meant to be ritualistically murdering people to gain power.
The Heretic directly compares to the Changeling, where they can cryosting you and whip out an armblade, and at that point you can't really fight back or run away, because you're extremely slow and taking damage over time from being cold.

I don't agree with this, Heretic spells can pull you in, or they teleport to you, or they make you blind as they charge at you. Closest Wizard has to this is their thunderbolt spell and maybe Blink. Changeling's cryo sting takes time to process, and armblade does not stun, while Mansus grasp is an instant stun and the stabbing with the blade is usually a stamcrit.

The Traitor can also whip out an item and just teleport away; see the syndicate teleporter, which is just as risky as the knife smash but far less limited. Their tools are more reusable and versatile in general. Laugh all you want, but the door card is good.

The airlock override card gets you in places but it's not as good to get out of arrests, especially with its delay between using it and an airlock opening. The Syndicate hand teleporter also gives you a general idea of where they teleport to, since they teleport in the direction they are facing, but also has the counter of ion rifle which Security usually has more of than they do null rods.

After which, yes, 'all they need' is a glass shiv and some resource, which is far more work than a wizard or traitor would have to do.

It's not comparable to a Wizard who would have to get their robes if they lost it, or a Traitor who has to make a new uplink or get a new syndicate hand teleporter with TC they now have to work towards (or not get at all), plus the fact knives are pretty easily accessible in basically any department except like, Medical, it's hard to stop a heretic from just going in a small corner and making themselves a new one when you have no idea of their location. I guess the best comparison you can make is a cultist that has teleport ready to use on themselves, starts attacking people with a longsword, and at the slightest hint of retaliation they will just disappear instantly, rinse and repeat.

Once you figure out that someone is on the Flesh path, you know a large number of abilities they are forced to have if they want to ascend, and you can deduce this based on the effects they're applying and the spells they're using. Nothing is stopping a Wizard from keeping a spell off-cooldown for emergencies, or a traitor from having a telescopic baton in their storage implant(or just having an uplink implant) outside of the cost of their abilities and tools.

I don't agree, heretic's access to so many sidepath stuff makes it practically impossible to tell what spells and abilities each heretic has without again, knowing absolutely everything about the antagonist. Compared to Traitors, Wizards, and Changelings, where you pretty much know what their tools are going to be, Heretics have so many different ways to play that learning them all is a challenge in itself and is just a massive knowledge-lock. Wizards can keep an off-cooldown spell, so can Heretics, so can Traitors, Changelings can keep a reroll for when they need, but Heretic is given vastly more abilities.

Meanwhile, a Changeling can just stand next to someone for less than a second and be able to instantly turn into them at no cost. My memory's telling me it can be any one of up to like ten people at a time?

The gimmick of changeling is that they impersonate other people, that's nothing against the point of my post. Compared to Heretics, Changeling's anti-stun capabilities are dogwater, their armblade is a toy and their stings are slow, while Heretics are given the ability to create allies which is gamechanging.

This is far from the least containable antagonist; the less containable ones are all destroyed ASAP because they can't be reasonably perma'd to the point that leaving them alive is stupid, such as Changelings and Cultists.

I don't mind Changelings and Cultists not being perma'd because Changelings are not human and Cultists can be deconverted, Heretics stand as basically some wizard version of Progtot.

[warbluke]

I do not like heretics. They're thematically weird, and being sacrificed is somehow worse than just getting gibbed half the time. It's also very hard to figure out what they're capable of so taking them alive is difficult.
Cultist simulator is cool but having Heretics AND bloodcult muddies the waters in my opinion. Heretics have never quite felt like they fit in the wacky spacemans game, you know? They feel like they'd be more at home on some sort of fantasy-medieval-server-thing. No, not that one.

[datorangebottle]

This seems like a complete misevaluation. Comparing Wizard to Heretic should result in Wizard being the far stronger result in every situation.

I agree that Wizard should be stronger than Heretic, the comparisons I made is because I think Heretics outperform Wizard, and that sucks.

If a Heretic attacks you, you have less of a fighting chance than with the traitor, but far more than with the wizard. This is fine, because their tools require a higher degree of effort to obtain and they're meant to be ritualistically murdering people to gain power.
The Heretic directly compares to the Changeling, where they can cryosting you and whip out an armblade, and at that point you can't really fight back or run away, because you're extremely slow and taking damage over time from being cold.

I don't agree with this, Heretic spells can pull you in, or they teleport to you, or they make you blind as they charge at you. Closest Wizard has to this is their thunderbolt spell and maybe Blink. Changeling's cryo sting takes time to process, and armblade does not stun, while Mansus grasp is an instant stun and the stabbing with the blade is usually a stamcrit.

