Nerf Manifest Spirit

[Surrealistik]

The Cult spell Manifest Spirit is monstrously overpowered; unlimited infinitely disposable player controlled baldies that are totally pain, hard crit and disable immune with cult swords + robes that you can teleport around the station (with a little prep) which cost almost nothing in time/resources.

Proposals to Fix:

#1: Have each summoning take some time (10 seconds?), and require a meaningful cost in blood loss and brute damage.

#2: Make the Spirits each require a small upkeep (fractional small) in blood loss and brute damage from their summoner per tick; perhaps this scales with the distance the Spirit is from the summoner (to prevent the inevitable camping from an impenetrable super fort to fling unlimited geekseeking murderbone baldies at people at the other side of the station).

#3: Hard limit on the number of Spirits one cultist can summon, or upkeeps (as above) grow exponentially with each additional Spirit a cultist summons.

#4: Have the summoner take a fraction (say 25%; decimals rounded up) of whatever damage the Spirits he's summoned receive as those Spirits are soulbound to him.

#5: If a summoner falls unconscious/asleep, each Spirit he summoned disintegrates as if he died or left the manifest rune (needs to maintain concentration).

#6: Manifest Spirits can no longer be utilized with the Sacrifice, Blood Drain, Summon Nar'Sie, or Raise Dead runes to prevent EZ circumvention of blood magic costs and use of Manifest Spirits to bring back cultists and act as sacrifice fodder without limit by sacrificing one of your unlimited supply of them, or even using ghosts to end the round outright.

Edited March 4, 2017 by Guest

[Alberyk]

Using, and keeping, a manifest ghost rune already deals brute damage over time to the people summoning it, besides, if they leave the rune or are knocked out, all manifested spirits will be dusted. And like most cult related things, manifested spirits can be weakened with the null rod.

[Surrealistik]

Using, and keeping, a manifest ghost rune already deals brute damage over time to the people summoning it, besides, if they leave the rune or are knocked out, all manifested spirits will be dusted. And like most cult related things, manifested spirits can be weakened with the null rod.

 

The damage dealt is tiny and easily recovered (this is why I suggest a blood loss upkeep in which is thematic and much harder to deal with in addition to the heightening of the existing brute damage). I know this by seeing first hand, as an AI, a character who literally did not stop continuously spam summoning spirits for about a full hour to repeatedly attack the crew (and he was almost perfectly healthy despite this relentless volume of summoning).

Null Rod isn't much of a counter; there's one of them, unless you're the Chaplain you don't even know it's effective in the first place to retrieve it, and even if you did, you might not be able to.

There is no way this is balanced as it stands.

[Scheveningen]

What is balance to you and why does it matter?

It's not a competitive e-sport. It's just an atmos simulator repurposed into an RP sim.

[Surrealistik]

What is balance to you and why does it matter?

It's not a competitive e-sport. It's just an atmos simulator repurposed into an RP sim.

 

Because dealing with an endless horde of low effort high reward baldie murderboners that can easily grind down the crew/ERTs via sheer attrition isn't fun.

[mirkoloio]

It is. IF you're not losing. Besides, if they extend their murderboner, just fucking ahelp and get that person dealt with. Rules still apply. No need to nerf a totally fine mechanic.

[Surrealistik]

It is. IF you're not losing. Besides, if they extend their murderboner, just fucking ahelp and get that person dealt with. Rules still apply. No need to nerf a totally fine mechanic.

 

The vast majority of things are fun if you're not losing. That said, holding out against the endless tide isn't winning so much as buying time, until the fractures and decommissioning injuries stack up faster than they can be healed.

I'm not so sure what's fine about a mechanic that is insanely powerful relative to the effort involved to utilize it; it fits the classic definition of an OP element: vastly disproportionate return on minimal investment.

[icy_dew]

What is balance to you and why does it matter?

It's not a competitive e-sport. It's just an atmos simulator repurposed into an RP sim.

do you always feel the need to use some snarky remark as an argument?

[Scheveningen]

What is balance to you and why does it matter?

It's not a competitive e-sport. It's just an atmos simulator repurposed into an RP sim.

 

Because dealing with an endless horde of low effort high reward baldie murderboners that can easily grind down the crew/ERTs via sheer attrition isn't fun.

