Buff Wizard Phylactery Artifact?

[Phalanx300]

This artifact allows the wizard to combine his soul with an item (once he is on the station!), he can then respawn at that station when he is killed. However currently if the body is gibbed he wont respawn. This becomes a problem because after the first death it takes four minutes which only keeps increasing. This essentially ruins the use this item would have. The entire idea of a Phylactery is that it must be destroyed before you can reform yourself at the item. The item also changes color making it very obvious if someone sees it.

Thoughts on buffing this spell/artifact?

[Scones]

BUFF

BUFF?

BUFF BIND SOUL?????

[ExplosiveCrate]

I'm just going to emptyquote this

BUFF

BUFF?

BUFF BIND SOUL?????

[Falamazeer]

Huh, it has to be broken to use it to return? that doesn't make sense at all.


Better idea, if it's on someones person it should allow you to mindswap them, putting them in your corpse, and you in their body.
Give people a chance by automatically changing the tooltip for examine to "It pulses with a magical aura"
Then the game for it becomes hiding it in a semi useful item that people are likely to grab and keep.

[onleavedontatme]

It's worth the single spell slot to become a skeleton alone honestly. It's good that you can gib him to stop him respawning from a pen he left in space forever.

[Xhuis]

It's worth the single spell slot to become a skeleton alone honestly.

https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Secret_mirror_technique

[onleavedontatme]

Incoming blacklisted skeletons from the mirror a month ago or something.

[Incoming]

It's worth the single spell slot to become a skeleton alone honestly.

https://tgstation13.org/wiki/Secret_mirror_technique

I removed skellybones from the mirror when I added the phylactery, and I finished making the phylactery because people were bitching about how good the secret mirror technique was.

THAT SAID:

The way it works now is that the wizard can't come back if EITHER his body OR his phylactery is destroyed. The grand majority of the time it's the body that dies, as hiding the phylactery is very easy and most people would rather play lets smack the wizard than prop hunt.

They way it would classically work is that even destroying the body would not stop the lich, you'd have to destroy the item AND the body to rid yourself forever. Unfortunately the way spells are stored (in the mind) doesn't survive the destruction of the body, so there's no way to keep the RISE spell active if you lose your corpse. It would be a big project to fix this, and I've already got a big project that I'm goofing off too much on (datum based antags).

If someone fixed that the RISE spell would probably change to only charge up while you're dead, as opposed to all the time. The time to resurrect might get longer too. Of course it's hard to put TOO much downtime for the wizard, because wizard rounds are notorious for shuttle calls at the first possible opportunity (stop doing this).

[Takeguru]

>Stop doing this

Stop trying to save crew from one of the most lethal antags?

[Scones]

"Too much downtime on a wizard"

No such thing

[Oldman Robustin]

Immediate shuttle call is always the best option, why do you think otherwise?

Unlike most antags, wizards have almost 0 prep time. Grab your spell, teleport, you're good to go. You can take full advantage of the long fueling window if you're that worried.

Otherwise if the wizard is alive by the point shuttle is called, either the wizard is wrecking the crew and it makes sense to flee, or he's doing typical maint hiding bullshit (99% of wizards now) at which point it's pretty much extended and the shuttle should be called.

[Incoming]

The tendency towards the "rush game" has always been something I wasn't a fan of. Fewer interesting/funny/stupid things can happen if everyone's so quick to hit the reset button. When the refueling period was added it was out of necessity. People were literally calling the shuttle five minutes into the round as soon as any antag was confirmed as existing. It wasn't a sanctioning of "when you've played the round long enough" but rather a hamfisted attempt at correcting a destructive player mindset about the pacing of the game. If a wizard does something crazy like summon a bunch of weapons then yeah call the shuttle asap but if it's just him or him and a few apprentices, it probably isn't worth calling the shuttle so quickly. Knuckle down and try to stop that wizbiz, don't just give up and go home without trying.

It's the path of least resistance on "defeating the bad guys", call the shuttle before they can do anything. It's effective sure, but is it fun? I don't think so. I don't know, I'm kind of an outlier on that subject these days, but that's just how I feel about it. It's not really the topic for this, so whatever.

[Takeguru]

Wizard is unique is that they're at their most lethal right from the getgo.

Revs, cults, shadowlings, gangs, they take time to get to the point where they're a formidable force, but as soon as the wizard ports to the station he's ready to go.

