Scoundrel Combat fixes

Jaidyn

Now that we have a new coder just wanted to get a plan together for possible fixes in the future. Welcome Zersiax! And @Eukelade told us to not just discuss stuff on discord without putting something here. Here's my ideas refined by @Soza and @Steve:

• Improvised Cover -> Actually puts you in the cover created. Here's the reasoning behind this. Implemented in a cache or cosmpiercer where you have to make your own cover (common PvP scenario). Improvised cover is a 3 second balance, then a 2 second balance to take cover. Your opponent depending on class can remove/take cover faster than a Scoundrel who just made it. 5 seconds is an eternity to get back into cover to be able to use TRIGGER or MULTIBOMB which is a big part of our kit. Just something to consider, thanks!

• Tripwire -> Sets up the bomb on ALL exits in the room

• Tripwire -> hits those not in crew (maybe enemy list?)

• Currently this skill takes a 5 second balance to place a bomb on a single exit in a room. This means that it is removed from viability once battle has begun. If the room has even 2 exits this makes chasing down a fleeing opponent very hard for the Scoundrel because you cannot spare 10 seconds to try and catch them OR try and set anything up. Not to mention that HIDE currently costs 6 seconds. Stickybomb is the best option at 3 seconds but has to be done on a reload. Just something to consider.

• Affliction Encroachment -> pulls the target from cover upon affliction (POINTBLANK the only way to apply it, when you use PB on someone in cover you leave your own cover, hit them, wait for the affliction to pull them from cover (up to 5 sec), take cover again. (Alternative - have PB work while leaving the scoundrel in cover?)  **needs tweaking -- FLAVOR RECOMMENDATION ( P.I.E.C.E. Whip as a skill name and flavor description to replace pointblank. Apparently the community wants this bad *heh*)

• Strangle -> First tick isn’t half damage. 

• 1st tick 1% internal, 2nd, 2% internal, 3rd, 4% internal 4th, 8% internal, etc

• And cannot crash while being strangled

• (NOTE: I believe this to be a bug but the first tick of GUILE STRANGLE is half the damage it should be) Suggestion as follows, first tick isn't half damage. As an alternative have each tick of Strangle do escalating internal system damage (in addition to it's damage) and prevent the target from crashing. 1,1% - 2,2% 3,4% 4,8% etc. Strangle is a trans skill in Guile and I believe was intended to be a FORCEFEED (damage based) alternative. If a target has 75% internal damage you can TRIP, BIND and they will be bound for 8 seconds (this is the forcefeed req btw so we’d be using FF at this point anyway). You can STRANGLE after you get balance back from BIND (3 sec assuming no aff or musc damage) leaving 5 seconds which means that in perfect scenario STRANGLE should only hit a person for 2 ticks before they can interrupt. 3 ticks if they are slow about it. 4 ticks should theoretically be impossible or they can't escape anyway and they should just die. Wetwiring will be curing aff and systems on it's own and many people are currently choosing to WW REGEN upon BIND since it can be done while prone and bound. This way if the person chooses to continue to regenerate instead of interrupting the strangle (scoundrel will lose the internal damage while they regenerate also).

• Kneecap -> Scale to internal damage and not muscular

• Scale to internal damage and not muscular. Here's the reasoning. Scoundrel currently has 0 way to do muscular damage other than pounding a connecting wetwiring system and a little bleed over into muscular. Our kit is setup to damage MIND, SENSORY, and mainly INTERNAL. This just makes sense and is a REALLY easy fix. 

• Shoulderroll -> Allow Shoulderroll to be targeted either to Player OR Prop. Most classes just instantly pull you from cover immediately but others like to stay in cover and it forces a scoundrel to fight OUT of cover just to get them out of cover. This would help the scoundrel to match cover with a target to be able to use Fling/Stickybomb/Facesmash again.

• Bind -> Currently people can wetwiring regenerate -AFTER- being bound and afflicted with entanglement, which means if we miss on forcefeed or don’t use an interrupt on balance they get in a free regeneration. This means we can’t use skills like Strange/Pummel as the enemy will out regen the damage. The fix would be to make the entanglement affliction prevent wetwiring regeneration. 