 

Then adminhelp the people "powergaming." Adminhelp function is an open door policy for you to legitimately, politely complain about something happening in-round. An admin and prominent coder has already said they are not changing this. We can talk to people regarding the powergaming and speak to them if it's an actual problem. Because it's actually not a problem in-game, until this thread popped up.

But I figure you guys don't want to use it because a.) you would be told "no" more times than you'd like and b.) you wouldn't complain about something if you couldn't win the argument over it. But seriously, we don't like saying no to anyone either, but either you communicate about something you don't like or you don't and it's not a problem.

"Calling it out" on the forums with an antithetical lack of proof of it being a problem doesn't make your complaints any more true.

Manifests aren't necessarily gamebreaking in any sense. They aren't that useful beyond distracting security at the cost of immobilizing a cultist. Did you know current Bay has it so that you can spawn multiple manifests without standing still? They get along just fine and its been a feature for awhile over there. What's the big deal here?

 

What is balance to you and why does it matter?

It's not a competitive e-sport. It's just an atmos simulator repurposed into an RP sim.

do you always feel the need to use some snarky remark as an argument?

 

Do you need a hug?

[Surrealistik]

Because dealing with an endless horde of low effort high reward baldie murderboners that can easily grind down the crew/ERTs via sheer attrition isn't fun.

 

Then adminhelp the people "powergaming." Adminhelp function is an open door policy for you to legitimately, politely complain about something happening in-round. An admin and prominent coder has already said they are not changing this. We can talk to people regarding the powergaming and speak to them if it's an actual problem. Because it's actually not a problem in-game, until this thread popped up.

But I figure you guys don't want to use it because a.) you would be told "no" more times than you'd like and b.) you wouldn't complain about something if you couldn't win the argument over it. But seriously, we don't like saying no to anyone either, but either you communicate about something you don't like or you don't and it's not a problem.

 

It's actually more that I'd much rather have balanced mechanics than cry to and debate with the admins every single time abuse of Manifest Spirits comes up. Based on prior interactions with the staff, mechanical balance is valued to some extent, so Manifest Spirits seems like a natural target for nerfing given how egregious it is, and completely over the top it can be.

 

"Calling it out" on the forums with an antithetical lack of proof of it being a problem doesn't make your complaints any more true.

 

The mechanics of Manifest Spirit speak for themselves, nevermind the first hand experience recently being in a round where a total of 20+ Spirits were summoned by one (1) person to butcher the crew. Again, unlimited sword wielding player controlled baldies that can teleport around the station, ignore stuns and pain, and have no cooldown or cost aside from temporary immobilization of a cultist while they permanently cripple and kill crew or at minimum impose far, far more inconvenience on it than the cultists. Massive reward, minimal risk (you don't even have to commit in any respect), minimal cost; the classic definition of OP.

 

Manifests aren't necessarily gamebreaking in any sense. They aren't that useful beyond distracting security at the cost of immobilizing a cultist. Did you know current Bay has it so that you can spawn multiple manifests without standing still? They get along just fine and its been a feature for awhile over there. What's the big deal here?

 

They are absolutely gamebreaking when properly utilized with sword + robe talismans, and worse still, teleportation runes. Manifest Spirits are blatantly mechanically overpowered and an issue on Bay albeit a rare one in practice, because powergaming isn't particularly common there, in addition to the infrequency of cult.

[Scheveningen]

Cult is not infrequent on Bay.

There were five non-sequential cult rounds in a row yesterday on Aurora. It was bad luck and unfortunate for everyone involved.

Powergaming on this server is against the rules if it is not done for the sole purpose of furthering roleplay.

 

It's actually more that I'd much rather have balanced mechanics than cry to and debate with the admins every single time abuse of Manifest Spirits comes up. Based on prior interactions with the staff, mechanical balance is valued to some extent, so Manifest Spirits seems like a natural target for nerfing given how egregious it is, and completely over the top it can be.

 

And I would rather not have to deal with griefers who barely speak english every time someone complains they're getting griefed, but it is part of the job to speak with and deal with them. It is part of the necessary process in getting things done the right way.

Another staff member (and prominent coder balled into one, as I mentioned) just said that manifesting spirits was fine. You cannot actually even do it without converting more than five to six people. It also requires living ghosts to do anything.

Here's some hints regarding dealing with it. Find the manifested person. Throw a flashbang at them. If they run, the manifest dies. If they stay, they get stunned for variably 2-10 seconds and the manifest dies. There is less counterplay to flashbangs than there is to manifests.

