Brainmed, Lethality and Firearms

[MattAtlas]

This is a feedback thread. Please put your feedback or thoughts here, because this thread will affect how lethal the game will be.

You may have noticed an in game poll has been set up for brainmed. This is to gauge how easily people die currently. If you have any grievances with overall lethality say them now, but this is mainly about time-to-kill with most weapons.

[Dark1Star]

I personally thing it's too hard to die from firearms. I was happy with how it was before, but then we removed the getting shot in the head paralasyis? Which took the fun out of aiming for the head... I'd rather argue it's too hard. Or at least, the pain could be increased where to actually getting shot HURTS.

[John_Bigless]

I'm not too sure. I find it pretty difficult to die by extremely low pressure (The shuttle getting vented).

As in, you go into hard crit quickly, but you're still technically alive. 3 minutes in low pressure isn't enough to give you the amnesia message. (You have suffered massive brain damage! You won't be able to remember the events leading up to your injury.)

[Apollodorus]

From major trauma, death should come "rapidly" without stabilization and intervention from skilled medical staff. That seems to be largely not the case. 

 

[Yonnimer]

Brainmed is overhaul a really nice idea. Not much I can complaint about other then a few small bugs/oversights that have mostly been fixed.

I do like the lethalnies of it, it gives you more time to save someone, but it can be a bit harder to save someone. My only chief complaint would be how hard it is to kill certain things, a frenzied vampire, for instance, can take well over damage before it dies.

Edited January 19, 2020 by Yonnimer
2nd paragraph didnt' save, ree.

[Naelynn]

I voted yes, but my vote should count with an Asterisk.

Why an asterisk? Because it's simultaneously super easy to die, and almost impossible.

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Easy to die reasons:

Any burn damage causes infection almost 100% of the time. Even something as small as an electrified grille. If not treated almost instantly, any electric/laser shit is going to be lethal over extended period of time.

Shrapnels deal damage. No it is not fixed. They do not just deal pain damage. Try playing an ipc [who are immune to pain] and get a shrapnel. You will constantly be taking damage.  As such, any shot that leaves a shrapnel has a chance of just destroying you if left inside for a long enough time.

Arterial Bleeding is extremely lethal. It removes huge chunks of blood and blood is needed to oxygenate the brain. Lack of oxy in the brain.

Lasers vaporize blood. This when left untreated allows the person to die from lack of oxygen to brain.

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Hard to die reasons:

If you have good medical, it is impossible for anyone who gets into medbay to perish. See: Alkysine / Brain Organ Repair Surgery meta. You can have a patient with LITERALLY all organs necrotic who is simultanneously bleeding out, as long as you are using one of those two things, they are alive and can recover. ( I know. I did this as a surgeon. This exact scenario. )

You can literally just prance around in space and give 0 fucks. Void is just a minor inconvenience now. An unprotected human can easily survive for over 2 minutes while still being able to move. A bit of soapboxing + relevant for explosive weapons. (See: https://science.howstuffworks.com/question540.htm - You should be able to move somewhere around 15-30 seconds MAX. Then you do survive for up to 90-120 seconds, but you are unconscious and just hoping that someone else helps you.)

The only way to kill someone with ballistics fast is to aim for the head. Head has lower hit rate than torso. If you do not do this, the other person remains combat capable for retarded long periods of time.

The best way to kill someone with lasers fast is to aim for the torso. You aim to remove blood from their system and proc unconsciousness from lack of oxygen in the brain. Thus you require best chance to hit. However, this will usually just K/O the target and allow them to survive the encounter, as the brain is not getting directly damaged.

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Tl;dr: Brain med makes it very difficult for someone to die fast, while making it stupid easy for someone to die slow. For players who often play characters that are isolated from help like myself, I suggest nerfing the long term death scenarios. I am all up for having low lethality combat system.

[Peppermint]

I've played a lot of both medical and security. My feedback is:

- Organ damage, especially liver damage, is far too punishing. It goes from fairly low damage to OH GOD ITS NECROTIC almost instantly.
- Blood loss is also too punishing, especially with arterial replacing IB. Especially with the whole feint spell thing almost instantly.
- Medical is harder so people die more readily now even after they're back at 'base'. Especially if there's no chemist.
- Being constantly knocked out from pain whilst in crit and flicking in/out of conscience is lame and frustrating.

 

But on the other side of things:
- Atmos is basically a joke now.
- Ballistics are almost useless unless you get a lucky/unlucky arterial hit. 
- People take forever to go down once adrenaline hits. Which oddly enough, makes it more lethal as now you just have to keep blasting to get someone to stay down - at which point they're likely fucked - rather than before where you had the option to soft-crit someone if you'd prefer.