If you legitimately think this, you need to take a very long look at the wizard spellbook, because you are objectively wrong. You're comparing to Smite(instant round removal if they click on you once), Fireball(ranged high damage mangling if they click on you and don't miss), Death Wand(instant ranged death, comes with a ton of other useful wands), and Mjolnir(stun baton that does actual relevant damage) here. The amount of time it takes a wizard to kill someone is much smaller than the amount of time to heretic takes to kill someone, and that's completely disregarding prep time.

Cryo sting takes seconds to start working, it not being a stun is irrelevant when it puts you at an equally large disadvantage quietly, invisibly, and very quickly.

The airlock override card gets you in places but it's not as good to get out of arrests, especially with its delay between using it and an airlock opening. The Syndicate hand teleporter also gives you a general idea of where they teleport to, since they teleport in the direction they are facing, but also has the counter of ion rifle which Security usually has more of than they do null rods.

The airlock card's a useful tool for breaking and entering that also has niche 'get me out of here' uses.
The syndicate teleporter, correct me if i'm wrong, can be used multiple times to get further similar to the cultist jaunter. Regardless of that, it can be combined cleverly with access and line of sight to escape pretty handily.

It's not comparable to a Wizard who would have to get their robes if they lost it, or a Traitor who has to make a new uplink or get a new syndicate hand teleporter with TC they now have to work towards (or not get at all), plus the fact knives are pretty easily accessible in basically any department except like, Medical, it's hard to stop a heretic from just going in a small corner and making themselves a new one when you have no idea of their location. I guess the best comparison you can make is a cultist that has teleport ready to use on themselves, starts attacking people with a longsword, and at the slightest hint of retaliation they will just disappear instantly, rinse and repeat.

I'll give you the robes, replacing them after they're taken away is much harder.
For traitors replacing their stuff, it's largely things they didn't have to work for in the first place and were just given by the game in their initial 20tc bundle, with additional things rewarded later. By the time a heretic replaces their heart and all the gear they already had to build, the round's probably over.

I don't agree, heretic's access to so many sidepath stuff makes it practically impossible to tell what spells and abilities each heretic has without again, knowing absolutely everything about the antagonist. Compared to Traitors, Wizards, and Changelings, where you pretty much know what their tools are going to be, Heretics have so many different ways to play that learning them all is a challenge in itself and is just a massive knowledge-lock. Wizards can keep an off-cooldown spell, so can Heretics, so can Traitors, Changelings can keep a reroll for when they need, but Heretic is given vastly more abilities.

Even without sandbagging an item, a given Traitor has:
Any combination of traitor gear totaling 20tc, minimum(they can get more TC). This can be anything from a deck of playing cards to a double-bladed energy sword, and what exactly they have access to differs based on a combination of time and how actively they've been pursuing objectives, unless they're the special midround tot.
A given Wizard has 10 spell points worth of spells, summons, and items, in any combination.
A given Changeling has 10 dna points worth of evolutions, and start with the ability to fake death and regrow limbs/heal wounds guaranteed.

Any given Heretic has:
Mansus Grasp, Living Heart, Codex, Cloak of Shadows, Knives at minimum.
Based on their path, they get up to 6 or 7 different abilities that they have to take if they want to advance up their tree and ascend; they can't have any of the blade passives or marks from other paths, and each path has one or more unique spells(as an example, void blast and star touch).
If you find out a Heretic is on the Blade path, you can know for certain that you never want to face away from them because it upgrades their funny hand, and that they could have abilities giving them blocking knives, the ability to hit you twice every time they click on you, and the ability to lock you in the room with them, because without even thinking of the side-paths, these are all abilities they're forced to pick up on their way to ascension.

You don't "pretty much know" what the antags' tools are going to be, they all have enormous lists of things they can choose from and carry at any given time, and the only one with any sort of restriction on picking those tools is Heretic. I don't know what else to tell you here.

The gimmick of changeling is that they impersonate other people, that's nothing against the point of my post. Compared to Heretics, Changeling's anti-stun capabilities are dogwater, their armblade is a toy and their stings are slow, while Heretics are given the ability to create allies which is gamechanging.

They're still the best direct comparison, and not every heretic has easy access to the antag's anti-stuns or ally creation. The further they go on the sidepaths, the more time they have to spend getting knowledge points.
Also, the armblade is not markedly worse than the knife.

