It’s bad enough as a heretic that you need to hide two incredibly conspicuous items to start off that aren’t even slightly metashielded, but now there are giant fuck-off glowing “HEY IT’S HERETICS” flags waving everywhere in the fucking halls.
It’s a stealth antag that gets NO STEALTH.
Not only that but even if all the other heretics try to go stealth and doesn’t touch pierced realities or only gets inobvious ones, it only takes one new or stupid heretic to get one of them in the main halls for the game mode to be revealed.
And sec is on high fuck-off alert every single time a pierced reality is seen, stopping and frisking everyone and checking their jackets and skinsuits and boots. Yeah, sure, it’s metagaming and against the rules but they still fucking do it every time and nothing’s going to stop them from doing it because they need that W as sec even though it’s the easiest possible antag to completely cuck.
I have literally never seen a heretic ascend. Is it even possible?
For the suggestion:
Make pierced realities less visible, less obvious, or only able to be seen way later into the round and not just the instant they’re taken.
I definitely agree that heritics need to be more balanced it’s just that so much meta gaming goes on that if it heritics sec knows and you can get fucked pretty fast
Another thing I just thought of is the book. First phase of heretics is finding realities to pierce, which you can only do with a book in-hand which is obvious. And since you are not the only heretic, you can’t scout the station for them ahead of time and then plan a route… it’s a race. A shitty race with no winners. And again, you need your book on you at all times while you do this, meaning stop and frisk gets you got.
And while I’m on the subject of pierced realities… once they’re obtained, that’s it. They’re done. Other heretics can’t get anything from them. If one heretic races for all the pierced realities and gets all the points but then gets caught because they were being obvious getting the realities, then all the other heretics are just fucked for first phase points. They don’t get any of those points, and they don’t have the benefit of stealth either.
Unironically what is a heretic to do at that point with no pierced realities left and sec on the hunt for heretics? Greytide gamer gear and try to kidnap people to murder them for rituals without even a single spell or weapon to their name? What is the fucking point of being a HERETIC if the only way to win is to greytide gamer gear, robust a sec officer for stun batons, and then murder people with lasers?
easy, simple fix: pierced realities are “kept” separately, and to balance it out you only can use 1/3 or so of all pierced realities (different for each player). about the same amount of realities obtainable for each player, the antags aren’t almost against each other, people aren’t fucked if one dies, because of different pierced reality accesses you can’t have every heretic band together and farm realities, etc etc
or, for an easier fix, if a heretic dies his pierced realities get reclaimable. that way heretics can either claim his points or break him out. ofc, if a heretic directly kills another don’t reclaim, and make it against the rules to do sneaky bullshit to get around it
I agree, the main issue I have with heretics is that they are either really powerful (you got all the pierced realities, good starting job and so on) or you feel like a greytider. The early game race for pierced realities makes the role feel extremely feast or famine.
An overhaul of the pierced reality mechanic would be neat, as well maybe of the items you need to cast certain spells.