Ling Rework

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Miauw
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Ling Rework

Post by Miauw » #111286

EDIT: In light of recent changes I have shelved this. I'll be comitting the enhanced disguise, though.

ling is shite right now, this everybody knows.

This is my suggested rework of changelings, I have completed the disguise ability. (and already have conflicts ;-;7)
It's based around the idea of an antag who goes loud multiple times but has many abilities to lose heat. This is generally pretty hard normally.

The chief ability of this antag would be a buffed disguise ability:
1. copies DNA (appearance, race, mutations, etc)
2. Copies all clothing a la abductor, but not broken easily. The antag is equipped with "flesh" items that are renamed and resprited to match the apperance of the person they stung. These are NODROP and offer no protection or functionality at all, but look exactly like they should. Clothing that the person is currently wearing is not dropped, so you can copy parts of a disguise just by wearing clothing in those slots. (im currently debating on whether there should be proper flesh PDAs and backpacks, the main obstacle to the former is that it would be annoying to code.)

They would also get all powers for free. This just makes it so things dont go unused.

However, a bunch of powers will be removed:
  • Armblade, probably.
  • Hallucination sting (dumb griff power)
  • Transformation sting (dumb griff power)
  • armblade sting (dumb griff power)
  • Spiders will be changed a lot at least, currently they fall into the category of dumb griff powers.
  • MAYBE mutesting?
They will also get some new powers. These would generally be stealth powers and minor combat abilities. Some things I'm thinking of is:
  • Stamina dart (neurotoxin-like dart that does a lot of stamina damage)
  • Power that makes them invisible while standing still
The basic idea is an antag that can cause chaos and actual paranoia because he can do lingy stuff and then get away and become anybody.

Lings might also become a secondary antag like abductors instead of being in so many rounds.

P.S. i doubt i can make lings worse than they are.
Last edited by Miauw on Thu Aug 13, 2015 10:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Cheimon
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Cheimon » #111295

Removing extract DNA sting wouldn't be bad. Getting DNA shouldn't be possible from just standing near someone at the bar, it should require the player to interact.
Bombadil
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Bombadil » #111297

Make the lings we have now a rare Side antag that can spawn 30 minutes in
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leibniz
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by leibniz » #111307

Miauw wrote: However, a bunch of powers will be removed:
  • Transformation sting (dumb griff power)
Just change it back so it works only on dead mobs. It had some niche uses and this way it isnt good for retarded griefing.
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whodaloo
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by whodaloo » #111313

transform stinging dead mobs would be hilarious if for nothing else than eating the hos -> turning his corpse into you, then burning it claiming 'lol it's a ling'
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Pybro
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Pybro » #111322

I used the armblade sting plus EMP to rek my target today. If that's your doing then A+++.

Instead of giving the ling flesh clothes why not let it store items in itself? Give it a chest wardrobe, chest ID/PDA holder/ and chest backpack. Chest wardrobe and ID/pda holder are infinite in capacity but only hold clothes/ids/pdas. The backpack is a normal backpack/ but built into your chest.
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Oldman Robustin
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Oldman Robustin » #111327

Ling at its worst was ling without armblade.

Ling without armblade becomes "greytider that is a little harder to kill". We tested that, we played ling that way for months, and everyone agreed it was 100% awful.

Letting them mimic clothing would be interesting but it really wouldn't do anything significant for the state of lings. If you are in a place where you can get your "original" out of the picture, there's a very good chance you have time to throw on their clothes or stash them for a later identity.

My problem as ling is almost never "once I get off camera its too hard to get a new identity". I have always been able to use a DNA sting/hive absorbed identity, and either monkey/walk my way to the relevant clothing locker. Even just going around naked with someone else's DNA is surprisingly effective since people don't associate naked streakers with "super dangerous changeling". Plus unlike the "flesh disguise" if you're running around as someone who has spaced/braindead off camera/etc. even if sec suspects that your streaking self is the same changeling that escaped as a monkey earlier... they will almost never take any serious action against you since a naked person will have 0 evidence on them... whereas the flesh disguise will be NODROP and will only make it easier for sec to identify the ling.

