Heretics Feedback

For feedback on the game code and design. Feedback on server rules and playstyle belong in Policy Discussion.
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SkeletalElite
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Heretics Feedback

Post by SkeletalElite » #566040

So this came up in a recent admin complaint, but it seems there isn't a way to get new codex/heart if you lose your old ones. There should probably be a way to get a replacement unless it's intended that losing these essentially disarms the antag for good.
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EdgeLord_exe
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by EdgeLord_exe » #566143

You can create additional living hearts, it is one of your base knowledges you start off, and yeah if you loosing your codex cicatrix is intended to disarm you.
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XDTM
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by XDTM » #566154

I'd avoid having a state where someone is an antag but has no possible way of achieving their objective, though. Either make them able to recover their tools in some way (doesn't have to be simple, but at least plausible) or just deconvert them if their tools are destroyed or irretrievably lost.
An objectiveless Generic Antag wandering around is probably against the spirit of the gamemode since it pretty much turns into Traitor-lite.
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by confused rock » #566195

it's about as much traitor lite as a traitor who had his stuff confiscated is traitor lite, xdtm. if there's going to be several independent heretics in a round then it's really not that different from a ling or a traitor.

Also ikoden as far as health goes 25 could be 1. I think the point is that you're going to only use the ghoul in situations there's no risk of it getting hurt. maybe to help you kill downed guys ..it has hands, right? it's not a simple mob? if it's a simple mob and it doesn't do like 50 dmg then wooah that sucks, it might be better as something like the shade. If it has hands then you've got a buddy and a buddy is incredibly useful!
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NoxVS
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by NoxVS » #566202

Had a bit of an idea for a one use ability all heretics get that gives them a new book at the cost of making them unrevivable if they die. Any deaths after using this ability would be permanent. Allows heretics to rebound if they make a mistake but also places them at a significantly higher risk. Could even do something like give them some sort of visible effect (Like cult eyes) to further add onto this
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Iatots
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by Iatots » #566317

I don't like when info is obscured or tedious to obtain, and I didn't like it in cultist sim either.

Rant:
"Explore and experiment" is code for: this game is barebones and I need a lot of smokescreens to prolong its longevity. Obscurity doesn't keep people out forever, and once they "get it" your product is dissected and ready for the garbage bin. Cultist simulator is a tedius game saved by a good script from a writer that knows how to lay down a breadcrumb trail. There is no bigger story to unveil in the game, and even if there were the code is public. I'm gonna put everything on the wiki as soon as I can be assed to. The players explore and experiment in this round based game simply by playing it with the tools you give them. Obscuring the tools is antithetic to real longevity: as soon as your game is "solved", everything that came before it will be a distant memory and the mode will be judged by its round-to-round meta. Not to mention that many players already code dive because the code is open source.
Rant over

