Shadowling Rebalancing / Rework

[Kyet]

The issue with shadowlings is that a single shadowling can convert the entire sec team to their side.

Traitors have mindslave implants, but those are expensive, require surgical removal of the mindshield first, etc.

Changelings can impersonate sec, but that requires one changeling per impersonated officer.

Shadowlings aren't stopped by mindshields, and a single shadowling can enthrall many officers.

 

Once the slings thrall sec, they've not only eliminated their main opposition, they've converted a group of people with excellent stun/disable weapons (ideal for capture/conversion) to their side.

At that point, the round balance is heavily in favor of the slings, and there's not much the crew can do to fight back beyond call an ERT.

 

If you want shadowling rounds to be more interesting... alter mindshields so that shadowling enthrall doesn't work against mindshielded targets.

Slings can still kill off sec. That should be possible. But subverting sec won't be possible anymore without using surgery to remove their mindshield first.

That should restore some balance to the game mode.

[Norwest]

8 hours ago, davidchan said:

Can someone explain to me why Shadowling, a roundtype that's at least fun to play in any of the roles involved with the struggle, is suddenly becoming hated and reviled despite multiple departments having the means and tools to limit or fight back against the slings, when roundtypes like vampire exist with blatant power gaming, mismatched kit, entirely unfun to combat and no real weaknesses?

 

The fact that there is at least 1 PR up right now trying to nerf Slings when not a damn person has touched vampire as of now is troubling.

Let's compare the two for a second. Yes, vampires are pretty bullshit, and I wouldn't mind some of their more ridiculous abilities getting a nerf (Glare's 30-second cooldown getting bumped up to 60, for instance - I'm really sick of the constant stuns from even low-level vamps I'm trying to perma). But compare vampire abilities to shadowling ones (see my post on pg. 1):

A. Stuns: Glare, Hypnotize, Chiroptean Screech.

B. Self-healing: Rejuvenate/Rejuvenate+

C. Utility: Vampiric Vision/Full Power, Cloak of Darkness, Enthrall

D. Escape: Shapeshift, Shadowstep, Mist Form

E. Other: Summon Bats, Diseased Touch

Vampires have a shitload of stun abilities; they can absolutely rock a 1v1 fight with all their stuns, and so long as they have blood, can escape countless times. But note the abilities they don't have, because vampires have a couple glaring weaknesses which can absolutely be countered. Vampires lack:

A. Lack of heals: Vampires get Rejuvenate - contrast that with shadowlings constantly healing while in darkness (and Rapid Re-Hatch, and Drain Life, and Black Recuperation...). Past the low-key healing and stun removal it provides, vampires are left relying on chems and their own limp pecker to keep themselves alive. I trust you can see where this is going, yes? Even with just their starting equipment and no assistance from other departments, a competent Sec member or two can suss out the not-too-difficult strategy of "grab a shotgun, load it for bear buckshot, aim for the legs." A couple buckshot rounds to the legs and a vampire's down to limping, half-speed if they remembered to grab some splints from Medbay. A couple more to the chest and head, and the vampire's stuck relying on epinephrine autoinjectors merely to stay alive, let alone any bloodloss from internal or superficial bleeding. Vampires can dominate a single fight, yes, but their lack of heals puts them at extreme weakness to the damage of extrended fights. A shadowling who takes the same damage will just run away, passively heal up on the move (or Rapid Re-Hatch if he wants to speed it up), and hey presto he's ready to rock. I should note that Rapid Re-Hatch is also specifically designed to counter more exotic, harder-healing damage types like cellular or genetic damage: hitting a 'sling with a Decloner or somehow glomping them with a slime won't do a thing.

B. Crowd-control harm abilities - vamps can stun, but they can't force an entire Sec team to fall back to Medbay based on their abilities alone. Even a newbie shadowling can just pop Icy Veins, with its no-cost, 25-second cooldown, and congrats, you've just incapacitated an entire group of pursuers at once. For bonus points, Icy Veins completely ignores the insulating effects of hardsuits, which means that insulating things like a 'suit are actually a detriment and will freeze you to death if you're not careful. I've nearly died on EVA from a 'sling popping Icy Veins (while they were still inside the station), and taking critical harm during my desperate rush to a warm environment. Boosted 'slings also have Drain Life and Sonic Screech, both of which have no cost other than their cooldowns, to quickly and easily lay the hurt on pursuers and to force 'em to retreat to heal up.

