Changes to Salicylic Acid, Oxandrolone, and Pentetic Acid Part 2 #630
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Short description
Changes the healing threshholds, along with the chemicals "Salicylic Acid" and "Oxandrolone" to not heal under said threshhold. Pentetic Acid heals a little less now.
(Salicylic Acid and Oxandrolone's Threshholds bumped up to 30)
(Salicylic Acid and Oxandrolone no longer provide healing under threshhold of 30)
(Pentetic Acid now heals 1 Poison/1 Radiation per 0.25u instead of 2 Poison/2 Radiation per 0.25u)
Why we need to add this
A lot of chemists are still only make Saliclic Acid, Oxandrolone, Pentetic Acid, Artiplates, and Tirimol. So these are to tune up a majority of those chemicals to try and nudge chemists to do more then three to four chemicals before walking out of the chemical lab. Plus, I feel medicines that are to heal all categories should be a bit worse then the specialized ones since they are specialized for a reason.
Also it was a small talk with Lilith that made me want to make these changes, just a bit less drastic then mentioned in game.
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🆑 Kaidanya
This change could be executed in a non-egregious way for sure, and the game would perhaps be better for it, however we need to use the mentality and rationale behind this change and see it to its proper logical conclusion , instead of what the changes show in their current stage.
For one, this change treats all of the chemicals equally, ignoring how they fit into the larger medicinal ecosystem it was meant to incorporate into every round, at first glance Salicylic Acid seems to have been 'nerfed for the better', after all, its main selling point all along was that it would not create the Razorium reagent when mixing with Specialized Brutes, (not using Tier terminology for them as that would imply that these are T3s, and the change would make them undesirable enough that it'd be a misnomer) but after giving more than a cursory glance at its effects, you can see that it is now an INCREDIBLY dangerous chemical at 9 Vital + 3 Nonvital damage per HALF UNIT over the overdose! That is extreme! Chemical weaponry aside (Salicylic acid smoking would reach more dangerous altitudes than Lexorin smoking) could you imagine the disruption to the medbay some poor intern's 15u mishap would cause? That overdose will cause the critical state almost immediately as it causes 108 total damage! I'll sugarcoat it by saying "That's outrageous!"
Moving over to Oxandrolone, it painfully doesn't even pass that cursory glance that could've fooled someone evaluating Salicylic Acid's change, and is the main reason why I think the rationale behind the change wasn't executed faithfully, the change purports to be propping up specialized meds by putting generalized meds in check, but what actual benefit does Oxandrolone even keep over Dermaline, ANOTHER generalized med that heals 2 Heat Shock and Cold WITHOUT the healing stopping below 36 damage, are you going to nerf that too? or did you just not consider it because player culture didn't favor it? Oxandrolone requires Dermaline and Leporazine (the Cold Specialist medicine) to make, it is objectively not worth the effort whereas the other two are just less motivating now.
Pentetic Acid ends up being the least egregious change of the bunch, just by method of elimination, it retains its most important qualities as a toxins disruptor, cleansing chemicals and radiation protection were already the point, after all, even without this change it was less medicinal than Diphenhydramine and Arithrazine (less complex and resource intensive medicines that can be mixed together), but that only raises a question to why the healing was lowered, and it doesn't take much cynicism to assume it wasn't a good one.
All in all this PR had little thought into it beyond the intention, to bend player culture away from convenience.
