/tg/Station 13

They can bring an unarmoured crewmember down to mid-health (the slowdown guaranteeing your death) in one hit, move as fast as a satiated human, have 250 health, can vent-crawl (apparently), are able to jaunt endlessly with pools of blood, and can instantly gib anyone, living or dead, by dragging them into blood. They aren't exactly fun to play against.

They feel more like xeno-tier round enders than something that's available at roundstart, much less available at round start and can that can be spawned five at a time during wizard rounds. It's like ei nath but a thousand times worse since I'm fairly sure you can't stun them (my ballsy telebaton charge was not rewarded) and they don't even leave a brain that can be used for borging or transplants

I only fought one, and not for long, The stakes might be a little too high I agree, but they are definitely interesting enough to continue to try and re balance for the bits that do work.

They should feel dangerous, and very lethal, but maybe they are a bit too lethal, Perhaps a movement penalty, not as far as a golem or mech or anything, but just slightly enough so someone at full food can outrun them for their lives, Then the people who really get wrecked are the ones who try to one-man-action-hero the fucker.

What we need to decide is should the Slaughter Demon be considered a round ender akin to Xeno's or the Death Squad, fully fledged antagonist that can carry a round by itself or a secondary antagonist akin to the Space Ninja or Abductors that spawns in mid round.

Personally I like the idea of it being a round ender.

Shaps wrote:They feel more like xeno-tier round enders than something that's available at roundstart, much less available at round start and can that can be spawned five at a time during wizard rounds. It's like ei nath but a thousand times worse since I'm fairly sure you can't stun them (my ballsy telebaton charge was not rewarded) and they don't even leave a brain that can be used for borging or transplants

Xenos you can at least try to fight off, and even if you fail you get to continue to play as xeno. Makes it quite fun for everyone usually, not like the deamon who is just fun for 1 guy.

Not every antag we have needs to be able to be fought.
Some antags are game-ending

You can't always fight everything.
You can always try to run, and get dead quick
Or you can hide




And no, they can't vent crawl, that was me in the vents, i was a slime.

I remember someone screaming "THEY CANT VENT CRAWL NOW??" as i went back and fourth under them in the vents

I'm gonna remove them from the spellbook until I can balance them.

Kor wrote:I'm gonna remove them from the spellbook until I can balance them.

One round the Wizard unleashed 4 Slaughter Demons. Most of the crew survived because volunteers turned themselves into engiborgs and cleaned all the blood around the station... also everyone was armed to fight the thing

I was there for that round, as QM. It took a shitton of buckets delivered to Robo, and turning myself into a janiborg, to shut down most of them.

Even then, a lot of people got robusted hard.

I observed a round with two slaughter demons, the first demon died early on due to the person he killed failing to bleed anywhere, thus he could not retreat. The second slaughter demon was simply unstoppable, even though in my opinion that player was not a highly skilled player.

The ability to instantly enter and leave your pocket dimension gives you great tactical manoeuvrability that even Wizards don't enjoy, in addition your powerful attacks can crit most people in two or three hits, with security usually taking four or five hits to down, in addition your high health (250ish) makes it very hard to kill a demon, and the ease of which said demon can spread blood around the station means unless the entire crew can coordinate to a high degree then stopping a demon is extremely hard.

In addition his ability to instantly heal all damage by eating a critical or dying player also further compounds the issue, I've seen the demon seek out monkies and ian to eat.

In the hands of a good player I would think the demon would simply wipe out the crew in short order, the only thing holding this demon back was that he was simply not a very skilled combatant.

I think we need to better discuss exactly what we want the demons to do, are they round ending like the Death Squad or Aliens or more of a side antagonist, I like the antagonist but I want to know where we want to take it before we do anything drastic.

demons shouldnt be round ending and need some nerfs. wizard shouldnt be able to spawn 5 unstoppable killing machines immidietly at round start and completely fuck station with absolutely no effort. maybe restrict the summoning to later in the round when the science has made new shit or the crew has had time to arm up and prepare or something. Right now it's just HURR DURR SPAWN DEMONS AND KILL EVERYTHING NOT EVEN GONNA TRY TO MAKE ANYTHING FUN.

Split Sdemons into two antags, Slaughter Imps and Slaughter Demons.

The Slaughter Demons remain the very powerful antag we have now yet the Slaughter Imps are more scaled down versions that are not as massively powerful as the Demons are now.

Maybe for a toned down version make the emphasis be bleeding people to death instead of just bludgeoning then deleting them?

Can we have melee attacks that always cause bleeding? I don't fully understand the underlying mechanics but a way to consistently cause bleeding would strain resources somewhat and put everyone attacked on a clock to get to medicine.

Make demons slow.
After exiting a blood pool however, they go at their current sanic speed for X seconds.

This lets them be an ambush predator, jumping out of blood and dunking and nerd, before hiding again, rather then just run around super sanic dunking everyone until eventually you need to heal.
Also make dragging someone into blood a little slower, it's pretty silly right now.
And lastly, the damage should stay high, but maybe not THIS high.

