Nerf Reavers, diversify mining hazards

[VeteranGary]

Title. Reavers are completely unfair particularly against mining. Their basic voidsuit only offers a measly 30% melee protection, and it feels like reavers can completely blast past this and deal some rather severe injuries in just a couple hits. If you are lucky, it can only hit your head, chest, arms or legs and hopefully doesn't hit you in the same place twice you can walk away with easily treatable injuries. However if it hits you twice in the same limb, you will be immediately greeted by an arterial, broken bone or all of the above. Hands and feet will be granted a critical injury in just one hit. Considering you can face one of these awesome creatures while blasting apart rocks or instantaneously as soon as you cycle out of the Spark's airlock this creature is a coin flip of whether you are allowed to have any sort of progress in an already mundane job experience. 

We already have three simplemob creatures that bite and slash the shit out of you, that being gnats, carp, and sharks and those are infinitely more fair to fight since as long as you're quick enough to blast it with a KA or slap it with a machete, you'll be able to treat yourself with a basic first aid kit and continue on. A reaver however is too tanky to be safely dealt with using a KA and you'll more than likely be trading blows in melee with a KA which will just injure yourself further, or a machete where the reaver will almost always get 3 or more hits in before you can kill it. This is simply just an awful gameplay design that can be solved by stuff we already have and seemed to just have forgotten to implement from oversight. 

First of all, reaver needs a damage, AP, or speed nerf. Alternatively, the basic mining voidsuit needs a melee armor buff. Then, we need to re-implement other simplemobs that we should reasonably face as mining outside of unique away sites. Simple lone hivebots, cave dwellers, maybe the occasional psiren. More mobs that either do ranged attacks, burn damage, or both! In most cases burns are easily treatable, and ranged enemies are generally less obnoxious to deal with than lighting fast mobs that will guarantee hits the second they get close to you. Yet still provide a reasonable threat if handled incorrectly. 

[Fyni]

The psirens will, once mappers/coders get to it, begin to appear on exoplanets and away sites more frequently. Their introduction was in part meant to diversify our enemy simple mob roster for away sites and Ody - and I am looking to expand on this more in the future too.

[hazelmouse]

So long as you spot them early and immediately begin kiting, without having backed yourself into a corner with no escape route, reavers can be reliably dispatched with even a basic accelerator. I feel you should be grievously maimed if you attempt to trade with the big purple asteroid monster in melee in the standard mining voidsuit.

For reference on a few stats:

• Reavers: 100HP, 30 Melee Damage, 10 Speed
• Carp: 25HP, 15 Melee Damage, 4 Speed
• Greimorian Warriors: 200HP, 15-20 Melee Damage, 6 Speed
• Greimorian Hunters: 120HP, 10-20 Melee Damage, 4 Speed
• Sharks: 100HP, 20-25 Melee Damage, 4 Speed

They aren't particularly tanky, the one thing they have going for them is enough speed to usually avoid being shaken off by an evasive miner. These only spawn in mineral asteroids, which are intended to be high-risk and high-reward - they wouldn't be exciting without the risk. Wouldn't it feel a very trivial environment if you could just flee from every hostile mob?

I do agree it'd be worthwhile to expand the roster of asteroid mobs, that said. Maybe we could finally find a use for the ever-neglected phoron worms.

Edited Thursday at 23:30 by hazelmouse

[NerdyVampire]

Divertity is the spice of space life! I can't comment much on the combat stuff, but I do want to have more surprises awaiting outside of the Horizon. We have a lot of cool mobs just lying about; Vannatusks, space bears, phoron worms, those weird electric things, now psirens. I imagine the reason it is kept back is for the surprise-factor when admins actually do see reason to use them, but I do think the roster can be expanded.