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Code: Select all

Heretic
	force = 20
	throwforce = 10
	wound_bonus = 5
	bare_wound_bonus = 15
	toolspeed = 0.375
	demolition_mod = 0.8
	armour_penetration = 35

Code: Select all

Changeling
	force = 25
	throwforce = 0
	throw_range = 0
	throw_speed = 0
	wound_bonus = 10
	bare_wound_bonus = 10
	armour_penetration = 35
	var/can_drop = FALSE

This is outside of their other abilities, but comparing them with all abilities factored in would involve getting super deep into it. At a base, it does more damage and you cannot be disarmed of it unless you have your arm removed.
My assumptions are that the Blade Heretic knife in particular out-slices the Armblade while being attacked or duel-wielding, but that the others end up just matching it(or barely coming out on top) when the extra modifiers + mark vs nodrop, tentacle combo, and ease of acquisition/use are factored in.

[johnfulpwillard]

If you legitimately think this, you need to take a very long look at the wizard spellbook, because you are objectively wrong. You're comparing to Smite(instant round removal if they click on you once), Fireball(ranged high damage mangling if they click on you and don't miss), Death Wand(instant ranged death, comes with a ton of other useful wands), and Mjolnir(stun baton that does actual relevant damage) here. The amount of time it takes a wizard to kill someone is much smaller than the amount of time to heretic takes to kill someone, and that's completely disregarding prep time.

I addressed this directly already, a quick death for a powerful antagonist is fine, but they can also be revived and go back to hunting the Wizard after, compared to a Heretic that gives you a trauma causing you to be stunned every time they are on your screen.

The syndicate teleporter, correct me if i'm wrong, can be used multiple times to get further similar to the cultist jaunter. Regardless of that, it can be combined cleverly with access and line of sight to escape pretty handily.

The Syndicate hand teleporter is powerful, but it is not as powerful as the heretic blade, you are still limited to 3 time use at a time if you choose to spam it, otherwise you are still close to where you teleported from, and risking being gibbed by a wall and getting ioned.

For traitors replacing their stuff, it's largely things they didn't have to work for in the first place and were just given by the game in their initial 20tc bundle, with additional things rewarded later. By the time a heretic replaces their heart and all the gear they already had to build, the round's probably over.

Heretics don't lose anything, I said in my original post that all they need to get is some work from either Botany, Public Garden, or Prison Garden for a poppy and if you want a focus, a monkey cube. Traitors lose their gear, and they need to work on getting their uplink back, which then gives them none of their equipment back, Heretics have it all innate so it can't be taken away.

Any combination of traitor gear totaling 20tc, minimum(they can get more TC). This can be anything from a deck of playing cards to a double-bladed energy sword, and what exactly they have access to differs based on a combination of time and how actively they've been pursuing objectives, unless they're the special midround tot.
A given Wizard has 10 spell points worth of spells, summons, and items, in any combination.
A given Changeling has 10 dna points worth of evolutions, and start with the ability to fake death and regrow limbs/heal wounds guaranteed.

And all this is easy to figure out as Security, if a Wizard is fireballing then you know they have fireball, if a Traitor is eswording then you know they have an energy sword. If you see a Heretic with their blade out, you have no idea if they will stun you if you try to baton them, nor do you know what their mansus grasp can do. Wizard's limited spellpoints means every spell you know is one less thing hidden from you, which is why I called heretic the 'wizard version of progtot'.

You don't "pretty much know" what the antags' tools are going to be, they all have enormous lists of things they can choose from and carry at any given time, and the only one with any sort of restriction on picking those tools is Heretic. I don't know what else to tell you here.

You have a general idea of what antag tools are from just looking at the item, regardless of antagonist, but Heretic is the only exception. You know what a fireball does from the name, you know what a desword does from seeing it in someone's hand, you know what the cult stun does from the name, you know what the cult longsword and daggers do from their names, but a heretic knife and mansus grap are completely unpredictable unless again, you know absolutely everything about the antagonist from knowing every single path. It's a knowledge lock, catereing to people who no-life the game to know everything about it. I've never before had to open up the wiki to an antagonist when not even playing as that antagonist just to know what spell they had just used on me. I found Heretic was fine in its first implementation when there were only 3 paths that were distinct with no crossover, but overtime we got to 8 paths with plenty of crossover between eachother. The amount of stuff that is expected from non-heretics just to be able to combat them is insane.

damage numbers for armblade and knife

The direct damage they do is irrelevant because of the mansus grasp's additional actions, which is usually just the form of a massive stun or even pacification.

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

I had a long passive-aggressive rant typed up, but I thought better of it.

