Making it so that virus symptoms don't stack (balance)

[farie82]

In the current virology code it works like this:

All virusses are called one another to activate.
When they activate they activate all their symptoms one after another.
All symptoms theirselfs do their thing.

This seems fine and mostly is. Untill you have 3 virusses with toxic filtering in all 3. Then you get situations like I had one shift. You can space walk indefinitely. I spend half my shift in space. No suit no air. All completely fine. I'm not gonna include my virus but it was quite minmaxed and included all beneficial symptoms.

I don't believe this is in anyway balanced and it's easily exploitable. If not abused by an antag it'll make the crew nearly unkillable unless you apply big burts of damage on them. 

My suggestion is to make it so that symptoms only activate once. It'll take the best working contained in the 3 virusses and activates this one. This will reduce the healing potential from say Toxic filtering from maximal 27.7 points of damaged healed per activation to about 11. This is still alot but this is the maximum possible if you min max the virus. This includes adding side effects and making one dedicated virus for toxic healing.

Coding wise this is doable but requires a refacter of the activation code. 

I'd like advise on this matter since I love virology but this is just to much healing. Way to much.

[Sikroth]

I think virology could use a full rework of some sort. The healing it can provide is stupid high, while also requiring a lot of dumb RNG work to get there, and the use of literal powergamey, no-rp symptoms no normal person would want to suffer. It's in a very awkward spot, to be honest. /tg/'s implementation has some good ideas (conditional healing, neutering symptoms) that I particularly enjoy. They also don't use a triple virus system, instead having only one virus effect you and higher resistance viruses overriding lower ones, which would solve these scenarios as well.

That said, that's kinda out of the scope of this post I guess. I believe having the symptoms not stack would be a good idea. It reduces some of the variance from a regular virus to a perfectly crafted minmax triple virus, and gets rid of the OP healing you describe. If you just lower the numbers altogether you'll make non minmaxed viruses suck hard.

Just my opinion though.