Killing the wizard just makes it extended unless it mulligans or badmins press buttons.

[Oldman Robustin]

The tendency towards the "rush game" has always been something I wasn't a fan of. Fewer interesting/funny/stupid things can happen if everyone's so quick to hit the reset button. When the refueling period was added it was out of necessity. People were literally calling the shuttle five minutes into the round as soon as any antag was confirmed as existing. It wasn't a sanctioning of "when you've played the round long enough" but rather a hamfisted attempt at correcting a destructive player mindset about the pacing of the game. If a wizard does something crazy like summon a bunch of weapons then yeah call the shuttle asap but if it's just him or him and a few apprentices, it probably isn't worth calling the shuttle so quickly. Knuckle down and try to stop that wizbiz, don't just give up and go home without trying.

It's the path of least resistance on "defeating the bad guys", call the shuttle before they can do anything. It's effective sure, but is it fun? I don't think so. I don't know, I'm kind of an outlier on that subject these days, but that's just how I feel about it. It's not really the topic for this, so whatever.

20 minutes is an eternity in wizard rounds. Given the amount of lethality that most wizards can possess, the fighting is usually decisively in one side's favor depending on crew size/robustness and wizard robustness. Either the wizard gets dunked immediately and its traitor, the wizard is outmatched and spends 95% of the shift hiding in maint, jaunting to places the crew will never find... or the wizard is on a killing spree and destroyed almost any source of serious resistance.

If you don't want a shuttle called ASAP, make wizard produce an interesting conflict for more than 20 minutes. I'm not going to sit around and just let the round drag on as extended because the wizard stole a jetpack and is going to AFK in the basketball/tye dye/etc. rooms where nobody will ever find them.

[Eaglendia]

As an aside regarding the mechanics of RISE! being fixed, I'm pretty sure (not 100%) "RISE!" is already broken anyway in that it's not multi-instanceable, which is something that would definitely need to be fixed if the spell is going to stick around (having more than one active wizard at a time, while uncommon, is definitely possible). My reason for believing this is that during a Wizard round a couple of weeks ago I killed a phylactery Wizard as an Assistant and found his spellbook unbound, with a charge remaining, among his belongings after he respawned at his phylactery. Out of the robeless spells, I elected to take RISE! in order to fight the Wizard on the same level as him, only to find that I didn't have access to Bind Soul to choose a phylactery (leading me to believe that I would have respawned at the location of the phylactery the Wizard had chosen if I ever died, which I didn't), and upon killing and incinerating the Wizard, I lost the ability to cast the RISE! spell at all.

[callanrockslol]

It's worth the single spell slot to become a skeleton alone honestly. It's good that you can gib him to stop him respawning from a pen he left in space forever.

Honestly with a staff of animation it almost is, just fly around animating shit in space and overwhelm the crew every time.


Would it be possible to make it force spawn you a new body and cram you in it if your body was destroyed and the spell was off cooldown when you died?

[Incoming]

As an aside regarding the mechanics of RISE! being fixed, I'm pretty sure (not 100%) "RISE!" is already broken anyway in that it's not multi-instanceable, which is something that would definitely need to be fixed if the spell is going to stick around (having more than one active wizard at a time, while uncommon, is definitely possible). My reason for believing this is that during a Wizard round a couple of weeks ago I killed a phylactery Wizard as an Assistant and found his spellbook unbound, with a charge remaining, among his belongings after he respawned at his phylactery. Out of the robeless spells, I elected to take RISE! in order to fight the Wizard on the same level as him, only to find that I didn't have access to Bind Soul to choose a phylactery (leading me to believe that I would have respawned at the location of the phylactery the Wizard had chosen if I ever died, which I didn't), and upon killing and incinerating the Wizard, I lost the ability to cast the RISE! spell at all.

This is probably a bug with the spellbook assuming all spell purchases coming from the same person source (to be fair 99% of the time that's true). It seems like you may have inadvertently selected to upgrade the spell the wizard already had instead of gain your own version. I'll look into it.

Would it be possible to make it force spawn you a new body and cram you in it if your body was destroyed and the spell was off cooldown when you died?

The spell is lost the instant the body is destroyed, which can't be reliably predicted in the code. This means that I'd have to throw in a check in the gibbing itself, which isn't good coding practice. At that point it'd probably be better to just solve the underlying problem of minds not surviving the gibbing process.