John, I think your position is absurd, and to a normal player such as myself, is the equivalent of someone holding up a normal housecat and loudly proclaiming it to be a vile demonic monster. Most heretics actually in game do not perform well and struggle to get a single sacrifice, let alone an ascension. I think that the high level of skill you play at, which is in no way indicative of the normal experience of 98%+ of the playerbase, is warping your perception of the power and usability of heretics, and, additionally, I think your perspective is further skewed by the fact that you are spending all of your time lately in the codebase instead of actually on the ground, in the game, actually playing as a heretic. Your last actual shift you played was nearly 4 months ago, and I doubt you were a heretic at that time. If you told me that you haven't actually played as or seen a heretic in game in the last year or more, I would not be surprised in the slightest. Additionally, for some reason, the coder team gets this weird bug in them every 3 months on average that makes them want to nerf Heretics. I think that these three factors combined are severely warping and skewing your perception of Heretics, and you would be better served either playing a few shifts or interviewing a bunch of normal players and asking their opinions on the state of Heretics, rather than posting this thread that only 3 players, 2 admins, and 10 other code maintainers are going to see.

I am very tired of the coder team getting a raging hate boner for Heretic every 3 months. Leave it alone already, actual players love the antag as it is, and you already soft-removed it by limiting it to one per shift a couple months ago, which was the last time the "coder heretic hatred" bug popped up, like a seasonal flu or something.

[johnfulpwillard]

I had a long passive-aggressive rant typed up, but I thought better of it.

I think what you wrote is even worse than any passive aggressive message you sent. My experience doesn't have to be from playing Sybil to have thoughts on something, nor am I part of some collective "coder" hivemind that nerfs Heretics left and right. The only heretic nerf I've ever seen get added is being limited to 2 knives at once, which was only added so knife heretic can bypass it (which brings me back to one of my original complaints of too many paths). I cannot find any PR that limits Heretics spawning to 1 per round, and I definitely wasn't responsible for it. Even the change from gibbing players to giving them trauma was a heretic buff because gibbed heads being stuck onto a new body is someone who can come hunt you back down. There is no "Coder team" on TG, we have maintainers and we have headcoders that try to manage it all, but in general we all have our own ideas and opinions on the game and we respect eachother. Your inability to ever try to see contributors as individuals is why I don't believe in your judgement and don't wish to make any debate with you on the topic.

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

I cannot find any PR that limits Heretics spawning to 1 per round, and I definitely wasn't responsible for it.

I believe it was a config change, but it was put in because the last time the heretic nerf coder bug came around a couple of months ago, they wanted to remove ascensions, and that was the compromise nerf, after much, much whining from the players, that if we had not done, probably would have gone through. I'm very tired of this exact same situation happening every few months.

Your inability to ever try to see contributors as individuals is why I don't believe in your judgement and don't wish to make any debate with you on the topic.

I addressed you as an individual John. I pointed specifically to your very high level of skill, and your own personal time you're spending, or rather, not spending, in game. Only one in three of my points about how your perspective is being skewed on the state of Heretics was addressed to your status as a coder.

[Jacquerel]

I cannot find any PR that limits Heretics spawning to 1 per round, and I definitely wasn't responsible for it.

I believe it was a config change, but it was put in because the last time the heretic nerf coder bug came around a couple of months ago, they wanted to remove ascensions, and that was the compromise nerf, after much, much whining from the players, that if we had not done, probably would have gone through. I'm very tired of this exact same situation happening every few months.

as the guy who made that pr, this is ahistorical nonsense and those two things weren't related and as far as I know weren't even proposed for the same reason, you are drawing lines which don't exist
the coding team (aka: whatever random person makes a github account, as John said there is no actual Team in terms of any kind of organised planning and certainly no entity with any kind of agreement about how heretic should work) does not dictate config changes and vice versa

it also isn't even how the config on live servers work, you can have multiple heretics per round and it isn't limited to just one

this literally doesn't happen every few months, you just have conspiracy brain where if you see a change you don't like it can only be caused by some kind of shadowy cabal rather than a bunch of individuals making their own choices and proposals
coders added heretic, coders added every heretic path, coders added everything you like about heretic, coders will continue to adjust heretic long into the future, coders will probably make a lot of heretic changes you disapprove of and some you like, there will be no top-down or any other kind of organisation to this because that isn't ho development of this game works

I've still got plans to work on how heretics function too, just different ones (relating to lowering the skill floor, making progression a bit less extreme, reducing the ridiculous amount of buttons you gain, ensuring that heretics actually have the flexibility to do gimmicks which aren't ascending (especially because even in this thread people are treating ascending as the only way to have played heretic correctly, emphasising why it was a stupid design from the start))
thought about mentioning them in this thread earlier but to be quite honest I don't really relate to Mr Willard's problems either so I don't think my plans are particularly relevant

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

as the guy who made that pr, this is ahistorical nonsense and those two things weren't related and as far as I know weren't even proposed for the same reason, you are drawing lines which don't exist
the coding team (aka: whatever random person makes a github account, as John said there is no actual Team in terms of any kind of organised planning and certainly no entity with any kind of agreement about how heretic should work) does not dictate config changes and vice versa

*Heretic goes largely unchanged for a few months.*
*You make a PR removing heretic ascension.*
*6 days later Mothblocks, another code maintainer, after the large amount of discussion surrounding heretics spawned by your PR, nerfs heretics down to spawning only one at roundstart.*

"They were totally unrelated guys!"