There's a dozen other reasons why this disguise idea has always been weak. Best case is you just make it work like Ayyyliens where I can just click someone and adopt their appearance at the moment of that snapshot. Again, this will help you get close to people but that isn't ling's main concern right now. I can sit right next to people in my starting department as a ling... they will mostly trust me and know I'm a familiar face... but I often have 0 confidence that I can kill them in a manner that won't get me caught.

There's much easier fixes for ling that you should put your energy into instead:

1) Get rid of Ling backstab objectives and either make it clear that backstabbing lings is against policy or give them shared objectives that imply no backstabbing. Lings are one of the antags that have HUGE synergy potential compared to a lot of other "Team" antags whose idea of synergy is basically "we want to murder the same people". I would favor shared objectives in order to encourage them to capitalize on that synergy. I gave ideas for this in an older feedback thread but simply having "escape with the identities of three heads of staff" (basically the impersonation objective but with three heads of staff), or "escape with 6 tasers or energy guns" or even just "absorb 10 crew members". Lings will instantly become a lot more fun for the lings and a lot scarier to the crew when they can rely on each other. Backstab objectives were always lame and never interesting, getting a ling to trust you and then armblading him in the face and absorbing him was never the source of any exciting rounds. Maybe backstabbing made sense when lings could parasting2win but those days are long dead. Lings are pathetically weak and they don't need objectives to undermine the only advantage they have (teamwork/trust/communication).

2) Make their energy a little more manageable. Default chems are a joke. You get 50 and you regenerate 10 every 40 seconds. Meaning you get like one ability use every 2-3 minutes. Engorged glands makes them tolerable but still very limited and keeps lings unthreatening when after they grow an armblade and shriek, they're pretty much just assistants with an esword in terms of combat potential. Make engorged chems the new default and make engorged even stronger.
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Gun Hog
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Gun Hog » #111328

Miauw wrote: However, a bunch of powers will be removed:
  • Armblade, probably.
  • Hallucination sting (dumb griff power)
  • Transformation sting (dumb griff power)
  • armblade sting (dumb griff power)
  • Spiders will be changed a lot at least, currently they fall into the category of dumb griff powers.
  • MAYBE mutesting?
Why? Griff powers are not bad things. You should leave the ling players the option to be annoying jerkwads if they want. Do not underestimate the power of annoying your opponent rather than killing him, there is fun in that. Especially do not remove Transformation sting, it is one of the most powerful offensive abilities a changeling has, if you have a Geneticist working on your team. The sting also transfers the SE, which means you can hit someone with the combined abilities of mute, blind, and deaf stings as well as a periodic stun!

There is fun in being a massive clown and getting your LULZ from making everyone stammer and hallucinate rather than just killing them. Please do not take that way, not everything has to be about killing and survival.
Cheimon
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Cheimon » #111342

I honestly think griff powers are bad things, mostly. Being the victim of powers meant to just annoy you is only really entertaining for the victim the first time: after that, it just dramatically skews fun towards the antag and away from its victims, as opposed to making it more about killing and survival, a situation in which both sets of players can try to have fun.

Annoying =/= good. Annoying your opponent is not fun for your opponent if they have no way to respond or even know who you are. Fighting your opponent at least gives them that opportunity.
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Saegrimr
Joined: Thu Jul 24, 2014 4:39 pm
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Saegrimr » #111343

Cheimon wrote:I honestly think griff powers are bad things, mostly. Being the victim of powers meant to just annoy you is only really entertaining for the victim the first time: after that, it just dramatically skews fun towards the antag and away from its victims, as opposed to making it more about killing and survival, a situation in which both sets of players can try to have fun.
I mean you can either be dead in a maint locker, or you can be tripping balls while limping your way to the medbay and maybe get fixed up.
Might just be me but one sounds way more interesting than the other. Besides legitimized griefing is like half of being an antag anyway.
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Cik
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Cik » #111358

i don't think ling even needs a rework, it just needs simple QOL and a few abilities changed/removed added

examples: easy clothes equipping if you transform on someone's corpse

abilities: remove transform sting and extract DNA sting, make absorbing slightly faster, add deadlier combat stings, buff camouflage (already in the works) add a hivemind function of absorbed people that can give the ling advice maybe. add a chemsting that can absorb chemicals from beakers and implant it in people as a sort of stealthy syringe. add an ability to absorb atmospheric mixes and emit them. add an ability to eat things that can later be thrown up. add an adaptive camouflage ability. add an acid spit that can melt walls and lockers. add the ability to leak through airlocks. add an ability to split yourself into lmao 2ling, add the ability to drink blood trails, and for goodness' sake buff all the useless abilities, as it is like 70% of it's kit is useless due to meta considerations like "oh i'm suddenly cold, better drink coffee" really the sky is the limit here. you can do a bunch of really neat exciting things with ling that add cool strategies.

