Blob Spores

[Steelpoint]

I've observed several blob rounds and I am now of the mind that the spore clouds left by dead spores needs to not be lethal.

Whenever a spore dies they leave behind a 3x3 cloud of gas that lingers around for a long time, this cloud of gas will deal a negative effect depending on the blob type. So if the blob deals fire damage and sets you on fire you're going to be set on fire from that spore cloud.

The majority of blob combat occurs in maintenance, making it impossible to avoid this.

This is just a bad feature all around, it makes combat extremely difficult and unpredictable and it honestly should have been gutted from the game a long time ago. I much preferd the old system of the cloud just acting to obscure your vision, instead of the cloud killing you.

[Phalanx300]

Maybe make them spawn a Blob tile if they die instead? Should also be a less demanding process.

[Arete]

Difficult and unpredictable? What? It happens the same way every time and it's trivial to just stay out of the cloud until it dissipates. Find a way around it or just tough it out and accept that it's a temporary area denial weapon.

[Steelpoint]

If you engage the spore in melee, which will always happen due to the speed of them, then you will be hit by the cloud.

Go ahead and try it, almost every encounter you will have with a spore will involve it being up in your face.

Its unpredictable because the spore effects change for every blob.

[Oldman Robustin]

Difficult and unpredictable? What? It happens the same way every time and it's trivial to just stay out of the cloud until it dissipates. Find a way around it or just tough it out and accept that it's a temporary area denial weapon.

>There are roughly 10 space suits on the station
>Anyone without a suit is going to have to fight the blob in maint
>Maint is often a 1x1 chokepoint
>Smoke will badly damage or kill anyone who walks through it, internals or not
>Smoke lasts about as long as it takes the blob to spawn a new spore

>Thinking this is balanced
>Thinking this is healthy gameplay
>Thinking that the area denial is "temporary"

[Bluespace]

I remember you used to kill one spore only for another to immediately take it's place.
Click cooldown meant you couldn't kill them fast enough.

[Incoming]

A factory can only have so many spores out at once (I believe it's 4), and spores only do 2-3 brute per hit. Trapping them somewhere means permanently neutralizing a factory node provided no one kills the spores in containment. This is also why factory nodes near space aren't a great idea, spores drift off the z level where they can't be recalled but still count against the limit

[Babin]

A factory can only have so many spores out at once (I believe it's 4), and spores only do 2-3 brute per hit. Trapping them somewhere means permanently neutralizing a factory node provided no one kills the spores in containment. This is also why factory nodes near space aren't a great idea, spores drift off the z level where they can't be recalled but still count against the limit

That's a very unintuitive, needlessly complicated, and powergamey way to counter them.

[Wyzack]

Why the fuck does this smoke magically penetrate a fucking sealed spacesuit with an internal air supply

[Oldman Robustin]

Why the fuck does this smoke magically penetrate a fucking sealed spacesuit with an internal air supply

Because coders run this game while simultaneously lacking even the slightest understanding of how to make it intuitive or balanced.

[Incomptinence]

Why the fuck does this smoke magically penetrate a fucking sealed spacesuit with an internal air supply

Rather than just diversifying blob's damage types to prevent melee armour always being amazing against it sometimes immune we instead had it turn into a pet project with all the benefits of being newly adopted such as power creep and total disregard of feedback.

[phil235]

I've observed several blob rounds and I am now of the mind that the spore clouds left by dead spores needs to not be lethal.

Whenever a spore dies they leave behind a 3x3 cloud of gas that lingers around for a long time, this cloud of gas will deal a negative effect depending on the blob type. So if the blob deals fire damage and sets you on fire you're going to be set on fire from that spore cloud.

The majority of blob combat occurs in maintenance, making it impossible to avoid this.

This is just a bad feature all around, it makes combat extremely difficult and unpredictable and it honestly should have been gutted from the game a long time ago. I much preferd the old system of the cloud just acting to obscure your vision, instead of the cloud killing you.

Are blob spore still too lethal even after https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/10085 got merged? It should've nerfed the blob spore chem smoke effect by a lot.

[Gun Hog]

The cloud should only appear as 3x3, but actually is just 1x1. I really hope that this thread does not lead to returning Blob back to the one dimensional 'grab welders, lasers, and emitters, then wail on the blob until it dies' routine. Reagent blob went a long way into making fighting a blob interesting, and I would be sad to lose that.

[ChangelingRain]

The smoke clouds should either actually BE 3x3 or have a 1x1 sprite because it's really unnecessarily confusing to look 3x3 but be 1x1.

[newfren]

Pretty sure you only get the effects of the spore when you're within the dense part of the smoke - I'm also pretty certain that all smoke follows this same pattern of looking larger than it is.

Seemed fairly intuitive to me the first time I had to fight a blob.

[ChangelingRain]

Only blob spore smoke does that; actual chemistry-made smoke and wizard smoke do not.

[phil235]

Pretty sure you only get the effects of the spore when you're within the dense part of the smoke

You will definitely feel the smoke's effect if you run into the center of the chem smoke, but the smoke's effect is also processed every second to touch all things in a 1 tile radius (i.e. everything that is inside the 3x3 area). Same thing for breathing, if you are in the 3x3 area you will ingest the smoke chemicals.