Making a new gamemode is pretty daunting and had I been more active during its creation I would've jotten down more much earlier.
  1. Designwise I don't like how a traitor can be busted roundstart by some validhunter checking their backpack, having to cart around two objects is also not ideal. I have no clear idea of an alternative right now that is easy to implement so I will just move on to the next bit.
  2. The spell learning experience is painful, especially for new players: It would be best to have a a command in the spell slot to remember a short list of all your powers ala martial arts/blob in addition to the book, as well as some fancy italicized red text in the chat on learning. I'd also like more clear descriptions of each path, with some example spells to booth. Rough pointers:
    • Ash: Not gone, but transformed: the ignorant only see the discarded shell. Learn to walk the aether (ash walk), and to keep the ignorants blind to your radiance (blindness, madness sorta in an rp sense).
    • Rust: (some life and death bullshit): learn the failings of metal(most abilities), and how to gain and lose from it (leech walk/toxic blade)
    • Flesh path: There is always room for improvement. Learn what makes bodies walk (ghoul/voiceless), and how to best adapt them for the occasion (the rest of the summons)
  3. The tome clearly calls specifically for a kitchen knife when you need any knife or even shiv. I don't know how many still don't know.
  4. What's so important about the black part of an influence anyway? Yes the cracks are 1 px wide but they can still be clicked. It sounds like I'm gonna gib myself if I click the white part.
  5. Mark and blade spells aren't really worth 2 points but I understand some padding is needed before the final ability. Hopefully it can be improved with more abilites or have 1 or 2 required rituals dividing the tree into sections
  6. Not a big issue but the initial rush for influences. In the early days when people didn't really mind heretics doing their stuff whoever had the best access also probably sucked up most of the influences. You do need to be sneakier now, meaning taking more time meaning more time for the maint-impaired heretics to get access. Still in a round with few influences, it would be nice if some ritual could be performed to locate, unlock or spawn an influence after some time.
  7. I played a bit with the summons on runtime station and if the player controlled ones are the same as the simplemobs you can spawn and posses (which i assume they are because they have abilities) they are lacking, especially in damage
    • Raw prophets have giant xray vision yes, but I could hardly move from what I assume is massive lag from all the tiles you look at. Yes I have a potato for PC but of the few summons I could witness on terry, raw prophets always moved incredibly sluggish from what I assume is my same issue. I'd switch it out for a pile of eyes/pillar of flesh that lets heretics see what the prophet does.
    • Stalkers do little damage and seem slow as well. Yes they can hide, but turning back and attacking is clumsy without hotkeys. If the ability let you attack whilst disguised (dropping the disguise in the process) it would make them stand a chance, and for damage i'd give them the 15+edge or pierce like a circular saw has. As they are now I only expect them to turn into securitrons to abuse stun combat. (ironic that their disguise is better than their normal).
    • Rust walkers have weak melee but I realize now I didn't check if the bolt does tox. In any case whatever their main attack is should be tox based.
    • Armsies/night lords need a big bold message telling them that they heal from arms eaten (if that's actually true, if it's not how their health works should be still explained to them).
That's it for now I aready spent too much time on it.
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by confused rock » #566403

for 1. maybe just make the rift sucking thing you can do with the book done by hand. then you could probably just stash the book and heart somewhere until you need them for sacrifices?
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by RandolfTheMeh » #566430

I feel like the sacrifice system should offer a pool of individuals to choose from, whether it be something like a prompt that offers you to choose one of three, or a pool of size equal to the number of people you need to sacrifice to greentext, with some way to cycle through who you're tracking with the heart. The random sacrifice target can make progress unreliable at times, and a difficult first target can put off a lot of progress. I've enjoyed my time with the antag across two rounds now, I love the atmosphere is has.
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by Kryson » #566451

Ikoden wrote:I agree with what RandolfTheMeh said. It would be good to be able to choose a target from some pool of players.
Can't you make a new living heart and get a new target that way?

I think heretic will get much stronger once people figure out how to play it.

Here is some strategical pointers.

*Get gloves or you might get busted leaving fingerprints on a rune

* Hide your heart and book somewhere in your inventory, they are both small items, there are several creative solution to achieve this, depending on your job, even keeping them in a fannypack around your waist is step up to their default placement.

* ditch your job and run around like a madman collecting influences, they are limited and you need to get as many as possible. Use your rust grasp or ash walk to get into places you don't have access to.

* The eldrich blade can be hard to hide thus might be a liability in the influence collecting phase. Hide a plastic, kitchen or other knife in your boots and a matchbox / junk food item in your bag so that you can make a knife when you get outed or need to start sacrificing.

* Get both ashen passage and priest's ritual pretty quickly, these will help you not get arrested or validhunted. Your eldrich essence lasts like 3 times longer if vaped, on the high voltage setting this also has the added benefit of gassing validhunters who do not wear gas masks.

* sunglasses should be stolen since flashes are popular right now, if you can't find sunglasses, getting the ashen passage / priest's ritual combo is even more important. Also remember that the hood of your robes is flashproof.

* once you start getting into the late game phase where all influences are used up, you might want to get the robes and a creature summon. The robes have 50 armour in the relevant armour types and prevents you from being gunned down easily. If you get the voiceless dead ritual, you can send them out to get sacrifices for you, but any ash man or rust walker you summon should stick with you prevent you from being dogpiled when fighting several people at once.