Edit: Also the health is awfully high considering they can full heal extremely easily.

make their jaunt cost a second or so.

I was literally running after a demon with space cleaner cleaning all the blood he created with dragging someone. The blood existed for around .2 seconds and he still had enough time to jaunt.

Make is so cleaning blood is actually somewhat of a counter.

Maybe make space cleaner and water burn them, the blood hates it after all.

John_Oxford wrote:Not every antag we have needs to be able to be fought.
Some antags are game-ending

You can't always fight everything.
You can always try to run, and get dead quick
Or you can hide




And no, they can't vent crawl, that was me in the vents, i was a slime.

I remember someone screaming "THEY CANT VENT CRAWL NOW??" as i went back and fourth under them in the vents

There are much more elegant ways for any button pressers to end rounds quickly. I'd rather we didn't leave some potentially very interesting antags (Xenos, Slaughter Demons) in a broken state just because MUH ROUND ENDER.

I do agree the SDemon needs to be toned down, the Death Squad should be the only real guarantee round enders.

Currently the only time's I've seen a Sdemon die was from a time stopping grenade.

>Not ending the round with a strength 100 blob

Ikarrus wrote:>Not ending the round with a strength 100 blob

A blob that generates 100 biomass per collection at start? Dear god.

I can imagine a guy crawling through a pipe to the center of the blob and suicidebombing it to save everyone. Do it.

Maybe give it slime weaknesses, no blood puddles in space after all.

Still OP!

Amnestik wrote:Still OP!

The health/speed thing didnt help?

Both died last time I saw them, albiet during a summon guns round

Just encountered one of these things for the first time.

Holy Jesus fuckin' crap. Something which can punch to crit through armour in four/five hits, disappears in one of our plentiful blood supplies, and utterly destroys the bodies of the people it kills so they're out of the round forever?

To be fair that's because most if not all station bound armour only offers very mediocre (read: poor) protection.

Steelpoint wrote:To be fair that's because most if not all station bound armour only offers very mediocre (read: poor) protection.

It was the captain's winter coat, which is functionally identical to the carapace, IIRC.

I'm doing some work on slaughter demons, I'll probably do some nerfs.

What's really nice with morph is that when you kill it, if you kill it, then all the people it's eaten do spill out.

If death to a slaughter demon wasn't so ridiculously final it might be a lot more fun to fight. But I don't know if people are going to argue that perma-gib is somehow "the whole point" of slaughters or something like that.

Yeah. Morph is fun because it's a pinata at the end, and the hero saves all the poor lost souls that got eaten (and usually assloads of guns and shit).
Slaughter meme just removes people from the round with no effort, and has bullshit blood jaunting, which just got it's CD removed.

Blood Crawl will have a two-second or so period for the user to emerge from the pool of blood. I'll probably make the slaughter demon drop the people it's eaten in some way.

Xhuis wrote:Blood Crawl will have a two-second or so period for the user to emerge from the pool of blood. I'll probably make the slaughter demon drop the people it's eaten in some way.

Some kind of power/ability that can be unlocked after eating a certain amount of people, but you drop the corpses when you unlock it.

Or make it spit out the corpse when he's done eating, but it's husked and all the items are gone.

The way it's being worked, eaten mobs are dealt 1000 brute damage (enough to massively bloody all limbs) and placed into the demon itself. When it dies, it drops all the people it ate.

Laughter Demons are fun as fuck, you guys care far too much about dying during a Wizard round.

It's Wizard. it's a round designed to be fun for a single individual and whoever he brings into existence. Just enjoy the ride, and the occasional gory death.

Cheimon wrote: But I don't know if people are going to argue that perma-gib is somehow "the whole point" of slaughters or something like that.

I mean yeah kinda. Scarier or something.

I also wanted to encourage people to fight it by cleaning floors/running away (the warning on surfacing was a good idea for this) but I can't imagine it's possible to clean up fast enough with the footprints.

Tunder wrote:you guys care far too much about dying during a Wizard round.

Along these lines, I think triggering an ERT spawn (and maybe the demon gets stronger?) when it eats enough people would be more fun for everyone involved than trying to sort through a dozen bodies and clone them all in the middle of wizard.

Ausops had some fun anti-demon ERT sprites, I'd be happy to code it if Xhuis doesn't want to.

Nobody expects the anti-demon Inquisition. Hell, we could make it so the Demon gets progressively stronger over time if it eats a shitload of people until a special ERT gets called in to dunk the fuck out of it and let people back into the round. Though letting the wizard have three of these is still too much I feel, especially with footprints. It needs to be 2 or 1, I feel 2 would be better, due to how massively it got buffed with footprints.

Kor wrote:
Ausops had some fun anti-demon ERT sprites, I'd be happy to code it if Xhuis doesn't want to.

I've mentioned having a Chaplain ERT/ghostbuster/purge squad geared towards cult and otherworldly enemies for years, it'd be awesome fluff.