C. EMP: A shadowling with an easy-peasy three thralls gets access to an area-effect EMP in the form of Sonic Screech. Cyborgs are your best friend against vampires; they're not a one-size-kills-all, and can of course be countered via normal means (the Cyborg Control Console, regular old EMPs, subverting the AI/getting Robotics on your side, etc.). However, vampires don't have an easy counter to wipe out a pursuing 'borg in the field, which makes Secborgs very effective at countering vampire stuns and assisting in that same attrition-fight which vampires are on the losing side of. Shadowlings? Sonic Screech, get some hits in, run away if necessary, rinse and repeat until you've a dead 'borg.

D. Ability cost/cooldown: Even at full power, without blood vampires only get Rejuvenate, Glare, Vampiric Vision, and Cloak of Darkness. Every other ability they have costs them blood, a scarce resource which they have to quite literally fight to get. Along with their lack of easy and effective self-heals, a vampire literally can't keep running forever; I literally can't recall how many vamps I've either killed myself or assisted in killing/capturing simply by chasing them until they were bloodless and forced to fight. Additionally, note the vampire ability cooldowns: only three of them are under 60 seconds (Glare, Rejuvenate, and Shadowstep), and most are considerably more. Their one proper crowd-control ability, Chiroptean Screech, is on a significant 3-minute cooldown and costs 'em 30 blood to boot.

Shadowlings, well...let's start off with their complete lack of ability cost. They don't need to fight for blood, wait for their Chemicals to recharge, or do anything other than pop their abilities the moment they come off cooldown. And hoo boy, their cooldowns are positively crazy to look at: 30 seconds for Shadow Walk and Glare, 15 seconds for Veil, 25 for Icy Veins, 10 seconds for Drain Life (an AoE 'heal friendlies, harm baddies' ability, mind you), 30 seconds for Sonic Screech - need I go on? Shadowlings have only three abilities with 60-second cooldowns, (Rapid Re-Hatch, Blindness Smoke, and Black Recuperation), and none with longer cooldowns.

 

 

To summarize: You can attrite even a full-powered vampire down to the point of helplessness and eventually death. Their large-scale abilities all have significant cooldowns, and cost them blood which is difficult to replace on the move. Keep up the pressure, keep inflicting hard-to-heal damage, don't let them stop to recuperate, and even a god-tier vampire can (and often has) been taken out. I commanded an ERT which did exactly that against a bunch of rampaging vampires a day ago: my two inquisitorial ERT members set their sights on one of the nastiest vamps, and just keep doggedly pursuing him until he was literally and figuratively out of juice. Once he couldn't use the bulk of his abilities for lack of blood, he was vulnerable and brought to a straight-up conflict: 2 chainswords, 1 vamp.

Shadowlings are effectively immune to attrition: they don't depend on a limited resource a la vampires or changelings, and they're specifically designed to be immune to lasting damage. With 'slings, the shoe's on the other foot: any pursuer is constantly forced to heal again and again, because shadowlings have oodles of AoE-damage abilities which they can (and do) pop every minute or less. As a pursuer, you can feel like you're inflicting lasting harm against a vampire even if they just mistform away: you're forcing them to waste their scarce blood, and that's a sense of accomplishment even if you don't land a single hit. With a 'sling, you'll be left limping away towards warmth, with the knowledge that nothing will really slow down a shadowling short of a serious case of death. Shadowlings aren't just mechanically difficult to fight against, they're infuriating to boot.

Edited April 26, 2018 by Norwest

[davidchan]

1 hour ago, Norwest said:

Let's compare the two for a second. Yes, vampires are pretty bullshit, and I wouldn't mind some of their more ridiculous abilities getting a nerf (Glare's 30-second cooldown getting bumped up to 60, for instance - I'm really sick of the constant stuns from even low-level vamps I'm trying to perma). But compare vampire abilities to shadowling ones (see my post on pg. 1):

~Snip~

To summarize: You can attrite even a full-powered vampire down to the point of helplessness and eventually death. Their large-scale abilities all have significant cooldowns, and cost them blood which is difficult to replace on the move. Keep up the pressure, keep inflicting hard-to-heal damage, don't let them stop to recuperate, and even a god-tier vampire can (and often has) been taken out. I commanded an ERT which did exactly that against a bunch of rampaging vampires a day ago: my two inquisitorial ERT members set their sights on one of the nastiest vamps, and just keep doggedly pursuing him until he was literally and figuratively out of juice. Once he couldn't use the bulk of his abilities for lack of blood, he was vulnerable and brought to a straight-up conflict: 2 chainswords, 1 vamp.

