Weapon Reflection Movement Mechanic

[FairlySadPanda]

About the PR

Adds a movement mechanic to deflection.
Standing still gives you your best chance of deflecting a shot. Moving lowers this to 2/3rds. Sprinting to 1/3rd.

As part of this PR I've also touched the numbers of a few swords, shields, etc. and modified some descriptions to make them read better.

Why / Balance

This allows for robust players to express better and provides counterplay to someone finding a goober-strong deflection weapon, giving more design space.

The balance changes currently are as follows:

1. All the sidearm swords (katana, cutlass, captain's sabre) have the same damage. There's no good reason the "ceremonial" blade the captain has doing more damage than a katana.
2. The Captain's Sabre has a 50% reflect chance, starting to drop before walking speed and dropping to 10% when moving beyond 4 speed. This is designed as a high skill-expression weapon, and maybe as a reason for the captain to NOT rush the nukies alone.
3. The Energy Katana has a flat 30% reflect chance well over normal run/walk speed
4. The near-admeme Throngler matches the cap sword for deflection. It's the best melee weapon in the game. Glory to Cargonia.
5. The E-Sword has the 50% reflect chance of the cap sword, but degrades less slowly and less harshly. It's probably a flat buff except when sprinting.
6. The Double E-Sword has a 80% reflect chance, dropping to 65% when sprinting. This primarily affects borgs.

7. Technical details

This is currently relying on direct movement input checks to determine a mob's sprint/move state, which I think is kludgy.

Media

• I have added screenshots/videos to this PR showcasing its changes ingame, or this PR does not require an ingame showcase

Nothing to demonstrate in game due to this being a dice-roll mechanic.

Breaking changes

Changelog
🆑

• tweak: Weapons that deflect shots, like the e-sword, now are most effective at doing so when standing still, with moving or sprinting making the deflection chance worse.

TODOs

• Make the calculation velocity based, test it!
• Try another balance pass
• Add snazzy deflection icon with helpful mouse-over with an exact percentage deflection chance for @metalgearsloth

[FairlySadPanda]

Yes, I know the captain sabre got nerfed recently; the final balance can be decided on after the overall mechanic is tuned.

[deepdarkdepths]

Goated.

[superjj18]

If it's movement based I see no reason why the max cant be significantly more than 30%. Very rarely would someone be standing still in a combat situation for good reason, its a death sentence, so if someone is actively attempting to use the reflect mechanic they should be rewarded for the extreme risk they are assuming. As it stands there is zero reason to stand still as your essentially just going to get absolutely obliterated with or without reflect and made fun of in ghost chat for thinking that using this mechanic was even remotely a good idea compared literally any other option.

What if reflection chance was doubled if your other hand is free as a way of ensuring the player is purposefully trying to play defensive rather than running gun and sword? meaning that standing still with a sword and one hand free would be closer to 60%. Its not a big deal if walking/running has a very weak reflect chance, but standing still should definitely give a sizable boost to defense.

[mirrorcult]

i like this

[superjj18]

also the damage reduction of the swords is absolutely insane as cap's wep was already a pretty weak weapon comparatively, setting the energy dagger(20 damage) at 33% more powerful than the cap's sword and the default energy sword/katana(30 damage) are now twice as powerful.

First off Katanas historically are weak weapons compared to other medieval option so there zero reason why a modern martial sword should be less powerful than a antique(also the energy katana is 30 damage). This change would make a one-handed fireaxe(15 damage) a near idendical weapon than the CAPTAINS SWORD, especially now that captain's sword's defensive capabilities have been nuked.

Cap's sword should be buffed to at very least 20 if not more, the freakin cybersun pen does 15 pierce. Are we honestly about to nerf the captain's sword to nearly the same level of effectiveness as a 1tc item(that also has a bunch of included utilities)? Before that would be fine because it was a defensive weapon that gave 50% reflect, now it's absolute trash.

Honestly either make cap's sabre a primarily defensive weapon again via a very high reflect chance(give it 75% at standing still, 40% at walking, and 20% at running), or give it a serious offensive buff. Everything that has happened to cap's sabre over the last week has been nothing less than insulting and depressing to people who play the role. especially now that cybersun pen would be considered a legitimate upgrade in utility to the captain's sabre. The initial nerf should have never been merged, and was only merged because of a very vocal minority of non-captain players.

[keronshb]

Both reflective shields - Mirror and Energy - have a 95% deflect chance, dropping to 63% then 31%.