Not every wizard spawns 3 demons, so nerf away but keep in mind that the demon should still be able to withstand the crew on his own. A single demon is severely limited by the competence of the crew, expecially on high pop, janiborgs for example are too fast for him unless they get cornered and they can clean the whole station in minutes. If the wizards spawns 3, then the crew should be fucked no matter what.

Also I don't know how the code works, but if the eaten mob isn't deleted but just moved "inside" the demon (morph-like), then I can see people just using health sensor-triggered bombs to kill it. And the crew will be able to track the demon using suit sensors/nuke disk just like the morph, basically making ambushes (the whole point of demon) much more difficult. So please make it so that any item on the mob is deleted when eaten.

As I said before, make a subtype of the Slaughter Demon.

Make the SDemon the strong and very powerful version, while make a Slaughter Imp a weaker version. So admins have more choice in their deployment and for game modes.

I'll make any mobs dragged into pools of blood drop all their items. I don't want their things to get deleted.

Slight side note, which has become far more relevent now that eatin demon hearts give you blood jaunt thing.

While blood jaunted, you can still operate the majority of items.
Like grenades.

Or max cap bombs.

They will trigger on (or 1 tile above, shit's wierd) you, utterly faceraping every, but leaving you completely unharmed.

For some wierd reason though, I wasn't able to spread blood doing this (straight blood, blood smoke, blood foam), even though cleaner and colour smoke nades worked.

Noclip+god mode + max cap bombs is somewhat bad, to put it mildly.

That's because blood crawling is handled identically to jaunting. I can probably force empty hands in order to blood crawl.

Here's something, make it that Blood Jaunting makes you naked. Slaughter Demons are naked so why should Humans be any exception?

Steelpoint wrote:Here's something, make it that Blood Jaunting makes you naked. Slaughter Demons are naked so why should Humans be any exception?

Because then the power would be very little fun to use

lumipharon wrote:Slight side note, which has become far more relevent now that eatin demon hearts give you blood jaunt thing.

While completely unbalanced, I don't think this is really that bad in a wizard round where a demon has already eaten a bunch of people/subsequently died.

Xhuis wrote: I can probably force empty hands in order to blood crawl.

Voice trigger would still work.

Grazyn wrote:Not every wizard spawns 3 demons, so nerf away but keep in mind that the demon should still be able to withstand the crew on his own. A single demon is severely limited by the competence of the crew, expecially on high pop, janiborgs for example are too fast for him unless they get cornered and they can clean the whole station in minutes. If the wizards spawns 3, then the crew should be fucked no matter what.

It was meant to be a limit of one already, whoever made a competing PR on limited wizard items set the limit as three for some reason.

I'd rather balance it around a single demon than gradually chip away at them until they're a non-threat. I'd rather janitorborgs and the like remain the counter instead of "grab armory weapons, unload at X" like most other things in the game. I'd rather people be respawned (ERT) than not die in the first place, especially in the most chaotic game mode.

Speaking of janitorborgs, the new surfacing delay+the demon slowdown probably makes them more or less immortal as far as the demon is concerned. Will also make it even more impossible for the demon to catch a wizard.

I think there's a lot of salt here.

Do you guys forget that the Demons' primary mission is to slaughter the wizard who made them?

Or that the wizard could have decided to be a Magic Missile/Ei Nath/Armory grab powergamer instead?

The wizard who decides to spawn demons is trading his essential spells for them. There is no reason they can't be bad ass, because it really doesn't happen that often.


Again, I will state that in regards to demons making the round less fun for other crew, it's Wizard. It has never been fun for the crew, it's designed to be fun for the wizard. Wizard is just like blob in that a quarter of the crew will say 'fuck it' and go braindead or hide in a closet until the round is over one way or another. If you want to change something about Wizard go for the round itself, don't nerf Demons into oblivion because you can't solo them. I've killed plenty of pre-nerf demons with one or two other people, they aren't invincible. They just have a high skill cap and that shouldn't be a bad thing.

yeah, i think slaughter demons are fine honestly
they rape absolutely everything except a coordinated team with lethals (or a horde of assistants with SMGs from science, whichever comes first), and that's a good thing (because it's a fun thing (inb4 "but losing isnt fun!"))
i think it would be fun if your body got added to the stomach contents of the demon and you died instantly, so changelings could regenerate inside of it or whatever

Ya'll are just too salty about dying. And that's one that's bad about this community.

There are two dumb things that could be changed about demons, but they're not stat related.

Firstly, they should not be able to drag bodies and create their own blood trails. This is kinda abusive since they're quick and pretty robust so they can just drag a wrecked corpse around for a long time and making tons of blood trails while shrugging off melee attackers. Removing their ability to pull would make stalking prey and letting them bleed out a part of playing demons, and that'd be neat.

Also, Blood Walk should probably not be instant cooldown. It does get abused to an extent, and powergamey/robust demon will be nigh impossible to actually hit with anything and can solo a dozen crew at the same time. 3-5 tick cooldown would be less abused and lead to Demons being more selective about what they attack.