/tg/Station 13

Heretic is an antagonist type designed around murdering a lot of people. Most objectives involve sacrificing a specific amount of people, or murdering people etc. The core mechanic of advancing as a heretic also almost always involves murdering.

it's current population requirement of zero means that lowpop rounds are flooded with constant heretic rounds and the subsequent murderbone that follows.

Lowpop heretic fucking sucks, I say this as someone who has been on the giving and receiving end of a lowpop heretic ascension. Frankly: it isn't fun. I don't know anyone who enjoys having this happen multiple rounds in a row. Plus, I'm sure we all know how people feel about murderbone (in general).

I believe that heretic should have a population requirement of at least 25-30 to remedy this issue.

Yes yes agree

this seems unreasonable to me

We let wizard through, and heretics are just shittier wizards with even more one dimensional mechanics.

I fail to see how a heretic is really any different from your average tot on lowpop.

traitor has more freedom of choice as he spawns with all the tc, he can even wait for more pop to come before buying anything or choose less lethal tools to do general mischief or even just use them to enchant his job
heretic unlock is a ladder so u either sac half the station to get new things or just ignore the fact you are heretic, funny items like trollface mask and noclip pots cant be got with just floor anomalies and in general doesnt have 5 years worth of tweakening and content like traitor to play with, ur just murderman with mini wiz spells

NecromancerAnne wrote:We let wizard through, and heretics are just shittier wizards with even more one dimensional mechanics.

the majour difference being that heretics spawn almost every round, as opposed to the fairly rare midround wizard spawn

Farquaar wrote:I fail to see how a heretic is really any different from your average tot on lowpop.

traitors have freedom of gimmicks or to follow their objectives, meanwhile heretic is build around murdering everyone

I still don't like heretics, something just feels off about their gameplay to me honestly. I understand the whole low to no power and then you gain it over time thing, but on the other hand there's just a lot of factors that can cuck a heretic comparatively to a tot, like if its Icebox and your target falls into the plasma ravine and things like that. Also, the one that I argue is the best designed for a game like this (flesh, since you get to make victims into summons to keep them playing) gets cucked the hardest, feels bad man.

Also, unlike tots, heretics don't get compensated in any very for having an actual job. Assistant makes heretic a lot easier to pull off (maint access is a massive boon for heretic and you being anywhere isn't that suspicious) whereas a heretic with a job can't really abuse job content unless its roundstart since they need to be hunting down victims. I guess it makes hunting down members of your own department easier, but that's pretty minor.

As for locking them behind a pop gap, sure I guess? It does serve to add variety to lowpop rounds but I wouldn't say its good for that in particular. Some of the lighter midrounds (revenant, abductors, etc...) might service that better.

SuperNovaa41 wrote:

NecromancerAnne wrote:We let wizard through, and heretics are just shittier wizards with even more one dimensional mechanics.

the majour difference being that heretics spawn almost every round, as opposed to the fairly rare midround wizard spawn

I’m uncertain what anne meant by that but,

A couple months ago I made wizards much more rare for lowpop (see: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/56869). At the time mothblocks was given leave to tweak dynamic as they saw fit, so I got to bypass the bureaucracy and just make a PR. I’m not sure if this is still the case but you might want to ask them, I seem to remember a discussion on heretics then too.

cacogen wrote:this seems unreasonable to me

i was tricking this is very reasonable

I think I'd like something like this put in place, sure.

Most definitely

wesoda25 wrote: At the time mothblocks was given leave to tweak dynamic as they saw fit, so I got to bypass the bureaucracy and just make a PR. I’m not sure if this is still the case but you might want to ask them, I seem to remember a discussion on heretics then too.

That permission of mine hasn't been revoked yet, but I have no real strong opinion about this (I don't particularly like heretics in general) and would rather leave it up to head admins to make the decision. If a decision is made, then we can have a PR for it so that the codebase values and production values are consistent. (Head admins aren't required to do this, Dynamic is 100% configurable, it's just nice to keep them matched)

Just gonna say that heretics seem to naturally encourage killing off lowpop, as I had yet another experience that involved a void heretic ascending at ~7pop, which involved teleporting on top of people and stunning them, and then the global mute to finish picking off everyone else. I'm not enjoying this.