[Kintsugi]

I feel quite strongly that firearms are very, very underpowered. I think they need a buff as far as lethality is concerned - it is way too easy to walk off gunshots, at the moment.

[Leudoberct]

I'm pretty happy at the minute with the way brainmed is after a fair few rounds playing as medical. The only thing I can really suggest is that ballistics should probably be more lethal. Having them do organ damage would probably help this.

[Warbidon]

It takes far too long to actually inject people with drugs. its faster to make them drink the stuff than actually inject them with it. This compounds with the fact that I didn't realize that wearing armor slows down injections because there was no way of knowing until you compare the two exaggerates my frustrations.

The surgery steps take far to long in my opinion as well, but it is less of an issue.

I would prefer if you could click a container with a hypospray to draw reagents from it. As it stands the weird click delays on moving objects in your inventory (grab bottle, fill hypospray, put bottle away, taking ~5 seconds) make it frustrating to put reagents in my take-too-long-to-inject hypospray when comparing it to other brainmed servers I have played. if I could code it, I would have it that hyposprays could draw from containers, but cant fill, youd ahve to remove the vial inside it to empty the hypospray.

I would prefer synthetic blood be implemented rather than the universally compatible blood we have now that for some reason has types.

Being a Skrell and being ping-ponged back and forth from the dream dimension that skrell have and real life actually sucks. Either make me stay in unconsciousness or send me to the dream dimension, plase fix this bug.

[Carver]

I prefer slow, theatrical deaths and believe ballistics should inflict mortal but not immediately killing wounds. Not much else to say, a slow death has more far impact (In SS13 and Aurora, at least) and lets the player give their final words.

[Aticius]

I've said this to you before, and I'll say it again.

 

Actual, Lethality, from firearms is very much unchanged.

 

However; their actual function of stopping someone from shooting you has gone way down. There needs to be an increase in pain, or perhaps exaggerate slowdown from pain to account for it. Maybe implement random item dropping, if someone is in too much pain.

 

Increasing lethality on brainmed should be done with utmost care.

[GreenBoi]

Burns and organ damage fuck you up a lot worse than they should. I've been shocked by an electropack-rigged crate and then somehow get organ failure about ten minutes later...but this might just be something iffy- this did happen a few weeks ago.

 

Toxins, I think, would be my most consistent issue. It easily leads to organ damage and the threshold seems a bit too low. Not related to firearms, but definitely related to lethality.

[N.U.L.-D.]

The fact you can blow your hand off from hacking a vending machine amuses me, due to burn damage. But then you can take a few pistol rounds to the face and be a-okay.

The issue isn't really being able to die or not die from firearms, but that lasers just have an arguably better ability to kill due to blood loss rates, while ballistics are no better than beating someone to death with a bat due to adrenaline.

I would say that lasers should cause good amounts of surface damage/pain, while ballistics should be better at damaging organs/causing breaks.

[DickFreedomJohnson]

My biggest thoughts on it are that we need an increase in pain from the guns, maybe a little bit more damage from headshots.

[A.I.M.M.O.]

I cant speak for the receiving side of this as I only played IPCs lately and I dont end up in combat scenarios too often, but once I kidnapped an HoP as IPC and missed to find a backup gun of theirs, a firefight in which I emptied my deagle (not the strongest gun arround I know) dissarmed him and shot him a few times with his gun, gave him alot of punches straight to the head, then another antag noted our fight and joined me, I got myself an icelander to shoot at the HoP, while my antag pal helped, I died mostly due to melee damage to the head as the two humans kept fighting. In the end my antag pal  primed a frag grenade in their little 3x3 room and BAM ... both get up ... ok another one will take out the much more damaged HoP yes ? Well .. it finaly got him to stay down, the only thing that killed him was sec assuming his heart stopped a while ago, not like 4 seconds before they arrived. 

As said I dont have much experience in combat and could have done stupid things that reduced my chances on winning the fight ... but the ammount of damage the HoP survived through was not normal.

[Resilynn]

Scrubbers take you from being some guy hanging out to crit in 45 seconds because of plant-b-gone. We’ve started just a helping for rejuvs because they’re usually dead before they get to medical and very rarely survive even if they do get there in time. 

[RadiantRose]

During a low-pop traitor round, I stole all the funds from every account and proceeded to gloat about it in an announcement.

The AI locked me down and I circumvented it with the door-hack tool. I could've teleported out of there, but I decided to laugh about it in Common while I hacked my way out through the first door.

