The last month or so Ive had a streak of heretic round rolls, both as the heretic and as HoS, and Ive noticed that its not really enjoyable for either side in a large majority of cases. Most of the time as heretic you’re trying to game the other party and or rush knowledge to have a chance at ascending, or as sec try and find the heretic as fast as possible, often disregarding RP, so youll have a chance to stop them before they become a murderbone machine.
Both of these I find to be very anti-Bee and anti-RP.
To start with, heretic is a very luck and time based antag. To progress as a heretic you need to unlock rituals to get your gamer gear, in which turn you need knowledge get the rituals. The main two ways of getting knowledge are sacrificing people and absorbing influences, both having pretty major problems of their own.
Sacrificing and getting sacrificed is almost never enjoyable, from the heretics perspective its often a gamble if you get easy targets or if you get a chemist who will refuse to leave their bastion of autism for any reason, a miner who has better gamer gear than youll ever have, john metasuspicious and an explorer that was a total of 2 minutes on the station the whole round. From the sacrificee’s perspective it isnt much better, you’re lucky to have a heretic trick you into a good gimmick, but most of the cases youll get a green hand down your throat and a sickel up your ass, then you are transported to do an extremely annoying minigame, before you are returned to the station 5 minutes later to some random unused room with cuffs on. Not to mention your pda exploding and losing your id if its a rust heretic.
I do not think sacrificing should be removed, its a core part of heretics after all, instead to deal the ability to reroll targets should be able to be researched way earlier to deal with the unlucky starting rolls. Though, the heretic hand minigame should be replaced with something shorter and something less infuriating, i do not know what, but anything other than what we currently have.
Influences are also a good sign of a bad round. Seeing one within 60 seconds of the round is going to give you the meta knowledge that theres an heretic onboard, of course as a crew member you dont know this and have to happily ignore the fact that a part of reality has broken apart in the corner of your eye. This has even gotten more extreme as bee has developed a culture of playing dumb with antags (which is not a bad thing imo), so absorbing it in public often doesn’t get you in any trubbel.
Now as a heretic influences often make or break your round, if you can get two or three of them within 20 minutes you’re pretty set for the rest of the round, this you often see heretics leaving their posts to comb the station for them, something I dont really find to be a staple of RP. If there are other heretics in the round (as it often is) you are now also competing for them, since only one heretic can get them at a time.
All of this together with an avg round being 1:45 hours long means that most heretics have to speedrun to achieve ascension, on top of this getting caught earlier than 30-45 minutes into the game will seriously fuck up a heretics round, since you will and loose all your and most likely face a 18 minute sentence (Dangerous contraband + resisting arrest) that will further promote a anti-RP and speedrunning playstyle.
Now heretics problems doesn’t stop there, one of the biggest problems with heretic is their four paths, since they are only as strong as what grasp and what ascension they have, since you can easily cross paths once you’ve selected one path.
For me this seems like a bug, but since no one has ever pointed it out and its like this on every other server with heretic it feels just like an odd choice. Making heretics stick to their paths abilitets would greatly decrease the amount of gamer heretics and encourage people to pick something else than rust.
Talking about rust, its the go to path for all gamers, because of its strong grasp. Being able to destroy any type of wall in just two hits is extremely powerful and together with their other heretic path abilities its just stupid.
I would also quickly want to mention ash, the path that is focused around fire not making you fireproof until ascension nor has any way to fireproof your clothing, which just ends up with you getting your stuff burnt off. I would replace the mask of madness (because its expensive to make and doesnt really provide anything useful) with some fireproof spell, then switch places with it and the ashen walk.
Finally, heretic is a stupid hard antag to play, it took me several rounds as a heretic until i managed to ascend for the first time. Bee being a new player friendly server i think its key that we make the heretic as straight forward as possible with what abilities you can unlock, instead of having to have the wiki open to see what you need to research for a specific thing.
The best way to go about this would be to have a focus tree style thing (much like the ones in h*i4), so you can actually see what you are about to unlock.
this became way longer than intended and i was slightly drunk writing most of this so it probably doesnt have that great cohesion, idk, i dont wanna read through it again