Experience has taught me and it will teach you too that not rewarding the effort to find a suitable jack of all trades in this game will only cause frustration, if you make "tier ones" more desirable through sheer universality of application, they will be the next thing disinterested chemists do four jugs of and leave, this isn't a numbers issue but a player culture and role/gameplay issue
Thanks for reading, and thanks for trying to improve the game
i have three things to note (with the background that i am an omu chemist and have yet to play much of byrd):
i do share the sentiment that even now, salic and oxandrolone aren't exactly worth producing 2 jugs of due to how limiting they are. i may be new, but oxandrolone and salic are nowhere near the champions they were. kicking oxandrolone and salic this far down doesn't seem to me a very healthy change, as at the given stats, there will very rarely be a time where you can get full use out of oxandrolone or salic. i admit that salic is quite nice as a significant upgrade to bicaridine with none of the razorium from the advanced brutes, and i think the OD as stated above isn't as catastrophic as posed (currently, a salic OD deals about 1.5 vital per second; doubling all the numbers implies that a new salic OD would deal about 3 vital per second, which is still on-par with a genuine poison mind you). i can't really say the same for oxandrolone, as the advanced burn medications (from what i know) do not have adverse effects from mixing. finding a use case for oxandrolone will be somewhat hard if it doesn't heal anything below an increased threshold. i don't think oxandrolone will have a place in the chemfridge with how harsh the changes are compared to simply using the advanced burns, which is somewhat the intention i get from this change, but oxandrolone essentially won't exist as a worthwhile option (like hercuri to an extent)
if it were up to me, i would stop at removing healing below damage threshold. this firmly puts salic and oxan into its own special category of "ONLY major brute/burn" and encourage mixing and output of the advanced brutes/burns as well as the T1s. the additional raising of the threshold and worse OD effects are unnecessary to get the point across that you cannot simply make salic and oxan then leave. hell, i'd even give salic and oxan a buff to their healing rates (+0.5 across the board) to compensate for the lost healing below the threshold. it would make them worthwhile to have around as a solid additive
no real qualms with pentetic acid since it's essentially a 3-in-1 deal of dylo, arith and charcoal, so having slightly worse healing than arith is fair enough i suppose
the descriptions have some grammatical errors in them that i'd like to be resolved, and i feel they're a touch incomplete. here are my suggestions on making them sound nicer:
Salic
Oxan
this is my revision i could suggest:
I honestly completely agree with both of you, and I really didn't want to have to make Salic and Oxan that bad. I thought my first nerf (Which is what you see in game) was fair enough. But I still saw a lot of chemists go "We need General Cure" and make the five T3s and walk away. Lots of cases of 800+u of each of them and calling it a day. I also used to be an Omu chemist, and I've always hated the mindset of needing to only make three chemicals (Which I've had multiple CMOs try to demand me to only stay to those chemicals. Which I find VERY unfun.)
My original take is I wanted it to be mixed with the advanced brutes by the doctors so they wouldn't ONLY use salic. Which is why the OD was dropped to a suitable 10.5u OD to fit with the other advanced brutes. Along with that being done to Oxan. Along with the medicines just be a 'General heal-all" I saw that they should be weaker then the specialized counterpoints, since it was a more general to everything. I only did another nudge to these chemicals because I was talking to Lilith about it and they said "Make it not heal under 50 damage like an anti-tricordazine" Which, I felt was a bit too much originally. Which is why I went for 36. (Every time I put in 35 it came out as 34.98.. Eesh..)
I will admit, I ain't the best at grammar, and with the changelog.. I was trying to be very open with what I was changing unlike some changelogs I've seen that would be like:
So I really did my best to avoid what was above. (Along with my last change which is what is in game at the moment not being in the changelog cause I didn't do "tweak:" but instead explained it outwards..)
I think drop the threshhold to 30, (Around the healing amount of an advanced brute) and maybe keep the overdose damage to 1.5 of each. But I tried to make it a bit more deadly since all of the advanced brutes are quite bad if you overdose them.
All in all, I do appreciate both of your insights, Cause even my chemistry main butt of 2400+ hours alone in chemistry will either overtune / undertune stuff. I just hate seeing a lot of chemists say "We don't have much to do" and then just make three chemicals and that is it. There is a whole catalog of chemicals you can make for medical, and I adore seeing when a lot of people actually interact with the different medicines. I know during all my time of teaching, I try to steer people to make everything they can. But it feels like that sentiment really fell down the drain due to the Goob / Omu mindset with T3s just being straight up better.
@gobbygobbler wrote in #630 (comment):
I will point out that, this was wrong considering 2 per 0.25 units did equate to it healing 40 damage over the long run. Above Diphen and Arith. Which is why I knocked it down to 1 per 0.25 units. So it would be 20. Better then Dylo/Hyro but worse then Diphen/Arith.
I'll lower the tune downs, but I will be keeping the no healing below a threshhold since that would still allow it to be used as a pure heal-all all the time if we don't remove the healing below the threshhold. Along with fixing the grammar issues I had. Once again, thank you both for your opinions without just being "We need Salic/Oxan because its all we make" mindsets.
(Note to self, don't make a long comment when you are exhausted. I made so many mistakes that I'm slowly fixing as I notice them in here.)
i am accepting of the current posed iteration though i personally wished it were slightly stronger
i heard of the reasoning that this is about as good as the general major damage med can be without feeling overtuned, so i have no reason to further disagree with the numbers there
oh heads up you copy pasted the salic description into oxandrolone you gotta fix that
and also the updated changelog should be
it's missing the "and" since the first item was truncated
@Kaidanya In as few words as possible, why is this nerf warranted?
Intent to pull Goob's balancing back a bit, Considering these medications "Generalized" Thats strong but to a certain point where it wears off to change from tiers to "Basics" "Specialized" and "Generalized". Where "Generalized" heals all to a point and is a bit weaker then "Specialized" medication.
(I'm fine with removing these nerfs in this post of Salic/Oxan with some talk with folks but I feel the Pent is fair to make it better then dylo but not better then Diphen as a middle ground due to it healing radiation as well. While Better then Hyro and a bit worse then Arith.)
Good enough for me. We can merge this.