Also, break hands of manifests. They can't wield swords if you break their hands and their robes only protect arms, chest, legs and head. Even better if you have a laser weapon as they ash hands in two shots, one if you're lucky. Laser rifles can shoot 20 times.

No, they're not gamebreaking. It sucks that nobody plays chaplain in a dedicated sense for added zealotry to completely crush cultists, as you can feed cultists holy water to instantly wipe the taint of Nar'sie from them. There's an even more hilarious mechanic where you can transfer holy water reagents to syringe darts and convert cultists in this way.

[Surrealistik]

Cult is not infrequent on Bay.

There were five non-sequential cult rounds in a row yesterday on Aurora. It was bad luck and unfortunate for everyone involved.

Powergaming on this server is against the rules if it is not done for the sole purpose of furthering roleplay.

 

It's a combination of Cult being intermittent to begin with, which compounds the inherent rarity of manifest spirit powergaming there.

 

Another staff member (and prominent coder balled into one, as I mentioned) just said that manifesting spirits was fine. You cannot actually even do it without converting more than five to six people. It also requires living ghosts to do anything.

 

In the round I just played in where one person (the guy who plays Sean Richter) summoned 20+ Manifest Spirits. There weren't even 5 total cultists and he was capable of doing this.

 

Here's some hints regarding dealing with it. Find the manifested person. Throw a flashbang at them. If they run, the manifest dies. If they stay, they get stunned for variably 2-10 seconds and the manifest dies. There is less counterplay to flashbangs than there is to manifests.

 

Good luck finding them and penetrating their inevitable doom fortress (pretty easy to hide, then teleport in your manifests) while you're plagued with disposable teleporting murderboning sword wielding zealots the entire time.

 

Also, break hands of manifests. They can't wield swords if you break their hands and their robes only protect arms, chest, legs and head. Even better if you have a laser weapon as they ash hands in two shots, one if you're lucky. Laser rifles can shoot 20 times.

 

Gotta break/dust/gore both hands. Again, easier said than done before they inflict significant casualties... and then when fully crippled they can suicide/dust and come at you again less than a minute later.

 

No, they're not gamebreaking. It sucks that nobody plays chaplain in a dedicated sense for added zealotry to completely crush cultists, as you can feed cultists holy water to instantly wipe the taint of Nar'sie from them. There's an even more hilarious mechanic where you can transfer holy water reagents to syringe darts and convert cultists in this way.

 

Again, how do you track nevermind fight cultists in their hidden doomfort while they're summoning and attacking you with a limitless supply of teleporting spirits?

[JKJudgeX]

If you don't like cultists using this ability, don't valid-hunt cultists. In most of the rounds where I've seen it get heavy use, it's because somebody started lasering the faces off of cultists instead of going through the trouble of arresting them. As dead cultists pile up, the reward of creating a rune and reanimating ghosts increases. It shouldn't be a surprise that an insane death cult has a means of gaining power as you kill them.

I've noticed a pretty strong uptick in the use of lethal force by security on Aurora lately. This ability acts as a good counter that IMO and I'd like to see it remain. I actually wish revs got something similar, but that wouldn't make any sense.

[Surrealistik]

If you don't like cultists using this ability, don't valid-hunt cultists. In most of the rounds where I've seen it get heavy use, it's because somebody started lasering the faces off of cultists instead of going through the trouble of arresting them. As dead cultists pile up, the reward of creating a rune and reanimating ghosts increases. It shouldn't be a surprise that an insane death cult has a means of gaining power as you kill them.

I've noticed a pretty strong uptick in the use of lethal force by security on Aurora lately. This ability acts as a good counter that IMO and I'd like to see it remain. I actually wish revs got something similar, but that wouldn't make any sense.

 

In the round I saw it abused, valid hunting wasn't going on.

Further, even if it was, this is still a problematic feature.

I don't think antags should have ridiculously OP stuff as 'insurance' against the occasional StalinSec.

Also, it takes just one cooperative spectator/ghost to have an unlimited stream of baldie murderboners fucking people up (which the Cult doesn't even have to be outed as being responsible for; again, hide in the doom fort, teleport them in). More is better of course.

[CommanderXor]

Cult is not infrequent on Bay.

There were five non-sequential cult rounds in a row yesterday on Aurora. It was bad luck and unfortunate for everyone involved.

Powergaming on this server is against the rules if it is not done for the sole purpose of furthering roleplay.