Also:

"Noooo, we're not a team, we're just the 0.01% of the community who has our own special rank, special color, special title, our own discord channel, we refer to ourselves as a seperate entity (coderbus), and have exclusive rights to approve merges in to the codebase, and we focus primarily on coding, but really, anyone with a github account is the same thing!"

Come on guys.

[Jacquerel]

It was fikou (as head admin, in collaboration with the triumvirate) not mothblocks
The change was certainly made because people were talking a lot about heretic, but because that prompted the author of the change to also think about heretics and their own (different) vision about them

There was no collaboration and it was not a compromise, they were not decisions made for the same reason or targeted at the same problems

This took place in public on discord and github

This would be obvious if you thought for more than 4 seconds because they're completely different proposals but you prefer to decide that people are making decisions based on "hating heretic" rather than having specific and differing goals in mind even when those goals are publicly communicated

"Coderbus" is not a team or entity, it is a discord server where coders from any ss13 server share tips, it has no sway over tg developmemt

The maintainer team for tg have an entirely public discussion channel on tg which is mostly very boring conversations about optimisation

There is, as has been repeatedly mentioned, no shared vision for heretic or frankly anything at all
"Coders" make arbitrary changes because they think they are good ideas, nobody directs them

Maintainers generally speaking code LESS balance and feature additions than random developers, and if you say CODERS you are indeed talking about random Joe Githubuser

You literally don't know what is going on or what you are talking about and make no effort to find out when it's all public because your imagined version is more exciting, your posts are totally worthless

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

your posts are totally worthless

Accurate and true, but your posts are equal in being pedantic.

[GPeckman]

I addressed this directly already, a quick death for a powerful antagonist is fine, but they can also be revived and go back to hunting the Wizard after, compared to a Heretic that gives you a trauma causing you to be stunned every time they are on your screen.

I mean, in practice will wizard victims get revived that much? Lets look at smite. It gibs you, leaving only a brain behind, and to get revived the brain has to be placed into a new body (probably a humanized monkey from genetics). Now, consider this: cranial fractures were implemented as a partial replacement to beheading explicitly because beheading was functionally round removal. It didn't matter that it was possible for your head to get reattached; it too rare for it to be functional. If head reattachment already makes revival so rare, wouldn't full-on gibbing make it just as rare, if not rarer?

Heretics don't lose anything, I said in my original post that all they need to get is some work from either Botany, Public Garden, or Prison Garden for a poppy and if you want a focus, a monkey cube. Traitors lose their gear, and they need to work on getting their uplink back, which then gives them none of their equipment back, Heretics have it all innate so it can't be taken away.

All traitors need to replace their uplink is a teleporter beacon (those spawn randomly across the station, and can be easily obtained), iron and cable (trivial to acquire), and a bluespace crystal (pretty easy to get by raiding the teleporter room). Traitors do lose their TC for good, but secondary objectives allow them to get more with relatively little effort, compared to how much effort heretics need to get more knowledge.

And all this is easy to figure out as Security, if a Wizard is fireballing then you know they have fireball, if a Traitor is eswording then you know they have an energy sword. If you see a Heretic with their blade out, you have no idea if they will stun you if you try to baton them, nor do you know what their mansus grasp can do. Wizard's limited spellpoints means every spell you know is one less thing hidden from you, which is why I called heretic the 'wizard version of progtot'.

The comparison between traitor and heretic here is pretty obviously fallacious. Its true that if you see a traitor with an esword, then you know they have an esword. But if you see a heretic with their blade out, you can similarly tell that they have a heretic blade, and you can even figure out what path they are. Its also true that simply seeing a heretic blade doesn't tell you with certainty what spells the heretic may have. But seeing a traitor with an esword doesn't tell you if the traitor has stims or noslips.