Soza

The biggest changes that can be made to help scoundrels be more defined are really just things that should already exist.

Scoundrel bullets should smart afflict, Why does rapidfire have a chance of doubling up an affliction? This hurts scoundrel so much.

Encroachment: As said before It really just needs to do a check on delivery if the person is in cover and knock from cover, Encroachment is scoundrels only way to remove someone from cover.

Staggering: Why is this a part of scoundrel kit anymore, It needs replaced with an affliction that will do something, It used to be that scoundrel gun shots were considered arm attacks and would proc the staggering, but as they dont anymore why does scoundrel have this affliction as one of their main afflictions in their internal route, id say push this onto a diffrent ability that will fit thematically, and replace it with a lesser form of Haemotoxin so scoundrel can actually have some health pressure even with their minuscule amounts of damage.

Steve

Bloop. I'm putting down the product of conversation with the most active scoundrels and the best scoundrels historically -- there's been a LOT of talk over the past six months about what to do and how to get scoundrel into a better place. The class is awesome, but, speaking honestly, it's got quite a lot issues, some of which really need to be addressed soon, and most of which should be addressed at some point.

A top priority for pvp should be to get sensory, mind, and internal afflictions on par with muscular, somehow. I'll let someone else, like Soza, explain that.

For scoundrel specifically, here goes my attempt to capture the best ideas we've had, and agreed to them being the best (with ambush being thrown in there as the product of = conversations with past experts):

• Buff encroachment. Encroachment has to pull enemies out of cover right away. It's getting cured too quickly against most opponents who set their WW priorities to afflictions first, meaning we keep landing it, they may not be pushed out of cover for a while. If scoundrel can't control cover with encroachment, a ton of our abilities just don't work. Some of the reasons they don't work are clearly intended, and others... who knows?
  
• Replace staggering in weakening ammo. For whatever reason, staggering is no longer proccing staggering. Perhaps this was a "bug" that was fixed, but scoundrel needs something to replace staggering now that we have no way to interact with staggering. One scoundrel, possibly the most skilled we've seen, called losing this "the biggest scoundrel nerf in history." It really hurts, even if it wasn't utilized often. So! Enter what I've been affectionately calling "baby haemotoxin," a poison that reduces health regeneration and healing by 20%. Note that real haemotoxin is a xenoslayer mob ability and it's pretty handy. Without having that balance advantage that staggering provided, we need something else to help us keep up. Forcing an enemy to heal less efficiently or more often, however you look at it, will do the trick nicely.
• Buff rapidfire. Rapidfire is essential for scoundrel to keep up in pvp, but it really needs to not be able to deal the same affliction twice in one attack. It's OK if the target already has one or both of the afflictions, but it really needs to land separate afflictions every time. With staggering no longer doing its job, there's no possible upshot for rapidfire not checking for what it's shooting. PVE is unaffected by this change, but we gain some consistency and lose a little less ground based on a roll of the dice in pvp.
• QOL change plus buff to shoulderroll. Shoulderroll targets as described above (SHOULDERROLL PLAYER will pick the correct cover) but also afflicts winded upon delivery, like a suckerpunch. Kerpow! Winded is too hard to land, making suckerpunch useless currently. Also, winded is just a handy thing for us.
• Buff ambush. Ambush is fine in pve, though its conditions for use feel inconsistent. More importantly, ambush in pvp is a very, very suboptimal way to actually ambush someone. 2.5s of balance, deals more damage than crackshot, deals same subsystem damage as crackshot per balance time, but has to be the first attack. Compare that with GUN VIGILANT, which attacks without balance for something like crackshot. Other parts of scoundrel's kit -- namely TRIPWIRE and HIDE -- strongly, strongly incentivize setting up and bunkering. There's no reason not to use vigilant instead of ambush for an ambush. Solution: make ambush take 1s of balance to reflect its fast-shooting flavor, plus change the conditions for shooting it so that each mob has its own timer instead of a timer for the scoundrel (or something similar so that you can ambush a new target right away), plus make it so that vigilant does not preclude ambushing by putting into combat with that target. This makes scoundrel pve a little better and definitely more consistent while allowing ambush to have a chance to play in pvp -- and even gives us a little bit more of a chance on chase. We're terrible at chasing enemies.