Shadowlings are effectively immune to attrition: they don't depend on a limited resource a la vampires or changelings, and they're specifically designed to be immune to lasting damage. With 'slings, the shoe's on the other foot: any pursuer is constantly forced to heal again and again, because shadowlings have oodles of AoE-damage abilities which they can (and do) pop every minute or less. As a pursuer, you can feel like you're inflicting lasting harm against a vampire even if they just mistform away: you're forcing them to waste their scarce blood, and that's a sense of accomplishment even if you don't land a single hit. With a 'sling, you'll be left limping away towards warmth, with the knowledge that nothing will really slow down a shadowling short of a serious case of death. Shadowlings aren't just mechanically difficult to fight against, they're infuriating to boot.

You're going to pretend that Thralls are infinite resource and Slings can run forever, when a typical vampire can easily get 5000 blood or more by draining the blood they can practically get for free from genetics? To top this all off, Slings take heavy damage from common light sources like flares that can't be veiled, every emergency toolkit has these, candles in the chapel and library and random spawns throughout maint will kill a Sling faster than the chapel can kill a low level vamp.

[EvadableMoxie]

Balance doesn't matter.

I know, crazy, right? Give me 5 minutes of your time and I'll prove it to you. 

Nuke Ops is not a balanced game mode. A well executed Blitz is basically impossible for the crew to counter.  Blitzes fail only because the nukies make mistakes, not due to the actions of the crew.   And yet... Nukies don't always blitz.  A lot of the time they declare war, even though war isn't the optimal path to victory and they know it. Sometimes they even stealth or do gimmicks, even though, again, doing so is not optimal.  Ideally, we'd balance the game so that there isn't one optimal path, but that's a whole different discussion. The take away is this:

When you give players multiple viable paths to victory, they will not always choose the optimal one. 

Which means that balance isn't really all THAT important.  It's better to have balance than not have balance, but imbalanced game modes can work because we have players who are not just interested in greentext.

So what does this have to do with shadowlings?

The main problem with shadowlings isn't that the mode is imbalanced (although it is), it's that there is only one path to victory.  There are no alternative viable paths to victory that are sub-optimal for the shadowlings to take. As a shadowling, you do the same. thing. every. round.  You know the meme rounds where operatives decide to try to pose as NAD inspectors? There is no shadowling equivalent to that. Shadowlings can't do that type of stuff.  The mechanics force them to bulldoze towards greentext, the exact behavior that is shunned by the community in every other type of antag. No one blames shadowlings for doing it because they have no choice but to do it. 

So even if things were balanced it would be a bad game mode. Sure, it would be better if it was more balanced, and balancing it isn't a bad thing, but it's not the thing that is going to ever fix the issues with the round. What shadowlings need is to be able to actually use different tactics like other antags can, rather than being forced into the same thing over and over.  If shadowlings had many viable paths to victory, they wouldn't need to always pick the optimal one.  The best part is we don't even really need to worry about balancing those paths to make them equally strong as the way things shadowlings do things now. Even if the other paths were objectively non-optimal, players would still choose to use them. 

[Norwest]

1 hour ago, davidchan said:

You're going to pretend that Thralls are infinite resource and Slings can run forever, when a typical vampire can easily get 5000 blood or more by draining the blood they can practically get for free from genetics? To top this all off, Slings take heavy damage from common light sources like flares that can't be veiled, every emergency toolkit has these, candles in the chapel and library and random spawns throughout maint will kill a Sling faster than the chapel can kill a low level vamp.

You're right that vamps can just cheeseball their way to victory with easy sources of blood, and I agree that I'd like to see that corrected. The /tg/ planned vampire implementation had a good division between "clean" and "dirty" blood, where only sucking actual players gave vampires points to spend; I'd like to see something similar implemented here. As @EvadableMoxiepoints out, though, the gameplay mechanics don't require vampires to be powergamey shits in the same way they do for shadowlings. And indeed, vampires who use monkeys as a blood source get roundly mocked in deadchat precisely because they're powergaming like a mofo.

Ultimately, I think Moxie put it best: it's not just that the gamemode is so unbalanced, it's that it's predictable and boring. I've got my issues with the unbalanced issues of vampires, but I've had plenty of vampires ask me politely to grab some of my blood, versus the ones who cablecuffed me in Maint and took a sip or two, or the ones who just drained me dry. And thematically, the vampire win-mode can be either 'tear a bloody path through Sec and force a Red/Gamma ERT,' a stealthy route to greentext, or a couple different variations in between. Shadowling...doesn't.

[Vivalas]

Liking this discussion, Norwest and Moxie have great points.

Are there any objections to removing the round-end trigger when all slings die? Unlike nuke and wizard which involve forcing or requiring complete disregard of regulations (e.g. giving guns to everyone) to beat the antags, sling generally only causes about as much chaos as a typical stealth antag.

[Kyet]

Monkeys aren't even the cheesiest source of blood for vampires.