You have a general idea of what antag tools are from just looking at the item, regardless of antagonist, but Heretic is the only exception. You know what a fireball does from the name, you know what a desword does from seeing it in someone's hand, you know what the cult stun does from the name, you know what the cult longsword and daggers do from their names, but a heretic knife and mansus grap are completely unpredictable unless again, you know absolutely everything about the antagonist from knowing every single path. It's a knowledge lock, catereing to people who no-life the game to know everything about it. I've never before had to open up the wiki to an antagonist when not even playing as that antagonist just to know what spell they had just used on me. I found Heretic was fine in its first implementation when there were only 3 paths that were distinct with no crossover, but overtime we got to 8 paths with plenty of crossover between eachother. The amount of stuff that is expected from non-heretics just to be able to combat them is insane.

I'd say that the bloody bastard sword cult item is easily less predictable than the heretic blades. It gives you a very niche form of stun resistance and has the weird spinny attack. Different paths have different heretic blade effects, but it also gives the blade a different name and appearance, from which you can deduce the effects. Its true that you can't tell what path a heretic is just from the grasp alone, but the difference between the different grasps is pretty much irrelevant. Speaking of which...

The direct damage they do is irrelevant because of the mansus grasp's additional actions, which is usually just the form of a massive stun or even pacification.

This is factually wrong. Lets go over every single version of the mansus grasp:
Grasp of Ash: Temporary blindness. Useful, but not a stun.
Grasp of Lunacy: Hallucinations, and hides your identity. Also not a stun.
Grasp of Lock: Opens airlocks and a few other things. Not a stun.
Grasp of Flesh: Raises corpses as weak ghouls. Not a stun.
Grasp of Void: Mutes your victim and cools them down. Not a stun.
Grasp of Blade: Extra damage and a stun only if you attack from behind.
Grasp of Rust: Destroys walls and does heavy structure damage. Not a stun.
Grasp of Cosmos: Puts a star mark on your victim. Not a stun.

Mark of Ash: Sets the victim on fire. Not a stun.
Mark of Moon: Pacifies the victim, but the pacifism ends instantly if you hit them with your blade.
Mark of Lock: The victim can't open airlocks. Not a stun.
Mark of Flesh: Causes bleeding. Not a stun.
Mark of Void: Lowers body temperature. Slows, but doesn't stun.
Mark of the Blade: Traps victims in the same room, similar to the Mark of Lock. But wears off if you hit them with your blade. Not a stun.
Mark of Rust: Damages items your victim is carrying. Not a stun.
Mark of Cosmos: Puts a special mark on your victim, which teleports them and causes a short paralyze when you hit them with your blade.

Out of 8 paths, there is one conditional stun, one conditional application of pacifism, and a short paralyze that also moves your target away from you in most cases.

Pretty much the only good point you made is that blade break is strong.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

heretics arent fun to play against and sit in the awkward spot of "Just weak enough to get completely ignored if theres any major antag active but just strong enough that theyre hunted with relentless desperate fervour if there isn't." but saying that they're "handholdy" when only the most powergamey/robust people ever seem to be able to ascend is silly.

[MooCow12]

Heretic's main gameplay loop is something that everyone generally despises and that's discrete round removals and assassinations without being loud.

And they are restricted to this because that's precisely what they excel at and how they scale into the round.


You cannot take this from them without entirely destroying their identity, although you can change their identity into something else like an antagonist that gathers bobbles ingredients and crafting trinkets for their own progress and actually interacts with the vast amounts of mechanics already embedded within the game.

Then you could rework how each path progresses and to pick a path is to pick a department, ash might need a particular hot gas as one of their ingredients and has a utility ability to heat up those gasses, maybe it needs a burned corpse to gain that ability.

Flesh could use and scale with medical stuff, uses body parts and organs and synthflesh and has ways of making certain chemicals

Rust is good at building and destroying structural stuff and likes building materials and tools

Void likes cold gasses and low pressure, its basically the opposite of ash in that it can cool down gas and containers to values that arn't achievable by the crew as a special interaction.

Cosmic could be an extension of science and the unknown, learning remote signaler frequencies from heretic influences and anomalies that it can signal to attract voidborn creatures to the z level to aid it.

[TheRex9001]

Mark of Moon: Pacifies the victim, but the pacifism ends instantly if you hit them with your blade.

Worth noting that it ends the second the victim takes up to 10 damage

[NecromancerAnne]

I don't think I agree with literally any aspect of this argument, John, and I'm not even able to get past the first paragraph before asking myself what exactly brought about this discussion and what the end goal is. i don't even feel it worth engaging with the comparisons made because most of it seems almost too selective and dishonestly presented to be worth engaging with at all. And the long and short of it is that I just outright think you're wrong on the core basis of the argument.