Two IEDs that really need some love because they've been nerfed to being a waste of time, and we really need them to not suck:

• Pusher
• Sleeper

Gunslinging abilities that underperform:

• Detonate, because we have some issues with hiding bombs and because detonate is random
• Impairing ammo, because encroachment isn't doing its job efficiently enough and because mind afflictions are not strong enough and because we have to resort to damage kill, which isn't really supported all that well in scoundrel's kit
• Disrupting ammo -- sensory's bad
• Arcing, because EM's payoff (discharge or a failed mend) isn't good enough to justify that we lose enough damage that people can set WW priorities to ignore our now miniscule health damage
• Infusing, because we don't have time for that
  
• Amplifying, because same. They're not bad, we just don't have time.
  
• Quickload -- meh
• Backflip, which would be awesome if we could actually use it to get away. The problem is that we backflip and then stand there waiting for balance long enough that our enemies always walk up and keep hitting us, meaning we've wasted a reload. The only thing good about backflip is that it gets us out of quicksand, which is probably unintended.
  
• Gauge. This ability should be awesome, but it's got a 3.5s balance cost. Reducing its balance cost to less than crackshot would get it close to where it needs to be because, right now, the main use of it is to GAUGE, LEAVE COVER and RAPIDFIRE, HAYMAKER to stack afflictions -- assuming you don't roll poorly and get redundant afflictions. It's rare that this is desirable, period, because we want to go for an internal kill, not a health kill, typically.
  
• Cavein. Doesn't do enough damage for an ability that doesn't do anything but damage. It doesn't even set up airstrike.
  
• Bulletguard. It just isn't that practical.
  

Guile abilities that underperform:

• Kneecap, because it could be a PIECE whip. I kid, though a lot of new players would rather see the flavor of a pistol whip. It's OK that kneecap is weak because pointblank is pretty strong, and forcing a scoundrel to use a reload to interrupt should be rewarded. Buffing kneecap would be fine, or changing it to a pistol whip.
• Suckerpunch because it's a reload and it's too hard to get winded on the target
• gritblast because it's a reload and is so much worse than fling -- as an aoe, it underperforms compared to trigger, which has a short cooldown. Trigger isn't a reload. This one's just bad, though I like the flavor (but why is it a reload? our jetpack abilities ought to be a lot cooler, and why isn't backflip a jetpack ability?)
• Pummel. It's awful. You can WW REGEN while being pummeled and be completely fine, even gaining subsystem health while being pummeled.
  
• Incite appears to fail pretty often now, which is lame (someone please speak into this one, I haven't tested it in depth in a while). It's really strong, but there are ways to make it weaker without making it random, such as reducing enemy damage on hit.
• Incite -- cool, but disappointing because it fails and because we don't get the benefit. Why not have something even cooler like, you know, a stim grenade that does ??? for everyone around?
• Strangle UGH. Why do we have two abilities that are both bad and so similar? I'm talking about pummel and strangle. One of these could scale with mind damage, and one of them could scale with sensory or total subsystem damage.
• Illegalmods. Its effect just isn't that useful. Nobody else has to worry about limited flight, but we spend an ability on making our limited flight last longer? It's got a tremendously long duration and I'm not sure the jetpack abilities even use the jetpack power. Not that I'm going to test it; the jetpack abilities other than jetwash are not good.
  
• Dash is redundant with a generic ability in exploration.
• Airstrike, as our max guile ability, has: a 5 min cooldown; is channeled and we can't do anything else during it; doesn't work indoors; and just does damage. If cavein would set it up indoors, that'd be nice. We just don't get to use it often because of indoor restriction. As an odd idea, we could have it do something fancy like generate new debris cover. I'm not positive what this ability needs, but it's not getting used because it's easy to interrupt and doesn't work indoors.
  
• Bugs really could stand to be rolled into one ability. They're limited in usefulness and it stinks to have to use three of our abilities in guile to make them decent.
  