A vamp who goes into some of the gateway missions (e.g: hotel) can use non-reactive NPCs (e.g: hotel guards) as an infinite blood supply.

Walk in there, drain them all, come out as a fully-powered vamp without ever having to kill a player on the station, or even steal anything. Plus, no on-station evidence for sec to discover.

You don't even have to worry about running out of them. In some places (e.g: hotel guard room) they respawn infinitely. All the blood you could ever ask for.

Edited April 27, 2018 by tzo

[Bxil]

18 hours ago, EvadableMoxie said:

Balance doesn't matter.

This. Person. Understands... this game more than half of the people here.

What we truly need about shadowlings is to buff mindshields. It has been said a million times already and... You know what, I am going to make a PR in a moment.

EDIT: https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/8937

Edited April 27, 2018 by Bxil

[Vivalas]

I would prefer we handle shadowling rebalance in one singular PR with a mixture of tweaks most people can agree with, not a bunch of singular nerf PRs that give people the impression of trying to run shadowling completely into the ground.

[The Respected Man]

Lots of people trying to "balance" the gamemode so slings don't win all the time. That's great and all but this does not resolve my first post on this thread, that the gamemode is boring, almost changeling tier boring. Balance, no balance, i don't care, it's still a pretty flawed and boring gamemode that needs a bit of rework. 

I won't deny that it's fun to be a shadowling though, ascending and blowing up people you don't like is always fun. But what about security? It gets old real fast going into maint and tasing the nearest gas mask toting grey shirt and dragging them into medbay ad infinitum. And the shadowlings don't fight us, they just mist away upon seeing a group of sec so it's just hunting gas masks all round till the captain calls evac to spare us this misery. 

Space station 13 is fun because every round is different, when it comes to shadowlings it doesn't feel that way.  When i am in a shadowling round i'm in maintenance tasing anyone with a gas mask and a stun prod out. The shadowlings also suffer from this, they suffer from a linear strategy, work with your fellow slings, don't let them die, thrall thrall thrall. But they don't mind how boringly linear this is because they become a god and blow up people they don't like and stuff. 

I agree with an earlier suggestion that shadowlings be individuals seperate from other shadowlings on the grounds there must only be one god. Shadowlings can CHOOSE to kill the other shadowlings in order to loosen up competition or CHOOSE to team up against a robust security team only to betray eachother once they are dealt with and so on. This makes rounds more unique and actually interesting. 

Edited April 28, 2018 by The Respected Man

[ZN23X]

Which game modes are fun and which aren't is entirely subjective. I can find different people who either enjoy and hate every single game mode who can give elaborate arguements for both sides.

That's why we have a variety of game modes. 

Edited April 28, 2018 by ZN23X

[Coldflame]

2 hours ago, ZN23X said:

Which game modes are fun and which aren't is entirely subjective. I can find different people who either enjoy and hate every single game mode who can give elaborate arguements for both sides.

That's why we have a variety of game modes. 

gamemodes can be objectively observed as more or less mechanically dynamic and variant which as a rule of thumb correlates to enjoyment in an emergent multiplayer game 

[Vivalas]

Bumping this, since absolutely nothing has changed in regards to shadowling balance so far, as much as I can tell, and I just had the displeasure of playing through another shadowling round.

Now, I enjoyed it more than usual because security went murderbone earlier, which made it more interesting and heightened the chances of actually beating the slings, given that dethralling people is still a huge pain (and I think still a major headache even with the current PR). I don't want to sound knee-jerky but according to the community poll there are significant concerns about shadowling balance and we haven't taken any steps yet.

I think from what I gathered in this thread the following would be acceptable:

1. Causing damage to shadowlings to be propagated among thralls. As mentioned earlier this allows attrition to help slow down the slings.

2. Making thralling permanent. Conversion gamemodes can be ass because of the fact that people get attached to their sides and get salty when they get converted. Now, this could mostly be chalked off as a player issue, and I'll admit sometimes when I'm thralled I'll just go sit in the bar and drink until the round ends, but I think the gamemode would be improved if deconversion was just removed completely. This accomplishes: 1) Giving security a fighting chance. Usually they only start murderboning when it is too late. 2) Prevents people from getting rethralled or people running into maint to begin with because they want to be thralled. If it turns out the slings are bad / incompetent, there is no going back, which adds a small amount of personal investment.

 

Does anyone else have any ideas to add? Can we reach any sort of consensus about what will make this gamemode better? I'm going to keep pushing for action here because, again, I love paradise and all other antags / gamemodes, but everytime a sling round comes up I just want to cryo, and I think there might be shared resentment. If consensus can't be reached I think a better course of action is to remove the gamemode from rotation entirely for a complete rework.