We should 100% be handholding our antagonists because of one consideration; the pilot's proficiency and game knowledge is an unknowable variable, and statistically speaking is likely to be low than it is high. Mothblocks herself I believe a few years ago demonstrated we have a lot of new player churn, and I think argued vehemently for designing with that in mind. Simple to pick up and play. And I agree with that perspective as well.

Essay post under the spoiler, ye have been warned.

► Show Spoiler

From experience, both observing as an admin, many hours playing and having played the role itself, I can absolutely say that no new player would ever be able to successfully grasp what the fuck Heretic is meant to do without a good degree of hand-holding. Which it barely even has at all. Melbert did his fucking best when he updated the UI and the antagonist, but there is a good deal of times where players still need to be instructed on how to perform their rites, what the foci are, and how to progress. The most common question I've encountered is how to even draw the transmutation rune, a fundamental aspect of heretic. These are all instructions laid out in their antagonist panel, but players simply do not read this information or know that it is there.

This isn't even to speak to the fact that, as a progression antagonist, they're not nearly as capable as most any of their other counterparts from the beginning of the round and often give away their presence fairly early on. We're permissive of players preparing for antagonists they know they will have to face even on MRP. And security players can often be some of our more experienced players as well. The role having built-in giveaways is often the ways in which newer players get caught, because they're not aware of what their opposition can bring to bare if they understand what they're doing.

When I first got to play heretic, while it still had the antag tells in their bag, the moment I got my first rift I stashed my gear because not more than three minutes later four security officers in riot gear burst through my door to arrest and bag search me. They did it to my whole department, sure, but I was obviously the one they were looking for. Because my fibers were on a door in the outside hallway. Not even in the room in question with the rift. And the only saving grace I had was because I knew some secoff was going to be particularly thorough about checking every surrounding doorway and area for clues. Any new player who had just joined the server would be done right then and there.

My own changes to Nuclear Operatives have been largely with a new player focus first and foremost. Trying, desperately, to get newer players towards success over failure not so much in 'I want ops to win more' but 'I watn the operatives to feel like they accomplished at least something and played out their role's promise before inevitably exploding into a fine red mist from eating shit to an assistant with ten times the playtime'. And I think it is going well! I'm seeing more players purchasing the starting gear box (an idea from Melbert) that does a lot to help new players succeed. And the gun cases seem to be stopping new players from walking out of the Infiltrator without spare ammo or items to help support their goals, a common way in which Ops completely fumble past the starting line.

An example where focusing too hard on NOT handholding and too much on the absolutely extreme end of player proficiency is Cult. Cult is writhe with new player traps, but also filled to the brim with powergaming potency. Any argument you have made about heretic can absolutely be applied seven fold to any individual cultist. Their powers are almost identical, if not stronger, than heretic out the gate and with no progression lock, just time and game knowledge. And they're a team antagonist. That's a lot of, theoretical, heretic-equivalents you have to deal with. And it got to this point because Oldman Robustin was obsessed with success. He expected and required people to both powergame in the role with all the possible knowledge you can bring to bare, and he wanted people to do the same when dealing with cultists themselves. This alabaster tower design has resulted in one of the biggest fuckup cancers we have in the codebase. It's very easy to do it unintentionally, but when done deliberately, I find the antagonist in question just implodes in the hands of anyone but the most seasoned.

TL;DR
Not every player playing a role is a several hundred/thousand hour god of war, and designing only for those extreme minority of players is a genuinely silly thing to do. You should instead design with an approachable, simple system that allows players the chance to play out their antagonist's role without requiring a high level of game knowledge/at least a minimum amount of game knowledge. On the flip side, if you're worried about those gods of war gaining too much potency when they really ramp up, you shouldn't design antagonists to obtain exponential power to begin with. Making it less approachable only empowers these people further as the only ones capable enough to actually engage with the content, resulting in the problem not being fixed and unfairly punishing new players for not having the experience necessary to actually play the role they have been given.

Edit: I also wanna say that if this a call to change heretic, I do agree, but literally just to move away from the gamer elitism design that edgezero made the role to appeal to, and towards a more approachable design. I fucking told him it was a bad idea when I gave him the name for the antagonist....

[Jacquerel]

Heretic was intentionally designed at its inception to be a high skill-floor role with a rarely-achieved spectacular payoff for elite, pro players and we've been trying to hammer this absolutely terrible idea into a workable shape ever since.

[NecromancerAnne]

It's rather unfortunate. I had a similar concept at the time for a more artificery/occult antagonist that was more like, dubiously magically themed than outright magical. Think more SCP than Lovecraft, weird science and the unexplained/otherworldly. It would have operated similarly to spies do right now actually (which I think is a good example of a simple antagonist design).

