Spear Nerf Partial Revert

[Snakebittenn]

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/9401

What's going on here?
The old divisors for spears were the following.

0.75 force for wielded (About 22 damage for a glass spear.)
0.65 for unwielded (about 14 when unwielded)
1.5 for throw force (20 when thrown)

Kaed, awhile ago, nerfed them down to
0.35 force for wielded (21 damage for steel)
0.2 for unwielded (12 damage for steel)
1.2 for throw force  (24 damage when thrown)

I intend to somewhat buff them back to.

force_divisor = 0.50 // 30 damage for steel (hardness 60)

unwielded_force_divisor = 0.15 // 15 damage for steel (hardness 60)

thrown_force_divisor = 1.5 // 30 damage for steel (weight 20)


Why?
I feel that the previous nerf for spears was primarily based off a single incident. A single, unrobust horror form that @Alberyk managed to bring down with a plasteel spear. It was pretty quick to be posted afterwards, so I don't think it was very much thought out. Spears have pretty much been untouched since the nerf, and a glass spear/other weaker materials is basically useless now.
The initial PR did have /some/ points, such as plasteel and diamond spears being pretty crazy, so that's why they're still a quarter less strong than they used to be (as opposed to two quarters less strong.) I haven't touched the gold and uranium nerf in the original one, as I agree with what they brought to the table. Do, please, keep in mind the problems spears have. They break, and they cannot be put in your backpack. They're not easy to carry around.

[Kaed]

Clarification: I was not present for this Alberyk incident you mentioned and while I dimly remember hearing about it, my reason for the nerf was not 'a knee jerk reaction' to the event but rather the result of looking at the damage values available for the weaponry added to the game and determined they were vastly unbalanced. Acting like this sole incident was the result of player skill being punished by nerfs is vastly reductive of the situation as it was at the time, which was that a plasteel or diamond spear was competitively surpassing most ranged weaponry in power, regardless of how good or bad Alberyk or his opponent was as in this hypothetical famous battle.

Your points that spears and related weapons deserve to be more powerful on account of how highly visible or breakable they are is not relevant to the actual problems with 'medieval weaponry' being in the game.  It does not matter how unwieldy or destructible they are, because they can easily be replaced in seconds with materials you are capable of carrying in your backpack or acquiring in cargo with extreme ease.  The fact of the matter is that these weapons were haphazardly implemented into the game using existing mechanics of materials crafting that make their manufacture absolutely, laughably trivial. 

Until something is done to curtail this, such as creating an more involved process for crafting them (maybe involving metal casting or something), they will have to remain a cheap emergency use only weapon so that cargo cannot arm the entire station with competitively powerful damaging weapons within less than 10 minutes. By contrast, most of the other weapons in the game have checks and balances on their use - firing pins, for instance, stop the use of science mass weapons production, or having to go through the cargo ordering system which keeps track of orders and is limited at least tangentially by available funds.  Even the original craftable weapons such as the powered crossbow and stun rod require an array of components that are not trivial to gather, take a long time to construct, and are of limited utility or uses.

Personally, I'd like them removed from the game entirely, but people hate content being cut, no matter how nonsensical it is to be wielding spears and halberds on a freaking space station, so we will have to look at this strictly from a balance sense.

Edited July 21, 2020 by Kaed

[Doxxmedearly]

I really don't mind that spears have fallen out of disuse. It was pretty annoying to see everyone just know how to do it. But that's more of a player issue and an issue of crafting being braindead easy.

That said, the numbers you're presenting aren't terrible. I wouldn't mind seeing your PR go through but I also wouldn't mind keeping it how it is. The reasons you're giving for the change aren't very convincing,  so I'll wait to see how feedback goes. Your point on downsides is pretty weak as things are right now; they don't break easily and making a new one is trivial. You can't store one in your backpack but you can store the materials to make fifty more, and it takes literal seconds. 

If crafting them was more difficult and/or they broke super easily (one or two hits), I'd see the merit of bring them up just a tad more.

[Scheveningen]

This was the classic Kaed nerf that actually was quite good in hindsight.

A diamond spear should not, ever, in any alternate or prime timeline, deal more damage in melee than an energy sword.

Sucks to not be able to oneshot carp anymore, I'm sure, but spears were ridiculous and the fact they got their damage chopped in half was 100% deserved and is completely fair.

Footmeta may be over but let's not bring that shit back since 45 damage per hit breaks bones instantly and that shit is NOT fair to any player at all since the armor system is as barebones as it gets with damage mitigation.

[Zundy]

I think spears should be pretty weak. Imo of we want a more powerful spear variant then they should (as others have stated here) require additional components that some mook can't just cobble together in 10 seconds. 

Something like chain glaves and or ION Glaves which require more complicated components.

[Carver]

These things are too easy to mass produce for just how effective they are. Had we some requirement of craftsmanship and machining in the process rather than it taking more than all of 15 seconds to build with bare hands and a pile of extremely common materials, then I'd see the value in buffing them. Things like crossbows are powerful for having niche material requirements (and being harder to use but let's not delve into that) at the very least.

[Arrow768]

Moving to the archive as the relevant PR has been closed.