There should be some discussion about these. Unlike swords, shields do break. Energy Shields are nukie only and right now and they're reflecting energy only iirc.

Mirror Shield is balanced around that it's fragile to anything that's not laser, they're also reflecting energy only.

Lowering the reflect chance on these while moving needs more discussion or less of a curve.

1. There's no good reason the "ceremonial" blade the captain has doing more damage than a katana.

The captains blade is usually good for high armor pen and delimbing, the latter we don't have yet. And there's only one of them so I don't think having higher damage is that bad.

[XxSWAG-MASTER-OVERLORDxX]

while i think the idea behind this neat, in practice this is going to be hell if you have a bad internet connection, doubly so for point 7 since the falloff for shields is so high

[EpicJoston]

Instead of altering the % chance for reflects, we can instead try to move away from the RNG part entirely and move towards a "charge based reflect systems", that works similarly to FTL's shield system. So your shield or sword or whatever will have 100% reflect chance for the first X shots and then drops to 0% until the reflects recharge. That way reflects can still be defeated by overwhelming firepower, while still retaining their defensive capabilities if the combatant plays smartly.

If we all agree that this idea sucks then altering the % reflect chance based on how fast you're moving would be my next preferred change.

[Hmeister-real]

This makes reflect almost completely useless IMO and hugely nerfs the Syndie melee's. if a sec man begins magdumping you as a syndie, and your holding an e-sword trying to reflect, then standing still is the literally worse option for your survival, and i imagine walking at the secoff or trying to walk away also isn't a great option, and at a certain point running behind cover is the best option and reflect is really good at that, and backpedalling, but with this your encouraged to tank, and thats something a 20tc syndie may struggle with if they don't want to use all of their TC. 👎

[mirrorcult]

main worry is this isnt going to be very intuitive, probably needs examine text + guidebook at least

[K-Dynamic]

main worry is this isnt going to be very intuitive, probably needs examine text + guidebook at least

Probably a status symbol too that shows how effective your deflection based on movement

[FairlySadPanda]

This makes reflect almost completely useless IMO and hugely nerfs the Syndie melee's. if a sec man begins magdumping you as a syndie, and your holding an e-sword trying to reflect, then standing still is the literally worse option for your survival, and i imagine walking at the secoff or trying to walk away also isn't a great option, and at a certain point running behind cover is the best option and reflect is really good at that, and backpedalling, but with this your encouraged to tank, and thats something a 20tc syndie may struggle with if they don't want to use all of their TC. 👎

Hey, totally agree this could be a big nerf!

Please keep in mind the balance numbers are provisional examples (I pretty much wrote them to start the conversation so feedback like this would bubble up)

The idea is to encourage dynamic defense. If you're running away at max speed, you trade effective HP for getting out of dodge quickly. It isn't to make reflect useless when moving, which is why I've enabled to set the specific falloff per movement type. However, I'll probably refactor that.

The next implementation will be:

A deflector has a max velocity you can be moving at to be completely effective.
The deflector will then degrade as velocity increases to a specific min effectiveness value at a specific velocity.

The min effectiveness should IMO still be meaningful, and the max should be high. You're totally right that standing still in defense is really bad in most situations.

I'd really love to give most deflection weapons a high base chance. So that you can be a brave Jedi standing your ground, or Darth Maul slowly advancing whilst deflecting shots. But also so that when you choose to flee, that does mean you risk being hit.

That's push-and-pull: making decisions in tense situations that you can talk about after the game. That's the fun of SS14.

[keronshb]

I'd really love to give most deflection weapons a high base chance. So that you can be a brave Jedi standing your ground, or Darth Maul slowly advancing whilst deflecting shots. But also so that when you choose to flee, that does mean you risk being hit.

I'd prefer a direction based system for shields at least, or something that could be implemented in both scenarios. Where if a player is facing west with their shield and they're being shot at from that direction, then the reflect chance works, but if they're not it won't. But that may be harder to implement.

Movement is extremely important in SS13/SS14 combat, so standing still usually means you're dead in the water.

[ARMOKS]

Wanted to run something by you to potentially be added in this. I think it’s an amazing change and mechanic but was hoping two or three tweaks could happen. If this is gonna apply the captains saber can probably be brought back up to 50% reflect so the captain still does have the best Defence utility (albeit more skill based) but the other thing I wanted to bring up is esword eshield.

