Lich balance

[Jacough]

Just had a round where a wizard went with Lich and was able to murder all except a couple of crew members despite being killed several times. How you ask? Simple. He hid his phylactery in a filing cabinet in the vacant office. Call me crazy but being able to respawn as many times as you want simply by jamming an item in a container almost nobody will bother checking seems like a pretty good indicator that the Lich power needs some serious tweaking.

A good start would be making it so the phylactery can't be put in containers such as lockers and shit. Another option would be to make it so it decays each time the wizard is killed, perhaps gradually weakening the wizard each time he respawns. The wizard gets three respawns, his max health lowering with each respawn before the phylactery breaks and the wizard loses his ability to respawn.

[Cik]

well the real thing was that he hid it inside the filing cabinet, the room was exposed to plasma fire but the piece of paper was preserved due to the file cabinet paperprotect(tm) technology, guaranteed to resist the temperature of an explosive blowout

lowpop wizard is always a shitshow, to be honest MM+ jaunt is the problem, where if you get cornered you can jaunt until MM is off cooldown and then spam that while running away. i caught him about 3 times and if he hadn't had lich and/or jaunt he would have been dead a few times over.

[Zilenan91]

Or just remove Lich. It's blatant power creep and almost impossible to balance.

[Jacough]

well the real thing was that he hid it inside the filing cabinet, the room was exposed to plasma fire but the piece of paper was preserved due to the file cabinet paperprotect(tm) technology, guaranteed to resist the temperature of an explosive blowout

lowpop wizard is always a shitshow, to be honest MM+ jaunt is the problem, where if you get cornered you can jaunt until MM is off cooldown and then spam that while running away. i caught him about 3 times and if he hadn't had lich and/or jaunt he would have been dead a few times over.

Could make it so you can't jaunt if you're slipped/stunned

[Doritos]

Could make it so you can't jaunt if you're slipped/stunned

>wizard, a solo antagonist who has to fight 70+ people should die to a single stun

???

[Cik]

>single

[Zilenan91]

>can chainstun entire rooms
>has a shitload of AOE stuns and damage dealing spells
>has spells that literally gib someone. anyone
>die in one stun

If you die in one stun you need to git gud.

[lumipharon]

jaunt + MM + lightning + knockback + whatever is a super fucking robust combo - you can chain stun nerds/avoid getting hit for fucking days.

Also remove lich, it's fucking dumb and gay for everyone else involved.

[kevinz000]

Get an explosive powerful enough to gib and find a way to instantly dedonate on hit.

[oranges]

I think there should be a limit to the number of respawns a lich wizard gets.

[Zilenan91]

It's honestly impossible to balance Lich to where it's fair for everyone. We really should just remove it.

[oranges]

if you want to balance the game to be fair to everyone you may as well delete the game.

It's the nature of things that people will have a power/level advantage over you in some situations.

[Zilenan91]

I didn't mean fair as in balance where everyone is equal, I meant a fair as in, oh hey that guy's literally a Lich who are supposed to be immortal unless their phylactery is destroyed, but he can only revive from death a few times because lel. Which isn't really fair or fun to have a spell spamming wizard who can easily kill 20+ people before he dies coming back from the dead to do it all over again, and not fair for the wizard because the fluff behind Liches is that they can't die forever unless their phylacterys go kaput.

[Jacough]

Could make it so you can't jaunt if you're slipped/stunned

>wizard, a solo antagonist who has to fight 70+ people should die to a single stun

???

Spoiler:

don't get hit

Jaunt really shouldn't be an instant get out of any situation you can think of for free card and neither should lich. It should be a power that rewards quick thinking and a bit of planning using it when you're backed in a corner and can't outrun the opposition, not a power you can just activate on practically a whim because "fuck I'm about to lose my green text better make sure I get it".

Wizard being chased by sec ducking into a maint access and jaunting in the complete opposite direction to throw them off and lead them on a wild goose chase through the maint halls or ducking into aux storage only to pull a classic disappearing trick? Fuck yeah that's some legit wizard shit right there.

Careless wizard just wandering around magic missiling and gibbing everyone and then just clicking the jaunt button as soon as he so much as slips or gets a tiny little tap from a crowbar wielding so he can immediately warp to safety with no consequences whatsoever and continue his murderbone spree without a care in the world? That's just cheap.

[Super Aggro Crag]

I DIED please "BALANCE" its not FAIR only I should EVER WIN wAAAH

I bet you're one of the people who cry in deadchat when the wizard does anything but spam summon valids so you can get a chance to murder

[CPTANT]

At LEAST make it so the phylactery can't be put in containers.

[Helios]

Well. On a counter note I was a lich, never died until someone suicide bag of holding'd me and I never got to respawn once. An important note when it comes to lich is what is the average outcome. Is it the OP? Is it me? Or somewhere in between

[Jacough]

At LEAST make it so the phylactery can't be put in containers.