Improvisation abilities that underperform:

• bandoliers. Bandoliers in general. Why do we have to create bombs? Why do we have to track the number? Can't we just be like other classes that simply use their abilities? Using a bandolier means we lose our bombs on class swap (alleviated a lot by construct now doing 50 each, which was a great bandaid, by the way, so thank you). Having a bandolier means we lose both the back item slot and the... whatever bandolier goes into just because we're scoundrels (clothing slots). That said, this isn't as important, frankly.
• Sweep
• Hide. It's slow. Making it faster would be great.
• Tripwire. It's slow. Making it faster, somehow, would be great.
• Disarm. I don't think I've ever disarmed a bomb.
• Stickybomb. It has its uses, but can we talk about not having it be a reload ability or something? The only reason we'd use this over fling, 99.99% of the time, is that encroachment isn't getting someone out of cover and so our fling might not work.
  
• Wiring. With sleeper and pusher not doing much, wiring doesn't ever keep up with shrapnel. Why not have some bombs, I dunno, be better with wiring?
• Timer. I mess around with this occasionally, but it's just a gimmick. Giving up shrapnel is almost always a loss. Almost always, in both pve and pvp.
  
• Blinder, because it's random which of blind or deaf you afflict and because neither of these afflictions is all that good. Afflicting both, every time, may bring blinder in the realm of "I might use that to set up a haymaker," occasionally. Sensory in general is one of the weakest parts of this game.
• Pusher. I'm saying it again here because it's unreliable. The Bushraki artifact works against its forced movement. I think people can follow around with it. There's just a lot wrong with this thing, but the main problem is that it's inconsistent.
• Zapper. Ripper's recent buff means zapper's just a little bit behind in damage against bots. For an EM flavored ripper, that means it's just worse than ripper. Buffing its damage or providing some kind of other benefit against bots that results in a tangible improvement would fix this one. EM in general isn't where it should be, though. The payoff isn't good enough against players.
• Shrieker, because... honestly, I don't remember exactly what this one does. If our mind route had a clearer end goal, such as making pummel or strangle scale with mind damage, then we're in business, probably.
• Choker -- low damage over time, doesn't have any other benefits. Just not good enough, and that its solely damage dealing, and slowly, means it has no place in pvp.
• Distorter. It's a shame that our max level ability just doesn't cut it. I think this is more of a function of mind afflictions, generally, underperforming. Would I rather use this or shrieker in a world with better mind afflictions? I don't know, but they're competing with one another unless their durations are pretty generous.

There's yet more to say, but that's what I wanted to throw down now. I love this class and SM. I wouldn't bother commenting if I didn't believe in the product and the team, so now I'd like to say, again: thanks, all, for making SM.

Jaidyn

• Pusher

Pusher -> QOL improvement for Pusher would be that it doesn't trigger the FOLLOW mechanic and truly throws everyone in the room in random directions. Currently in a piercer/cache if you throw a pusher at a group ONE person will be pushed and all the others will just follow them to their new room.

Also pusher should throw from room on frozen ground. It's a bomb and frozen ground isn't glue. Currently it just triggers movement and people either leave or fall over.

Jaidyn

• Replace staggering in weakening ammo. For whatever reason, staggering is no longer proccing staggering. Perhaps this was a "bug" that was fixed, but scoundrel needs something to replace staggering now that we have no way to interact with staggering. One scoundrel, possibly the most skilled we've seen, called losing this "the biggest scoundrel nerf in history." It really hurts, even if it wasn't utilized often. So! Enter what I've been affectionately calling "baby haemotoxin," a poison that reduces health regeneration and healing by 20%. Note that real haemotoxin is a xenoslayer mob ability and it's pretty handy. Without having that balance advantage that staggering provided, we need something else to help us keep up. Forcing an enemy to heal less efficiently or more often, however you look at it, will do the trick nicely.

Name:           Haemotoxin
Description:    Health regeneration and healing is reduced by 50%.
Type:           Curable affliction
Subsystem:      Internal
Subsys Damage:  100
Stacking:       No
Duration:       10.00s

OPTION 1: That's current form. This is my proposition to replace staggering.

