Thinking of adding a new level 8 symptom

[ATHATH]

There are currently only two level 8 symptoms in the game. This means that if you apply two 1u doses of stable uranium gel to a rhinovirus bottle, you will ALWAYS get a sneezing+regen coma+plasma fixation virus.

I'd like to add an extra level 8 symptom called "Numbness" (or something like that) to the game. Without any thresholds met, it will just apply the screwyhud effect (the one that makes your HUD say that you're fine/undamaged, even if you're not (it's what miner's salve uses, IIRC)), making it a minorly negative threshold. With a stage speed threshold met, it will also give hosts a mild stamina regeneration effect (I'm thinking something like 2-3 points per tick). With some other threshold met, it'll occasionally give hosts that "comfortably numb" positive moodlet that morphine gives you if it stays in your system long enough. I'm also considering adding an absurdly hard threshold to meet (something sort of like voice change's transmission 14 threshold that causes it to scramble languages) to it that would let hosts ignore slowdown from damage (NOT from clothing, legcuffs, etc. (we have a version of noslowdown that does that already, right?), but I might hold off on adding that until a later PR.

I've been thinking about what the stats of this new symptom should be, and stealth 1/resistance -4/stage speed 1/transmission 3 looks pretty good to me. There are currently only THREE symptoms in the game with a transmission stat of 3+ (viral evolutionary acceleration, inorganic biology, and sneezing), and of those, only one of them has a transmission stat of 4+ (sneezing, which has a transmission stat of 4). All three of those symptoms lower the stealth stat when added to a disease, unlike this proposed new symptom, which would slightly increase the stealth stat of a disease that it is added to. So far, the only potentially problematic disease that I've been able to theorycraft with this new symptom (that isn't already possible to make (or come close to making) now) is an alkali perspiration disease that is both airborne and stealthy (and meets the transmission threshold needed for the alkali perspiration symptom to produce its incredibly deadly chems). We already have some comparable viruses to it currently, though, so perhaps it's okay. If that becomes a problem (or if people think that that most likely WILL become a problem), I could drop the stealth stat of numbness down to 0 so that the above virus wouldn't be able to hit 2+ stealth without dropping its airborne transmission vector.

What do you guys think about this proposed symptom/PR?

[Cobby]

more passive healing symptoms are not being added to the game.

[letshavecake]

Better idea; remove virology and diseases
It exists only to annoy people even under good circumstances, it's sorta like most of atmos, except at least the station doesn't randomly flood itself with other gasses because someone complained about atmos techs not having enough to do every round

[ATHATH]

more passive healing symptoms are not being added to the game.

Is passive stamina healing with a cost (the screwyHUD effect) really that bad? Like, I could get your disapproval if it was just a straight up "you get 2 points of stamina back every tick and that's all it does please merge my PR" symptom, but I don't see why passive healing symptoms that have significant drawbacks shouldn't be added to the game (it'd be better if they weren't passive, of course, but there aren't very many conditions that I can think of that would trigger a stamina regen effect at an appropriate/useful time for it to occur).