* The curses can be really good, but can sometimes be a wasted point since they require an object with the victims fingerprints and the jobs you would most want to curse all wear gloves. This can sometimes be overcome with some trickery.

Overall, i think the antagonist is really fun to play.
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NoxVS
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by NoxVS » #566507

What does the eldritch water do?
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by py01 » #566509

Heretics has a very cool theme, though there are some gameplay challenges with the current iteration.

1. Some recipes overlap, causing you to accidentally create something other than you intended to. For example, poppy is used in both the living heart and mute undead recipe. If you attempt to raise an undead but there happens to be a heart on the ground from a previous sacrifice, you may accidentally consume your poppy to make a living heart.

2. Some recipes call for remarkably specific items that I feel will lead to metagaming, Ex: A person asking for poppy/ a kitchen knife getting arrested by sec.

Also, some recipes use atoms that may be hard to find unless you are aware of specific, very niche tricks. Ex: Get vomit by making organic slurry by dipping a dead mouse in welding fuel, make a glass shiv with a shard and cloth from gauze to substitute as a kitchen knife (kitchen knives are actually kinda hard to get, since you need to get to an autolathe or the chef vendor which a fair few jobs dont have access to).

3. The gamemode can sometimes stall out if the heretic's initial sacrifice targets are too difficult. They need to sacrifice to get stronger, but don't yet have the tools to reasonably capture their target. Chaos can provide opportunities to do this, but early heretics often cannot create chaos because they are not yet particularly strong.

Since they don't create much chaos, this also sometimes leads to heads of staff making a stubbed toe shuttle call before heretics can get strong enough. Maybe just a playerbase issue that is a symptom of heretics not doing a lot early.

4. Most of a heretic's power is bound in a small number of very strong abilities (Ash jaunt, Cleave, Ash Eyes), and the rest of the skill tree is populated with talents that are not realistically helpful for getting their sacrifices (Curses, Raw Prophet, Spread Rust). This notably reduces how interesting the tree is, since most people will just beeline those specific powers and not use the others.

5. Due to the nature of typing being slow, it is frustrating to coordinate with flesh summons. I feel that convenience features such as: a hud for the heretic and their minions, pinpointer to master/master's target, would enhance the user experience. Even if power had to be taken out from the summons to accommodate for the convenience, I feel it would make the experience of using summons notably better.

6. It would be convenient if the heart direction was replaced with a periodically updating pinpointer arrow instead of a chatlog direction, since you end up staring at the chatlog for a long time reading directions while searching for your sacrifice target.
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Jzoid
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by Jzoid » #567206

When getting a target, it should likely follow a budget system of sorts, so it'll read over what players have on them, and how hard it'll be to kill them, and then it gives you a player within a budget. The more upgrades you have, the higher the budget goes.

That, or it should display, say, 5-10% of the server at a time, so if there's 50 people on, it'll give you a list of (2.5 round it up) 3 to 5 people, but with a minimum of 3.

The 3x3 itself seems to be a bit much, essentially ensuring the only place you can make it is inside maintenance, and since they're so obvious to see, the moment someone places one down, it's instantly "Heretics" flooded in chat. A work around is to make these vigils invisible apart from when you use them, decrease the time it takes to make and erase one, or very simply decrease the size to 1x1 (though having it be 3x3 definitely makes it feel like a call to something greater). Right now, it just gives a big disadvantage to not be an assistant heretic.

Needing things like Poppies for abilities should probably be avoided as it could lead to a power-gamer going "Oh they're making poppies? They must be a path of flesh!".

Making it so you can recall your book and heart would be nice.

Finally, a way to distinguish which reality rips are visible for just heretics and which are visible for all would be nice.