 

It's a combination of Cult being intermittent to begin with, which compounds the inherent rarity of manifest spirit powergaming there.

 

Another staff member (and prominent coder balled into one, as I mentioned) just said that manifesting spirits was fine. You cannot actually even do it without converting more than five to six people. It also requires living ghosts to do anything.

 

In the round I just played in where one person (the guy who plays Sean Richter) summoned 20+ Manifest Spirits. There weren't even 5 total cultists and he was capable of doing this.

 

Here's some hints regarding dealing with it. Find the manifested person. Throw a flashbang at them. If they run, the manifest dies. If they stay, they get stunned for variably 2-10 seconds and the manifest dies. There is less counterplay to flashbangs than there is to manifests.

 

Good luck finding them and penetrating their inevitable doom fortress (pretty easy to hide, then teleport in your manifests) while you're plagued with disposable teleporting murderboning sword wielding zealots the entire time.

 

Also, break hands of manifests. They can't wield swords if you break their hands and their robes only protect arms, chest, legs and head. Even better if you have a laser weapon as they ash hands in two shots, one if you're lucky. Laser rifles can shoot 20 times.

 

Gotta break/dust/gore both hands. Again, easier said than done before they inflict significant casualties... and then when fully crippled they can suicide/dust and come at you again less than a minute later.

 

No, they're not gamebreaking. It sucks that nobody plays chaplain in a dedicated sense for added zealotry to completely crush cultists, as you can feed cultists holy water to instantly wipe the taint of Nar'sie from them. There's an even more hilarious mechanic where you can transfer holy water reagents to syringe darts and convert cultists in this way.

 

Again, how do you track nevermind fight cultists in their hidden doomfort while they're summoning and attacking you with a limitless supply of teleporting spirits?

 

Hi, guy who plays Richter here. The main reason I fell back to a fortified location, walled it up with wall ruins and sat back with manifest spam is because the moment we acted, the RD instantly called a ERT. Now, it's not fun doing all that effort of grinding through rune words and such to hopefully get a good sense of possible roleplay going to only have security instantly loot the tac armoury, grab lasers and call a ERT. Not only that but the RD straight up valid hunted by looting the spare ID, calling a ERT and printing weapons off in RnD before coming after me. That entire round devolved in to 'KILL THE OTHER SIDE' with the RD, ERT and AI trying to kill us all by siphoning, shocking, printing weapons, etc, with me. A LONE fucking cultist being valid hunted by the entire station. I used the only way I could of defended myself. Blood drain, manifest, teleport and armor runes.

Please don't complain when you kick a antag so far in the ribs with the entire station, that the LONE antag(In a fucking GROUP based antag role) has to pull back and kick back. If you kick someone who is down like that, expect them to kick back.

[Surrealistik]

Hi, guy who plays Richter here. The main reason I fell back to a fortified location, walled it up with wall ruins and sat back with manifest spam is because the moment we acted, the RD instantly called a ERT. Now, it's not fun doing all that effort of grinding through rune words and such to hopefully get a good sense of possible roleplay going to only have security instantly loot the tac armoury, grab lasers and call a ERT. Not only that but the RD straight up valid hunted by looting the spare ID, calling a ERT and printing weapons off in RnD before coming after me. That entire round devolved in to 'KILL THE OTHER SIDE' with the RD, ERT and AI trying to kill us all by siphoning, shocking, printing weapons, etc, with me. A LONE fucking cultist being valid hunted by the entire station. I used the only way I could of defended myself. Blood drain, manifest, teleport and armor runes.

Please don't complain when you kick a antag so far in the ribs with the entire station, that the LONE antag(In a fucking GROUP based antag role) has to pull back and kick back. If you kick someone who is down like that, expect them to kick back.

 

I didn't do shit to stop you save lockdowns of you and your infinite spirits, and, after you had already killed the RD once, and kept trying to kill crew with manifest spirit spam, and disregarded my request that you stop and stand down, and I got authorization from the only head on the station and acting captain, try to siphon you (which I got boinked for and had to stop, even though I was following laws by prioritizing the RD's protection over yours via rank). You were also the one who initiated murderboning via the manifest spirit spam.

I didn't really follow what the RD was doing 100%, but from what I could see, he wasn't going after you aggressively; there was friction between you two when he became active captain, but I didn't see him actively valid hunt.

Also, that this enabled you to hold out against pretty much the rest of the crew solo is pretty clear evidence as to how broken this spell is at present.