Main thing I can see still being an issue though is the possibility of a wizard just pulling some shit where they hide their phylactery in a place that's otherwise inaccessible without tools or jaunting like the sealed off rooms scattered around maint, unless it's treated as an OOC issue similar to how just walling yourself off somewhere as a head during rev is a bannable offense?

[Takeguru]

I was there for that round, was contemplating making a thread myself.

Dying wasn't the issue, that's a given in a murderboner wiz round, but the fact that he was able to hide the thing in a filing cabinet is dirty as fuck

I even searched the room after it became survivable and came up with nothing, because I was under the impression it wouldn't work from inside a container like the filing cabinet.

[Cobby]

Is it possible to make the Lich progressively worse the more they respawn? Worse being <idk insert something cool here>

[Incoming]

http://ss13.eu/tgdb/tg/latest_stats.html#wizspell

Lich spell is "LD" on this list. It's at the border of the top third of most commonly picked spells. Ever since the nerfs of https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/12598 its definitely mellowed out in terms of use. If you kill the wizard once you get a pretty strong indication of where the philo is, and unless the lich takes steps to move the philo with every regeneration it's really just a matter of following the vector for at most a few dozen tiles to find it.

Y'all got tricked by a wizard that knew that using obscure and years old game mechanics is a great way to hide in plain sight. This isn't really a balance concern so much as it is just a lesson in filing cabinets. I doubt any of you will fall for that one again. Honestly it's that kind of lateral thinking that makes for the best stories in the game.

[Zellion]

I get really salty about this game but you dont see me making threads about it. Lich is fine.

[PKPenguin321]

>can chainstun entire rooms
>has a shitload of AOE stuns and damage dealing spells
>has spells that literally gib someone. anyone
>die in one stun

If you die in one stun you need to git gud.

>the year is 25XX
>wizards can no longer teleport while stunned
>wizard gets tased by a sec officer, and quickly uses repulse
>officer gets back up before the wizard does and stuns him again
>repulse hasnt recharged yet so the wizard uses magic missile
>the officer lasers the wizard into crit before the missile even gets to him

rip fun

[Zilenan91]

Blink is a thing that exists, as is chain lightning which is an instant stun.

[TheNightingale]

The wizard should've used repulse first, and then magic missile while the officer was down.

[Aloraydrel]

Nofunallowed

[Bluespace]

i died please nerf this item xD thank you
excuse me while i make some more deviantart comics about my favourite ss13 job, the librarian! (i like to print porn but dont tell the captain he'll be angry arrrrghhh haha xDD)

[oranges]

i died please nerf this item xD thank you
excuse me while i make some more deviantart comics about my favourite ss13 job, the librarian! (i like to print porn but dont tell the captain he'll be angry arrrrghhh haha xDD)

all these flavours and you choose to be salty

[Luke Cox]

Wizards have to fight an entire station. I'm fine with them having borderline broken abilities. Killing one should be a major achievement. Hell, I'd advocate for making them all Liches by default.

[ShadowDimentio]

It's like the guy that has to fight the entire station is supposed to be strong or something

Nah let's nerf them so I can win

[lumipharon]

There is a difference between
'this wizard can shit fireballs and teleport and shit'
And
'this wizard can die and respawn at this object hidden inside an apc/behind singulo containment/sitting in a random spot in space/inside a monkey's chest inside a vent/in a endless disposal loop/etc so we can never kill him ever except for bombs.

[iamgoofball]

doesn't the corpse render a beam to the phylactery

because if so just drag the corpse around following the beam to find it

[Jacough]

doesn't the corpse render a beam to the phylactery

because if so just drag the corpse around following the beam to find it

It does but only for a couple of seconds and as Lumi pointed out there's just so many stupid ways to abuse it right now. You can call me salty all you want but if I was actually salty about it I'd be crying for it to be removed. I think it's an interesting concept with a lot of potential but at the same time right now it's got some serious balance issues that need to be worked on.

Is it possible to make the Lich progressively worse the more they respawn? Worse being <idk insert something cool here>

Kind of what I proposed in the OP. Basically each time the wizard dies his phylactery decays a bit and so does his body, reducing his max hp until he's basically as brittle as glass. If you wanted to get extra cool with it you could make it so his body visibly degrades as he dies with a couple of stages until he becomes a walking skeleton. Shit I'd be more than happy to take a shot at spriting something for that.

[Screemonster]

Doesn't it already have a longer and longer cooldown each time the wizard dies? Seems like something that could be tweaked to make Lich more of a "useful" thing to have rather than a complete gamechanger. Maybe add an exponential component to it so the first couple of times don't change much but if you keep dying after that the wait really starts to ramp up.
Have the "here's the phylactery" beam appear for longer and longer times with each use too.

[Zilenan91]

Or we could just do what Goon does and make there be a soul stone item that revives you from death once.

[iamgoofball]

Soulguard is something I'll probably port, yeah