space-wizards
The Wizard
The fabled wizard document.
This still won't unfreeze Wizards, Spells, or Actions but it's to give people a more solid idea of the plans for Wizard and goes over some of the finer details.
Relevant urls - https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/pull/40983 https://forum.spacestation14.com/t/remove-wizard-roundstart-antag/24764
I think teleporting the Wizard to the station if they try to fire an event spell while in space is a bit too strong and disorienting. Just not firing the spell with an explanation popup ("too far from station!") would be sufficient, and leave more agency to the player.
I think teleporting the Wizard to the station if they try to fire an event spell while in space is a bit too strong and disorienting. Just not firing the spell with an explanation popup ("too far from station!") would be sufficient, and leave more agency to the player.
Event spells are being changed to use game rules so it will be doing it every time it fires. So they can't just go off into space after using it.
What prevents wizards from picking the same few meta spells every single round? This seems like something that currently needs an extreme amount of microbalancing that just does not feel viable,
This is the same issue that any antag will have - what prevents any of them from doing exactly that?
Choice. Having choice and good choices are key. That being said, balancing too. This is addressed in the doc
The Wizard being quite strong will be limited by the amount of spells they can buy. The ideal situation is to _avoid_ making "the game winning build" but instead
allowing the creativeness of the player to mix and match different spell & equipment combinations to make something interesting.
That being said, timestop and fireball is a classic combination for a reason, but giving players way more interesting options will help cut down on pure offensive Wizards.
Especially the event spells currently violate the wizard's own design - he is intended to be a wildcard antagonist that has the round go into a completely different direction each time - but if a player picks summon guns/magic it pretty much ends up in a free for all deathmatch without many possibilities for roleplay every single time.
This is also addressed already
- These are spells like Summon Guns or Magic - which turns everyone into a free agent. This was added initially, as a request _by a wizard_, because it would be too much of a net positive for the crew to get a bunch of guns and magic for them to use against the Wizard without any intra-conflict.
- The current implementation turns all crew into a free agent, which has caused some admin headache. Instead of mass-changing crew, the new solutions is that a small group of players will be made into a free agent at a low percent based chance each time the event fires off (and the event will fire off automatically instead of manually).
Which will considerably lower the amount of free agents it makes which in turn reduces admin headache.
A few problems that I would like to see addressed are:
What prevents wizards from picking the same few meta spells every single round? This seems like something that currently needs an extreme amount of microbalancing that just does not feel viable,
Especially the event spells currently violate the wizard's own design - he is intended to be a wildcard antagonist that has the round go into a completely different direction each time - but if a player picks summon guns/magic it pretty much ends up in a free for all deathmatch without many possibilities for roleplay every single time.
Well, there will never not be a reason for someone to pick the same meta options every single time. It simply comes with giving the player full agency of what they can choose. Right now the Wizard has very few options, and because security is always going to respond lethally Wizards have been choosing loadouts that gives high evasion and high lethality since there is a lack of options.
To fix this we must provide alternatives that feel equal to what the 'meta' can achieve. Right now Jaunt and Rod are popular because they provide true invulnerability and high unpredictability. Other spells like force wall that cost 3 Wizcoin can't even come close to providing the amount of protection that they could for how little effort they require.
I mean even giving the option to summon magicarp as a buy option would be some variety at least. They could lean into a summoner archetype if they paired it with a staff or animation.
There's also all of the unimplemented spell glyph traps. Sure they're all lethal in some way, but they're options. If a Wizard wants to power trip and kill the whole station they've been given the tools to do so. But if a Wizard wants to slowly and meticulously turn the whole station slippery via mindswap and slippery slope. There aren't many ways to defend yourself without giving yourself away in a flashy manner. At least with glyphs they're subtle and dangerous as opposed to the very obvious fireball or very obvious rod and its path of destruction.
When fireball and rod destroy, they destroy absolutely. But we don't have many less-lethal options to work with that aren't intimidating. Stuff like the wand of locker is great because it's disruptive enough to get assailants away from you, but not lethal should you want to play a Wizard that doesn't kill.
Now this isn't here or there, but I feel the spell freeze is contributing to this. And a lot of people aren't going to develop things they know will be put on hold, even if it doesn't necessarily mean it won't be merged in the future once the freezes are lifted. But we don't want to take a leap of faith and open the floodgates since it could create technical debt.