[JKJudgeX]

It literally requires dead cultists.

That means that the counter is don't kill cultists.

You have a brig available to you for a reason, as well as a chaplain who can fix cultists. You've got borgification options, you've got chemical coma options, straightjackets, and all sorts of other non-lethal ways to pin down a known cultist without killing them.

Cultists are just the only antagonist that has the *honestly rarely used* ability to become more powerful in death. I think I've only seen it used once, and very shortly, in the past 5 cult rounds I've been in, even when using it would have been wise because multiple cultist ghosts were ready to roll.

[Fire and Glory]

It literally requires dead cultists.

Last I checked (fairly recently), it doesn't, actually.

A ghost that's on the rune the summoner is standing on will get turned into a manifest, dead cultist or not.

Might be a quirk about making ghosts visible making them eligible for being summoned but either way, still not a dead cultist.

[ShameOnTurtles]

It literally requires dead cultists.

That means that the counter is don't kill cultists.

You have a brig available to you for a reason, as well as a chaplain who can fix cultists. You've got borgification options, you've got chemical coma options, straightjackets, and all sorts of other non-lethal ways to pin down a known cultist without killing them.

Cultists are just the only antagonist that has the *honestly rarely used* ability to become more powerful in death. I think I've only seen it used once, and very shortly, in the past 5 cult rounds I've been in, even when using it would have been wise because multiple cultist ghosts were ready to roll.

 

I'm not all too familiar with cult, but in the scenario that Surrealisk is posting about in this thread myself and another one or two ghosts were manifested without being cultists.

[Surrealistik]

It literally requires dead cultists.

That means that the counter is don't kill cultists.

You have a brig available to you for a reason, as well as a chaplain who can fix cultists. You've got borgification options, you've got chemical coma options, straightjackets, and all sorts of other non-lethal ways to pin down a known cultist without killing them.

Cultists are just the only antagonist that has the *honestly rarely used* ability to become more powerful in death. I think I've only seen it used once, and very shortly, in the past 5 cult rounds I've been in, even when using it would have been wise because multiple cultist ghosts were ready to roll.

 

As others have mentioned, any spirits will work, and even if only cultist spirits did, all it takes is one (1) dead cultist to have an unlimited supply of murder death kill.

Further, as previously mentioned earlier, utilizing a doom fort + teleportation makes actually dealing with unlimited summons excruciating in practice.

Lastly, that other players don't often embrace the broken cancer of Manifest Spirit often doesn't mean it's not egregiously unbalanced.

[TrickingTrapster]

Reading through this, it seems to have some ties with my suggestion to change cult up. I myself would ask the question here, why are there so many combat mechanics incorporated into a gamemode for a server that is built on slower roleplay? I could go into detail here, but I already did in my posts on that topic, so I won't. All I will say is that I think the problem lies in the execution of the cult mechanics, rather than player mentality or concept.

[Surrealistik]

...And apparently not only can you use manifest spirit to summon an endless supply of murderbaldies, and blood drain resources, but you can also use them for sacrifices to bring cultists back from the dead on essentially an unlimited basis (after teleporting their corpse into your sekrit doom fort from which you summon your hordes in perfect security and secrecy).

[Scheveningen]

Provided you still have 3 cultists. The manifest counts but it still requires an active ghost player.

Cult isn't OP. It's an antagonist type that is meant to be different from the others in its own way. It is actually fair, they don't get access to cloning like most loyal crew roles do. Traitors do not even gain access to that luxury.

[Surrealistik]

Provided you still have 3 cultists. The manifest counts but it still requires an active ghost player.

 

3 cultists are easy, and you only need 2: you, and the cultist you want to revive. _Any_ ghost can be your manifest buddy.

 

Cult isn't OP. It's an antagonist type that is meant to be different from the others in its own way. It is actually fair, they don't get access to cloning like most loyal crew roles do. Traitors do not even gain access to that luxury.

 

It's blatantly OP, and I've catalogued fairly clearly how it is, even if people tend not to always abuse its broken mechanics to the utmost.

Also who needs cloning when you have unlimited nearly instant speed perfect revives anywhere (nevermind the fact that they can certainly build cloners or seize cloning)?

[Scheveningen]

You have nice opinions but in practice organizing cultists to do anything right is usually the equivalent of herding cats. Good on the cult for organizing and using the magics they have to their advantage.