Why the fuck does this smoke magically penetrate a fucking sealed spacesuit with an internal air supply

It has to do with how blob chemicals are handled. If we made their touch effect to be similar to other chems then a biosuit (and other covering clothes) would make you immune to the blob's touch effect. And that would be too big a nerf to for the blob. The hard part is that we can't easily dissociate the blob touching you from the blob spore smoke's touch effect.

[Steelpoint]

What nerf?

This was never the case prior and considering how many blob spores the blob will thrown at the crew I don't think this is something that will make or break a blobs chance of winning.

[Oldman Robustin]

The cloud should only appear as 3x3, but actually is just 1x1. I really hope that this thread does not lead to returning Blob back to the one dimensional 'grab welders, lasers, and emitters, then wail on the blob until it dies' routine. Reagent blob went a long way into making fighting a blob interesting, and I would be sad to lose that.

Blob already got enough additions to make it sufficiently interesting to fight. Tossing in waaaahaaaacky chems into the mix just makes it extremely unintuitive and an absolute shit gametype. I've played this game an obscene number of rounds and I still get the chems mixed up routinely, the average player isn't going to have a goddamn clue what the chems are doing until it's too late. I really don't think you have a clue what you're talking about if you think chemblobs are now "interesting" to fight. What the flying fuck is the difference from a blob dunking me with brute as opposed to just exploding me, knocking me out, and then following up with a free kill? What the fuck is interesting about that? There's wasn't even counterplay until the smoke got nerfed (hopefully) so that I don't get my ass blown up just from walking through smoke with internals and a hardsuit (WHY WAS I THE ONLY PERSON WHO NOTICED THIS SHIT?!).

The only difference is medbay just has to grab a bunch of different meds depending on the blob, but that's just adding a chore to the same fundamental task of being healers... yay I apply ointment instead of brutepacks holy shit this blob mode is so much more fun and interesting now oh my god. That's the best case scenario too, average case scenario is only 1-2 people actually mastered the autism of goofchem and know how to heal the chem's effects while everyone else just sits there dying while noobdocs can't figure out why I'm in crit and just leave me to die.

Juggerblebs, spore zombies, core splitting, and the armor nerf were all blobs needed. That alone gives them more ways to differentiate a round than is currently available to Malf which remains to be a door hacking simulator 90% of the time. Blob was always unique because the playstyle of the blob was a huge factor in deciding how to fight it. Fighting a blob that would spend most of its resources trying to manually attack you was a very different experience than a turtling blob that would simply try to wear you down with spores and power sabotage. Since blobs would usually pop in different areas, handling the natural terrain constraints and developing an effective means of attack was another challenge that varied from blob to blob.

People also act like blobs were underpowered before. Blobs were underpowered the same way wizard is underpowered, if an idiot got thown into the role and didn't even read the wiki he would get slamdunked the same way the wizard who fireballs himself immediately after arriving would get slamdunked. Nobody actually thinks wizards are underpowered just because the average player is incompetent at playing them. I had -NEVER- lost a blob round before chembleb became a thing. If you were smart about where you popped and actually made efforts to sabotage the station before popping, you had an extremely high win-rate. You could space the EVA suits, cut power wires in several key areas, destroy the Tcomms APC and/or gut the key machines (you can destroy an r_wall in under 2 minutes people stop being lazy), and my personal favorite... getting the plasteel from EVA and putting up a series of r_walls in maint in every path that leads to your burst spot. Even if someone sees the r_walls in maint and reports it, nobody will really care... but the time the biohazard alert goes out they'll need another 5-6 minutes to effectively clear a path to even fight you... by that time I'd have 4 nodes & factories and would easily overwhelm the crew.

TL;DR bleb a shit, players shit, making the blob a guaranteed winner just because the average blob player was clueless is not how to effectively balance a gametype you shits.

It has to do with how blob chemicals are handled. If we made their touch effect to be similar to other chems then a biosuit (and other covering clothes) would make you immune to the blob's touch effect. And that would be too big a nerf to for the blob. The hard part is that we can't easily dissociate the blob touching you from the blob spore smoke's touch effect.

This is as close as we'll ever get to coderbus saying "yes we ruined blob and doomed it to be a shit gametype forever, but we'll never say it outright".

We nerfed armor, bruteblob had a problem (a very RARE problem that came about when Tim Ebow, Reed Glover, and other crew would come together to make the ultimate 'fuckblob' combo) that was based on armor and the old healing chems. We nerfed the passive healing chems, we nerfed armor, and we gave the blob new abilities. Being that issue, there was nothing wrong with good ol'fashioned bruteblob.

Now we've got this giant clusterfuck of a blob mode and the best anyone can say in its defense is "well now its really confusing for medbay to heal people, that's what makes a good gametype after all!!".

[newfren]

Would it really be that much of a nerf to make biosuits stop the chems get inside you? Like maybe halve the chems the blob injects and up its brute to counterplay that, then if you prepare with biosuits congratulations you've prepared with some limited resources to take less damage from the blob - there are only like... 7 biosuits on the station? Doesn't seem like a huge deal to be honest!