Heretic Buff: More Stealth or More Power? [Poll]

General
1

Currently, heretics are insanely weak for what their objectives tell them to do. They are designed as a stealth antag, yet to get points they have to stand in public and reveal an influence that instantly gives them away to the entire crew. They also have an objective to sacrifice 6 people (reminder: they are designed as a stealth antag), all of which they have to track down, kill, and drag back to a rune using extremely limited and weak tools.

So this poll is about what a heretic buff should be more focused on: stealth or power?

Stealth would entail removing the ability for non-heretics to see pierced realities, lowering the number of sacrifices needed for a greentext, and other suggested changes. This would back up the intended design of the antag, but may make it too easy if handled poorly.

Power would entail more combat abilities in the tech tree, a more powerful melee, possibly some ranged weaponry, and other suggestions. This would make it a lot more thrilling, and require you to be good at combat.

What part of heretics should be buffed?
  • Stealth
  • Power
  • Other (say suggestion in replies)

0 voters

2

heretic seems like an antag type designed to be challenging for experienced players

2 Likes
3

I’d like to see it go in the direction of being a lite-Wizard. Spells are fun, but a Wizard’s abilities pool allows a single one of them to curbstomp the station with ease.

A Heretic should have a greater pool of combat skills to choose from and earlier, but their current endgame abilities are still OP as hell so maybe not too early. Perhaps just making the two blade upgrades be a passive upgrade when you get to a certain number of sacrifices rather than it be something you have to spend points on.

2 Likes
4

Heretics are a suicide antag, no?
They don’t need to be alive to accomplish their objectives.

5

First of all, canaries are dumb, no matter what way you slice it. But yes a stealth overhaul is very needed.

6

there should be a way for heretics to colab and do cool stuff

7

its pretty easy to find fellow heretics. Just hide near unclaimed pierced realities lol

8

stealth disappears with game knowledge, power will always be power

9

posting this in-case some people arent aware. It’s a pretty significant rework

1 Like
10

Oct 27, 2020

Hard to believe that was 5 years ago already.

11

Heretics aren’t a stealth antagonist

You don’t need to be alive to complete your objective. You get access to robust healing via eldritch water that will allow you to survive most fights with ease.

The heretic armour you can get is better than nukie elite hardsuit, it blocks 50% of all incoming damage. This means you can survive double the disabler shots and take 8 shotgun shells to kill.

Your objective is to kill your sacrifice targets, not kidnap them. Get good. Heretics can easily kill the whole station, trust me.

4 Likes
12

cat telling everyone to stop being unrobust babies who want a free win for not antagonizing :flushed:

Ngl tho, you aren’t wrong. Basically all of their abilities are the opposite of stealth.

Since the OP mentioned the “intent” a couple of times, I checked the original PR and it doesn’t remotely suggest that it’s intended as a stealth antag either.

2 Likes
13

This has got me curious, is there any stats on how often different flavors of antag green text or not?

14

I don’t think so, it’d be a bad metric to have too much weight behind too

15

yeah, I thought that I had seen people talk about heretics as a stealth antag somewhere. I swore I saw it on the wiki/pr, I was wrong. velvet is right here

16

It’s not a stealthty antag, it’s just incredibly meticulous. Meticulous does not have to mean stealthy.

1 Like
17

what velvet said

18

be flesh… raise ghoul army… win.

19

So basically, tldr: git gud

20

Problem is, you’re independent as a heretic. A lone nuke-op has so many more options for power and stealth and is much more difficult to take down (at least prior to ascension). For a stun-based combat system the heretic stun is pathetic too; who cares if you block half of incoming damage if you can still be disabled/baton’d and killed without any effort afterwards like essentially every other antagonist.

A cult with multiple members is also significantly stronger; there’s a reason you see many more cult victories than heretic wins.

The only people I’ve seen that have pulled off loud heretics are people that use other departments to make themselves really strong (xeno/science/chemistry/genetics), at which point you’re less of a heretic and more of your average powergamer with a license to kill.

Edit: I personally would like to see the path of void ported from tg/, it is another option for stealth.

1 Like