you can go alot of cool places with what's there already, ling's chief weakness is it's inability to infiltrate anywhere important, due to poor door access and how difficult it is to reliably impersonate anyone or replace anyone that matters. as it is they are basically prototype style armblade combatstim/fleshmend killing machines, not stealthy infiltrators. that doesn't mean you have to get rid of armblade; it and like two stings are the only part of the kit that really works, what it does mean is you have to give them more robust infiltration tools, so they become more rounded. i should be able to go without armblade if i want, but really it's indispensable. the rest of the kit needs to be filled in.
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by TheNightingale » #111370

What if husking someone gets you an extra chemical point?
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ChangelingRain
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by ChangelingRain » #111386

Ling really needs that rework, yup.
Giving lings all powers for free won't actually make them use the stuff that doesn't get used, though. It doesn't get used not because they can't buy it, but because it's shit and or costs too many chemicals.
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Reimoo
Joined: Wed Apr 23, 2014 2:58 pm
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Reimoo » #111498

Please, do it

Can't be any worse than what we already have
Miauw
Joined: Sat Apr 19, 2014 11:23 am
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Miauw » #111508

Oldman Robustin wrote:Ling at its worst was ling without armblade.

Ling without armblade becomes "greytider that is a little harder to kill". We tested that, we played ling that way for months, and everyone agreed it was 100% awful.

Letting them mimic clothing would be interesting but it really wouldn't do anything significant for the state of lings. If you are in a place where you can get your "original" out of the picture, there's a very good chance you have time to throw on their clothes or stash them for a later identity.

My problem as ling is almost never "once I get off camera its too hard to get a new identity". I have always been able to use a DNA sting/hive absorbed identity, and either monkey/walk my way to the relevant clothing locker. Even just going around naked with someone else's DNA is surprisingly effective since people don't associate naked streakers with "super dangerous changeling". Plus unlike the "flesh disguise" if you're running around as someone who has spaced/braindead off camera/etc. even if sec suspects that your streaking self is the same changeling that escaped as a monkey earlier... they will almost never take any serious action against you since a naked person will have 0 evidence on them... whereas the flesh disguise will be NODROP and will only make it easier for sec to identify the ling.

There's a dozen other reasons why this disguise idea has always been weak. Best case is you just make it work like Ayyyliens where I can just click someone and adopt their appearance at the moment of that snapshot. Again, this will help you get close to people but that isn't ling's main concern right now. I can sit right next to people in my starting department as a ling... they will mostly trust me and know I'm a familiar face... but I often have 0 confidence that I can kill them in a manner that won't get me caught.

There's much easier fixes for ling that you should put your energy into instead:

1) Get rid of Ling backstab objectives and either make it clear that backstabbing lings is against policy or give them shared objectives that imply no backstabbing. Lings are one of the antags that have HUGE synergy potential compared to a lot of other "Team" antags whose idea of synergy is basically "we want to murder the same people". I would favor shared objectives in order to encourage them to capitalize on that synergy. I gave ideas for this in an older feedback thread but simply having "escape with the identities of three heads of staff" (basically the impersonation objective but with three heads of staff), or "escape with 6 tasers or energy guns" or even just "absorb 10 crew members". Lings will instantly become a lot more fun for the lings and a lot scarier to the crew when they can rely on each other. Backstab objectives were always lame and never interesting, getting a ling to trust you and then armblading him in the face and absorbing him was never the source of any exciting rounds. Maybe backstabbing made sense when lings could parasting2win but those days are long dead. Lings are pathetically weak and they don't need objectives to undermine the only advantage they have (teamwork/trust/communication).