Name:           Haemotoxin
Description:    Health regeneration and healing is reduced by 20%.
Type:           Curable affliction
Subsystem:      Internal
Subsys Damage:  200
Stacking:       No
Duration:       10.00s

 Normal system damage and reduces the healing from 50% to 20%. At least this way someone with the class_heal_5 artifact still looses 4%. And it isn't OP for a normal person. Allows Scoundrel to pressure HP slightly.

OPTION 2: Return the balance knock back effect to staggering through Gunslinging attacks hitting arms.

Soza

As mentioned by Steve, Shrieker and Distorter both currently seem useless with the kit given to scoundrel, though they are great if they gain a new small portion of code that make them uncurable by wet wiring for their duration. Scoundrel is missing a finisher though as we only have one and three main subsystems to do.

Strangle: you place your hands around an enemys neck choking the life out of them. Requirements: enemy be prone, bound for x seconds, have distraction and sluggish.

Small change to bind to have its duration based off either mind or internal whichever is lower at the same rate (currently it doesn't scale to anything except internal)

This would give scoundrel their 2nd kill route, fix a ton of small things and give scoundrels variability.

Jaidyn

• Sleeper

Bleeding should NOT wake up a sleeping target. That doesn't even make sense. IRL bleeding will make you stay asleep because of blood loss. 

Jaidyn

• Gauge. This ability should be awesome, but it's got a 3.5s balance cost. Reducing its balance cost to less than crackshot would get it close to where it needs to be because, right now, the main use of it is to GAUGE, LEAVE COVER and RAPIDFIRE, HAYMAKER to stack afflictions -- assuming you don't roll poorly and get redundant afflictions. It's rare that this is desirable, period, because we want to go for an internal kill, not a health kill, typically..

So my thinking on Gauge would be just to remove it's balance cost altogether. It's a setup ability and has an 8 second cooldown time. So it can't be spammed or abused that way. Taking cover is already 2 seconds, Shoulderroll 3 sec, Improvisedcover 3 sec+2sec to take cover.

Jaidyn

• Incite appears to fail pretty often now, which is lame (someone please speak into this one, I haven't tested it in depth in a while). It's really strong, but there are ways to make it weaker without making it random, such as reducing enemy damage on hit.
• Incite -- cool, but disappointing because it fails and because we don't get the benefit. Why not have something even cooler like, you know, a stim grenade that does ??? for everyone around?

I think this was one of those "oops the skill is kinda OP let's nerf it" moments. Incite really isn't that overpowered. Think about the fact that everyone has access to DIVERT so any of us could aoe and then divert to target. Or if incited just divert back. I think it was fine in its original form of affecting the mobs in the room. IF it needs a fix then sure, make it so that INCITE causes the mobs to only do 1/2 less damage than normal. But then using it is just kinda flavor. *shrug* Thoughts?

Soza

Upon further consideration, a baby haemotoxin is just a worse sickness.

Instead: why not push the (for some reason muscular?) affliction, haemophilia into staggerings place which would give us a usable affliction. Probably also make the subsystem damage 200 to match other afflictions on gunshots.

Ikchor

Currently: Toolkits. Wielded.

Kind of annoying cause if we get hit with myopathy the only options we have are to constantly reequip our weapons until we cure it or to start throwing haymakers and glaring at the person who put the scoundrel unjustifiably in a position we'd rather not be in.

Solution: Toolkits. Worn.

This means we'll be able to throw hands and bombs.

Soza

Haemophilia would probably work better as a 20s duration melter esq type ied, I'm still trying to come up with a good not super strong variant for staggering.

Jaidyn

Solution: Toolkits. Worn..

This is actually the really needed with myopathy. We can quickdraw only our piece or toolkit which means, we lose the ability to interrupt. vs Beast/Fury/Engineer it's a race to run down the systems. This -really- needs to happen.

As an alternative Steve's suggestion of rolling Scoundrel toolkit into bandolier is a really good suggestions as well. Since making ALL toolkit worn would make Engineer's immune to myopathy which is really meh.

Lain

Toolkits probably should be worn rather than wielded, yeah. How the heck do you throw bombs or punch people if your hands are full?