Imo esword should have 0 kinetic reflect and 95% energy weapon reflect dropping down with the various move states like you said, but eshield should be unaffected by the move states, maintaining it’s position as a strong defensive choice awhile still remaining viable with an esword change. Quite a few people on the discord agreed the sword should be buffed and I think this might be a good way to go about it. Was curious what you thought?

[metalgearsloth]

Having 0 telegraphing of ingame mechanics and making them hidden is pretty bad for discoverability.

[FairlySadPanda]

Having 0 telegraphing of ingame mechanics and making them hidden is pretty bad for discoverability.

That's fair, but deflection is completely hidden as-is in game, as is slip speed and other important combat variables.

Would love to add an icon to indicate deflection chance and then a slider graphic on it for degradation!

[FairlySadPanda]

@deathride58 BEHOLD, velocity-based deflect chance code. (I also updated so hitscan shots also works with the new system).

[deathride58]

Yo that's p sick 👀

[Rainbeon]

The jump from 75% to 90% reflect for the Double Energy Sword is a very, very deceptively large change. That's 4x expected EHP being buffed to 10x expected EHP while also reflecting damage, that is maybe a bit too nuts for Syndie Borgs and I'd suggest bumping it down a bit (80-85%?). 90% also puts the expected time/effort to kill a Syndie borg with projectiles on par with Death Squad, with random variance causing it to be potentially higher (or lower)

[FairlySadPanda]

Mmm, true. Forgot about how higher percentages affect sliding scales. I am gonna bump them down.

[keronshb]

Would still like to see this removed for shields until we can figure out better balancing or a different mechanic for them. This is due to them being destructible, requires a purchase, or have specific values. They would require discussion on price changes, and potentially value changes as well.

For example the mirror shield is extremely frail and doesn't reflect bullets. Also it's something that's admin only atm but it will be made (temporarily) available for Wizards, if not then they'll be given to their actual cult when that time comes around.

Energy shield is a different beast since there's some balance around TC (even considering making it more expensive so it has 100% reflect chance) and how Nukie-Crew interaction is approached - Nukies having an extreme disadvantage with firelocks + lasers from the crew. So losing some of that reflect chance from the shield while moving could considerably handicap them.

[EpicJoston]

keronshb's comment is one of the reasons I like my charge reflect idea more than simply keeping % reflect chances, its easier to make shields better defensive items than swords without making swords useless for it.

I'd really like to move away from % reflect chance altogether since it has that possibility for a weapon/shield with a low reflect chance to just high roll and earn many reflects in a row and completely carry a firefight for the weilder. That can never happen with a charge based system, and managing the reflects, as an attacker or defender, will take some effort and increase the skill ceiling for combat.

Again, if we're intent on keeping % chance, I do agree that shields should be exempt from the penaltys altogether and just keep them as is for now. I don't think any shield outside of the disgustingly strong e-shield is problematic.

[FairlySadPanda]

Alerts don't have the ability to show dynamic data at the moment (I think?) so the best I could do would be to show a rough approximation of the deflection chance as severity :/

Think this would be fine for a V1 tho @metalgearsloth

Just need a sprite

[notquitehadouken]

Alerts don't have the ability to show dynamic data at the moment (I think?) so the best I could do would be to show a rough approximation of the deflection chance as severity :/

abuse the cooldown ui

[mirrorcult]

Alerts don't have the ability to show dynamic data at the moment (I think?)

good in concept imo, also they should now after changes from emo, check the revenant energy alert

[github-actions]

RSI Diff Bot; head commit 0eb6861 merging into 877ccd6
This PR makes changes to 1 or more RSIs. Here is a summary of all changes:

Resources/Textures/Interface/Alerts/deflecting.rsi

State	Old	New	Status
deflecting0			Added

[FairlySadPanda]

After a review, this is the best I can work with based on current alert code. The alert text is fixed, so I explored how to animate the icon to reflect information.

PROBLEM UNO
Reflection is type-based. A number would only be true for the types that can be reflected.
PROBLEM DOS
You can have more than one thing reflecting you on you at any time. If you hold an e-sword and a shield, BOTH attempt to deflect the shot. We can't encapsulate that data in the alert system as-is.
PROBLEM TRES
The alert system updates per-render tick and this makes it hard to envision how an "accurate" reflection number could be calculated per-frame - it would involve checking every item inside someone's inventory for a reflect component and asserting the state of the mob in case they're stunned, down, weightless etc.

[FairlySadPanda]

Can I have clear to-dos on this please

mrrrrp meow~ (review has been satisfied)