That's from a limited play with the mode though, right now I love what the mode seems to offer, I don't think the criticism of it being just like traitors because they're single is really valid, since if you make them team based, they'd be too similar to cult. It's okay to have them be none-team oriented, and that doesn't mean it loses it's identity. I'm glad someone is actively working on bringing more niche and fun game modes to us.
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NoxVS
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by NoxVS » #567322

Heretic really hurts early on. They are given no tools and told to go kill people who can be significantly more powerful to the point where theres next to nothing you can do about them. Theres so few offensive abilities, and all of them tend to be at the very end of the paths
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by Flatulent » #567395

NoxVS wrote:Heretic really hurts early on. They are given no tools and told to go kill people who can be significantly more powerful to the point where theres next to nothing you can do about them. Theres so few offensive abilities, and all of them tend to be at the very end of the paths
you get crab maga-like funny hand, use it to kill people with gear in maints
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by Kryson » #567539

NoxVS wrote:Heretic really hurts early on. They are given no tools and told to go kill people who can be significantly more powerful to the point where theres next to nothing you can do about them. Theres so few offensive abilities, and all of them tend to be at the very end of the paths
The only ways to kill sec early is pretty much to mansus grasp them once they pull out their baton and steal it, or if you are flesh, make sure your ghoul sticks with you and is carrying a stun prod.

Priest's ritual and jaunt helps you deal with disablers and to escape from hard to win fights.

For rust path, you have shitty damage output until you get toxic blade, but after you get toxic blade you only have to hit someone 2-3 times to deliver enough poison put them in crit after 15-30 seconds.

EDIT: I have been told it is not possible to reroll your sacrifice target, if this is true, i think a method achieve this should be introduced.
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by Tlaltecuhtli » #567547

the curse rituals have potential to be unique and should be buffed
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by Kryson » #567610

Tlaltecuhtli wrote:the curse rituals have potential to be unique and should be buffed
They seem to be very powerful as is, especially curse of corrosion. The problem is that almost all jobs, and certainly the jobs you'd most want to hit spawn with, or quickly obtain gloves.

If you want to hit a sec officer, you will need to find a piece of their discard roundstart gear, such as the armour vest of an officer that has switched into a hardsuit or perhaps steal their jackboots off their feet.

If hitting a desirable target was more feasible, such as if you could scoop up a blood stain and target via blood DNA, curse of corrosion might actually be too powerful since in addition to the puke stun lock, the victim will want to get food and treatment for organ damage in the aftermath of the curse, giving you a good opportunity to attack them.

Curse of blindness and curse of paralysis are only good if you can invoke them while the target is somewhere you can access, otherwise i think they will just cause the victim to hide in a locker for the duration of the curse.
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by Kryson » #568087

There is too much overlap between aggressive spread and rust wave. These abilities exist largely to support leeching walk, which is an ability that is substantially weaker than imperfect ritual and ashen passage.

Mark of rust is useless and you feel bad spending two points on it, in contrast with the excellent toxic blade.

The reason why mark of rust is so bad is by the time you have hit someone twice with your mansus grasp, you've already won or lost the first. If you win, you have now dusted useful gear you could have retrieved from the body.

The strengths of rust are the excellent grasp of rust, toxic blade and rustbringer’s oath and easy access to great side abilities such as priest's ritual, armourer's ritual and blood cleave.

Flesh seems to be the most popular path by far, followed by ash.
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by chocolate_bickie » #585190

Heretic costs too much Threat.
3 heretics is not 35 Threat. It's impossible to stealth the game mode, because as soon as you grab an influence it becomes visible to crew. At that point security knows where to look and what to look for. What's more since heretics start weaker they cannot seriously threaten crew. If they attack someone they get called out over comms or spotted by the AI at which point security knows who to look for.

Since your so weak you can't fight off security and since 3 heretics take up so much Threat there are often few to no other antags to distract security which means you get 4+ officers tracking you down. Either make more influences and heretics spawn or lower the threat Heretics take up.

Heretics need other things to be happening in order to buy time to gather strength and they can't do that when they take up most of the Threat level.
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Re: Heretics Feedback

Post by oranges » #585203

that's a policy discussion as it's a config setting.
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