You could make the argument here that Engineers have to wield their toolkits, but, you know, they're actively doing stuff with those in combat, as opposed to just having them as a bomb-component-carrying-case. If it's not possible to separate scoundrel and engineer toolkits, just make bandoliers with stats and get rid of Scoundrel toolkit usage entirely. Problem solved.

Also, Pointblank seems pretty weird from a fluff consideration. You walk up to a guy, shoot him straight in the forehead.... for a very small amount of damage?

It'd make more sense for a pistol whip attack to take the place of Pointblank. (or, if folks really want a bullet to use, do a foot shot or something equally distracting in place of a pistol whip.) Maybe rework Pointblank into an instakill for sensory/mind damage or whatever other stuff would work. It'd be a badass finisher: you casually stroll up to someone you've knocked senseless and delirious, push them to their knees (if they're not already on them), quip something edgy like "Nothin' personnel, kid" and core their brain like a pippalap. Super stylish!

Soza

Speaking with some people on the discord about ways to make sensory more in line with muscular, even with these changes will still probably need a bit more but here's what I could come up with so far.

Blind becomes relevant if it stops people from blocking your movement.

Deaf becomes relevant if it stops all chatter on the mindsim Tells/crew/clans/all

evasion becomes a flat number damage reduction applies to all hits, instead of what it is, and dizzy makes enemy accuracy go down aka your evasion/flat damage reduction go up.  Accuracy will never make you miss a hit, but will decrease the amount of damage you do, everyone starts at 100% accuracy, its reduced by enemy evasion and stacks of dizzy. 

Steve

In addition to Soza's suggestions for blind and deaf, we should definitely replace comms blackout.

And... I propose the newest, hottest, most touch-oriented sensory affliction yet. I call it... Super Duper Itchy.

• New affliction: super duper itchy (name is... negotiable). Channeled abilities, including crash, take longer to complete (preferred) OR interrupting a channeled ability, including a crash, imposes a balance loss on afflicted target. This allows for scoundrel to interrupt more easily, to give scoundrel a balance advantage when fighting enemies that decide to wind up, and to help us keep people in a room when they try to crash out. The way crash works now, you can crash, and if interrupted, crash immediately again and complete the channel before the interrupter regains balance.
  

Also, melter should probably inflict sensory damage since it seems to fall into the sense of touch bucket.

For reference on the sense of touch, here's AFFLICTION LIST SENSORY to show that, for whatever reason, the sense of touch and the sense of smell are neglected.

-------------------------------------< Afflictions: sensory >--------------------------------------

Name System Desc

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Blind Sensory can't LOOK, can't see people entering/leaving

Blurry Vision Sensory -10% inflicted damage

Comm Blackouts Sensory chance to miss comm

Dazed Sensory +10% sensory damage

Deaf Sensory can't hear says

Delirium (L1) Sensory sensory damage L1

Delirium (L2) Sensory sensory damage L2

Delirium (L3) Sensory sensory damage L3

Demented Vision Sensory wrong vision

Dizzy Sensory +10%/stack sensory damage

Double Vision Sensory can mistarget

Echoing Sensory Sensory damage causes echoes

Nearsighted Sensory can't target enemies outside current room

Painspike Sensory sensory damage over time

Sensory Shutdown Sensory sensory damage L4

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lain

Blind and deaf are definitely super weak affs (and they're supposed to be, since I think in other games they're actually defences with their negative components mitigated by another defense). I think they definitely need to be made better or just removed entirely or something, because there is honestly no good reason to apply them except purely to increase a total affs counter of some kind, and, in their current state, they make half of Impairing ammo basically useless.

Comms blackout seems like it'd be a great aff and definitely debilitating as an aff since it could stop you from coordinating effectively in group combat. Much more useful than deafness which only stops you from hearing says. Maybe incorporate some of its characteristics into deafness?

Jaidyn

• Dash is redundant with a generic ability in exploration.

Skirmishing/Exploration should have less effective versions of class skills if it's following the meta. AB SKIRMISHING DASHING has it at 0.5 seconds. If we bump GUILE DASH to .25 that would make it more useful! My idea anyway.