The second door was shocked. I touched them once. Both my hands were mangled, I couldn't use anything, and I stuttered cries for help until I fell unconscious.

I absolutely loved it because it was exactly what I deserved, and exactly what would actually happen in a scenario like that. The new system creates organic, realistic situations and it's hilarious. Keep as-is or even buff, in the case of brute damage.

Burn is already good but could be even more lethal and debilitating. My hand stings like hell for an hour if I spill boiling water on it in real life.

Maybe you could have brute be better at consistently knocking someone down for a short period of time, and burn would be better at reducing their capacity to use items and its debuffs would actually last longer? That way, combat wouldn't just boil down to stun-cuff.

Edited January 20, 2020 by RadiantRose

[IAmCrystalClear]

My primary concerns, currently, are with pain.

As a hulking vampire, I engaged an officer who baton tased me. I lost the use of both arms, yet was still capable of moving and walking and not downed. I ended up being caught because all I could do was run.

[Carver]

2 hours ago, IAmCrystalClear said:

My primary concerns, currently, are with pain.

As a hulking vampire, I engaged an officer who baton tased me. I lost the use of both arms, yet was still capable of moving and walking and not downed. I ended up being caught because all I could do was run.

I have to imagine this is an oversight in brainmed, as hulks were designed before pain and intended to be stun-immune, to which they could never be downed by pain before brainmed. Bay hasn't exactly had hulks for quite a while I believe, thus leading to the oversight and your issue.

[Cnaym]

Have to echo a lot of what the others wrote. Balistics are completely useless right now. An entire magazine from a revolver does as much brute as a single esword hit. The fireaxe will oneshot everyone even armored, while the highest end of ballistics, the anti matter rifle can hit  someone 2-3 times and they are able to walk and survive that through medical. There is just no logic to it right now. An esword, selfmade sword or even a baseball bat is stronger than anything the armory has to offer. The revolver, antag or  not, is a complete waste since it does as much as rubber pellets at this point.

Best example would be my officer taking all six rounds from a revolver point blank to the face, then proceeding to laser the antag to death with a laser rifle and walking towards medical alone. That needs serious balancing.

[Kaed]

I know very little about brainmed, but I think it's funny that we've gone from ballistics being objectively stronger than lasers to being joke compared to deadly lasers.

[Cnaym]

It really is.  Used to be that mercs and raiders had the gunpower, security took some time to prepare for a big showdown and the antags would try to break that line of supply.

Right now mercs should go back to buying eswords and force gloves. The damage multiplier is not even needed anymore since the esword downs with a hit anyway and you can just cut their head off and be done with it.

I am fine with lethal antags, I am not fine with making the entire system work exactly opposed to what was established.

Quote

Only resort to killing if it makes sense or drives a story.

Is the line in our rules.  Right now as antag you want to kill everyone as quickly as possible, since brainmed is only on your side for that part. Longer survival is good for the crew, longer treatment is great for the medbay RP, but both work against the antags. The ninja mode is currently the strongest sign of this. Frequently one kills the entire ISD, sometimes even the ERT without the crew having any way to meaningful influence the slaughter. The antag on the other hand cannot slow down, because treatment would take to long, so they take out as many as they can before exploding. Seems rather counter intuitive to an HRP environment and I hope it get's reworked.

[Brayce]

Antag melee weapons, and maybe melee weapons in general seem really out of tune with everything compared to any projectile weapon I've encountered thus far. I've played three separate rounds where I've had  ballistics, or energy weapons just for them to not.. do anything. The antag runs up hits me once on the head, and that's it fight over. You never recover from the stun, or they just cut your leg off, and then proceed to decapitate you. I've beaned a person twice with a shotgun with bean bags rushing me with an e-sword, only for them to hit my once on my armored head, and down me instantly. 

Anything that inflicts direct toxic damage also seems hilariously lethal really quickly.

[Peppermint]

Whilst it doesn't account for all of it, shrapnel is - in my opinion - contributing to the problem. We're back to it being a death sentence as a hostile antag, as shrapnel in the chest/head will now eventually kill you unless you get it removed; which is, of course, fairly unlikely. So there's more justification in killing security/the ERT as they've effectively resigned you to die anyway, which is something we keep seeing with ninja. A fight happens, the ninja gets tagged but doesn't go down - usually in part due to the med modules - wipes security as their time to kill is very fast, then dies a little while later from their injuries. 

Melee is just too good compared to all guns, as the moment you close the distance the fight is over. I got tagged *once* during the Tajara event round with a saw and was instantly downed and knocked-out, whilst I've had times of blasting people with a full laser clip only for them to dash off with barely a care in the world.

Shit is whack, y'all.