2) Make their energy a little more manageable. Default chems are a joke. You get 50 and you regenerate 10 every 40 seconds. Meaning you get like one ability use every 2-3 minutes. Engorged glands makes them tolerable but still very limited and keeps lings unthreatening when after they grow an armblade and shriek, they're pretty much just assistants with an esword in terms of combat potential. Make engorged chems the new default and make engorged even stronger.
ling being made better by armblade just proves how awful ling is right now, if a basically mandatory ability that can be summed up as "organic esword" makes it better.

the changes you suggested will make ling slightly less terrible, especially team objectives, but the gamemode will still be pretty awful.

also note that it's not entirely mandatory to use the flesh disguises, you can always drop the "flesh" items at will.

E:

also the griff powers are dumb because you get rounds where nothing happens except changelings spamming transformsting or one of the others. lings can't actually do antagonistic shit so they just end up using their obnoxious meme powers to not have some minor effect on the round.
literally don't need an antag for that, somebody could just code an event that does the same thing.

E2:
if lings have all their powers for free the more situational powers like space suit will probably see more use. no point in taking a power that is only useful in a few cases, but if it's always there...
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Oldman Robustin
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Oldman Robustin » #111571

Saegrimr wrote:
Cheimon wrote:I honestly think griff powers are bad things, mostly. Being the victim of powers meant to just annoy you is only really entertaining for the victim the first time: after that, it just dramatically skews fun towards the antag and away from its victims, as opposed to making it more about killing and survival, a situation in which both sets of players can try to have fun.
I mean you can either be dead in a maint locker, or you can be tripping balls while limping your way to the medbay and maybe get fixed up.
Might just be me but one sounds way more interesting than the other. Besides legitimized griefing is like half of being an antag anyway.
There's this obvious point that people like you are missing.

From an IC perspective of COURSE I'd rather be tripping balls, blind and deaf rather than dead and husked.

But when you include the OOC perspective I would much rather be dead, spaced, and out of the round and getting to watch a ling assassinate increasingly important members of crew while impersonating others and eluding AI/Security rather than sit around and getting halluc. stung, bumping into the occasional spider, and then suiciding out of boredom just so I can watch a ling stand in vacant office pooping out spiders.
I like the idea of husking/absorbing giving you a higher chem-cap, but it needs to be 5 at minimum and even that is bordering on irrelevance... increasing chem regen per absorption would be closer to making such a change meaningful.

Remie has a proposal on Github that incorporates a lot of my suggestions, I think it's the most realistic path forward right now since "give them all abilities" is going to stir up needless controversy and flesh clothing is going to be difficult to code while doing nothing serious to improve ling's plight.

Plus Remie is adding a % chance of Team Objectives and I would absolutely love to see that play out.
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Miauw
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Miauw » #111587

flesh clothing is already completely coded dude

but yeah team objectives sound cool and i would actually like to see a "team traitor" mode with similar objectives,
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Cheimon
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Cheimon » #111632

From an IC perspective of COURSE I'd rather be tripping balls, blind and deaf rather than dead and husked.

But when you include the OOC perspective I would much rather be dead, spaced, and out of the round and getting to watch a ling assassinate increasingly important members of crew while impersonating others and eluding AI/Security rather than sit around and getting halluc. stung, bumping into the occasional spider, and then suiciding out of boredom just so I can watch a ling stand in vacant office pooping out spiders.
Yes, this exactly. Being crippled by drugs, spiders, and a bad genome isn't as fun as watching in quite a lot of situations.
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Oldman Robustin
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Oldman Robustin » #111655

Miauw wrote:flesh clothing is already completely coded dude

but yeah team objectives sound cool and i would actually like to see a "team traitor" mode with similar objectives,
It sounded open-ended still, like you were considering a flesh PDA and whatnot.
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Miauw
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Miauw » #111773

yeah, im considering adding a few more things but that wouldn't be very hard.
well, flesh PDA might be. i might just make it an ID with proper name and job (even if it looks like a PDA)
also considering making flesh backpacks a thing etc. (the items wont drop if you change from one disguise to another)
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Poorman
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Poorman » #114086

Just make them a really low percentage chance to spawn during ANY roundtype. They don't work well as their own round, but the threat of one cropping up at ANY time would at least give them a unique thing, instead of just being a worse version of traitor.
Miauw wrote: but yeah team objectives sound cool and i would actually like to see a "team traitor" mode with similar objectives,

You mean like Nuke Op? The literal team traitor gametype?
Miauw
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Re: Ling Rework

Post by Miauw » #114314

lmao
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