Find stuff, do something to the thing that permanently makes it a danger towards the crew (like make lathes eat people or turn a room into an active hazard because it is turning people into slimes or plasmamen because the vending machine keeps spitting out bottles of mutation soda at people), gain secret knowledge to build some doo-dad to make your life easier. But it was with the assumption that you're operating as an outside party coming aboard and with at least a few tools to help. I was really inspired by contractors when working out the specifics at the time. But my knowledge of coding was still very limited.

[TheFinalPotato]

Heretic was intentionally designed at its inception to be a high skill-floor role with a rarely-achieved spectacular payoff for elite, pro players and we've been trying to hammer this absolutely terrible idea into a workable shape ever since.

Hey guys I made a mass murder antag for high skill players gets banned from discord
Fuck the high skill mass murder antag is high skill and kills a lot of people, WhO CouLd HavE SeEn thIs ComINg!?!

oranges should have never retired, he could have saved us

[oranges]

magic antags are shit and this is just traitor but you have magic instead I don't really know why anyone thinks it has any value.

[MooCow12]

magic antags are shit and this is just traitor but you have magic instead I don't really know why anyone thinks it has any value.

Magic allows an easier way to explain and animate certain abilities

Imagine if we gave changeling a skillshot where it cleaves people infront of it, okay we would have to make textures for a special arm that reaches out and hits those tiles or sprite spikes coming out of it to hit those tiles, it has potential to look really really good but it seems like alot more effort than just making an effect that has no structural meaning like a limb or an object flying out while magic is just something you dont have to fully explain with visuals.


Atleast thats my back end logic for thinking magic is good for the game design wise, its a reason to be a bit more lazy when it comes to visuals in a game full of mechanics and allows coders who suck at spriting to be more creative with the mechanics they create.

[Shadowflame909]

I don't think I've green texted with this antagonist once. It's tools are kinda stinky and require a lot of prep that could take an entire round.

It's a lot better to just treat it like blood brothers and use stolen security tech. Easier to use and more plausible deniability.

It's tricks are cool but the high difficulty will leave this antag as a permanent filter on the player base. Like toxins or Atmos.

[datorangebottle]

magic antags are shit and this is just traitor but you have magic instead I don't really know why anyone thinks it has any value.

I like magic in my scifi. Not everyone does and that's okay.
Also just a big fan of the lore it admittedly stole, and the idea of someone running around ritually murdering the crew. Blood cult is neat, but the heretic does it with a lot more style and effort.

I still think organ drop heretic was the best version.

[Super Aggro Crag]

magic antags are shit and this is just traitor but you have magic instead I don't really know why anyone thinks it has any value.

i hate magic antag

[Indie-ana Jones]

I pretty much agree with Anne's take wholesale on this one, I find it pretty much aligns with what I posted initially. Heretic sucks and ought to be changed, but for the sake of not being handholdy enough, especially for less seasoned players, as opposed to making it any harder than it is now.

[Blacklist897]

Heretic has cool flavor cool spells and ass gameplay, the only antag that is worse is the tumor that is cult.

[xzero314]

I cant speak to the balance of heretic as a whole but it is by far the most flavourful antag in the list. Nothing will ever top the time I got to have a DBZ battle with a space dragon using space phase.

[Higgin]

It's interesting to read this with fresh recall of the last several non-path reworks of heretic (including Melbert's probably biggest changes on DDR, research, and the cloak/bladebreak) all aiming to make heretics less prone to totally fizzling in the early game and a bit more meaningfully* predictable than murdering a handful of dudes.
.
On the topic of handholding, I'd call heretic by far the hardest of the antags on that list - even before the # you could see at roundstart was limited (less competition, sure, but crucially: less cover.)

There is a form of handholding today where the objectives and ascension channel you, I suppose. If you're a target, you can't throw off the Living Heart (but it's fine that traditional methods of hiding don't work with heretics - it's a cool, unique thing they have that they can also reroll out of if they really need.)

Take all the other disadvantages with them, though, and even the strongest heretic abilities pre-ascend don't put them above a wizard in my book.

My biggest gripe will always be with free escapes or ways of attacking that are totally without contest. While I dislike rng and inputleas block in general, besides attaching more of a limit or cooldown to blade breaks and making the free blocks either a toggleable timed parry with riposte or only apply on melee attacks, I'm not sure what I'd change.

Maybe get rid of the sacrifice trauma? Make it heretic-specific instead of all magic/supernatural (which is silly and obnoxious for its tendency to catch wizards, cultists, Jehovah's Witnesses, goths, the chaplain, and the heretic alike?)