Changeling sting in the right hands can create interesting situation and decieve the crew into killing innocent person, which is rare, but is interesting thing to see happen.
Some people use this usualy as a joke, a gimmick where they turn everyone into the same person. Which happens more than the decieving part.
This doesn’t have a real counterplay to this, other than people accepting the sudden identity change, doing preparations beforehand or doing a lot of stuff that require a lot of help from xenobiology and genetics. You can scan yourself in DNA machine to get yourself back to how you were before, but let’s be real. You need to have yout DNA saved before identity change. How many people will and can do that? Chances are you will get stung before you can do that and preparing for this might look weird to some people.
The sting is instant, and identity change is permanent.
It is good ability, but the permanent part is kinda what i think is not cool part about it. If there was at least one way to fix this without needing to do be paranoid rusher to genetics, first time you hear news about lings, then it wouldn’t be so unpleasant. For some it is just a simple round ruiner, where there is no actual preparation. Other antags need to do a lot of preparation or sacrafice some of their TC to do something like this, but changeling can do that instantly and still do it to more people without wasting resources given to them. Besides… needing to do intense genetic operation with DNA machine that some people don’t even know how to make it change someones appearance without having saved your DNA while there are more people with the same issue is a extreme time waster where, changeling can sting you again after you’re done fixing yourself.
TL ; DR
This abililty sucks because it costs nothing for changeling and the fixing is extremley taxing for the victim where changeling can just sting them again to repeat the process. Adding something to make it easier to fix this sting might make this ability less sucky.
If xenobio is actually helping out the crew, go and ask for a rename potion and possibly species-change mutation toxins. Not really a counterpoint, just a suggestion.
Last time I checked this can permanently change your species as well.
I very clearly remember getting turned into a glass golem and two shot at some point in time.
Granted I still almost never see this ability get used in all honesty.
Can’t you clone a plasmaman? Or was this removed eventually.
I know you could’ve cloned earlier. I also remember complains about changelings turning people into plasmamen. The problem is between seeing a plasmaman, them being dead for cloning, and me playing a doctor, I haven’t seen these interactions recently.
I think the grief-iest transformation you can currently do is turning people into shadowpeople. I don’t think golem transformations are possible anymore (thankfully).
Golem transformations aren’t a thing anymore, can’t even transform people into a plasma-man. I think one greif-iest transformation you could do is vampires and I think a few other races you can get access to via prides mirror. Vampires force you to consume blood from living things so you could force the station to rely on xenobio to pump out food. Though I feel like that would be a interesting round as well, the kitchen just turns into a wet market with monkies and other animals to pick out
Sadly it probably wouldn’t play out like this, although it would be really cool to see. Vampires downside isn’t really functional currently. Transforming into your bat form (something you’ll likely do somewhat often) completely resets your blood count so there’s next to no risk of dying from it.
Sadly you can’t also sting transform people into abominations (body with parts of random species) it will always default to the original species, found this the hard way but it’s intended by kapu afaik
It gets the characters base genetic data (Species, Hair style, Colors of things) and applies them to the victim. So if you make someone into this multirace abomination, these limbs and organs are not part of base DNA
Didn’t know that, would’ve saved my ass a few times and that’s bullshit. Though I guess you’d have to code simple mobs to have hunger for it to work. Actually, if simple mobs had to eat would be interesting. Watching goliaths eat a few limbs off a freshly killed miner or having to feed pete
Indeed. It’s almost certainly unintended behavior, I opened a github issue for it but it’s such an irrelevant issue I don’t expect anything to come of it.