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# System prepended metadata

title: 'Heretic 2: The Subtitle'

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## Abstract
This is a pitch to rework the Heretic antagonist in an attempt to make it more harmonious with dynamic and modern tgstation round design.
At it's inception the Heretic antagonist was intentionally designed to have a high skill floor and cinematic payoff as a reward for "elite players" who were capable of leveraging the game mechanics effectively in the face of opposition. Unfortunately this "hard to learn, hard to master, big payoff" design does not really gel very well with the way that tgstation gameplay actually functions from either the player's side or the crew who are opposing them.

## Goals

- Lower the skill floor for Heretics, while also lowering the power ceiling.
  * At present a roundstart Heretic is something of a pushover compared to other "main" antagonists like Traitor or especially Changeling. 
  * The present power curve of Heretics has a very odd effect where you spend a significant period of the round without really gaining many of the most fun or interesting antagonist tools, then suddenly having way too many to actually use once you breach a certain level of power.
  * We should even this out so that you start higher, end lower, and progress at a somewhat more linear pace between the two. 

- Reduce the number of abilities that Heretics have access to by changing the "cross-path" system.
  - It is possible under the current system to gain two full rows of action buttons that are entirely made up of Heretic spells. This is intensely impractical for the player even now that we have added action button hotkeys, and also for other players who cannot possibly be expected to keep track of what any individual is capable of.
  - We should try to make sure a single heretic isn't accumulating more than a single bar of active abilities.

- Make it easier to tell what any individual Heretic might be capable of.
  - Reducing "cross-pathing" should re-emphasise your path-specific abilities. Reducing the number of abilities per path should make it easier to remember what each path actually does.

- Increase the versatility of individual Heretics.
  - Currently Heretic abilities are almost exclusively composed of ways to kill people faster or be better at fighting.
  - Abilities which *aren't* related to killing people faster tend to be centralised around one or two paths, which can result in an odd effect if that is the only path you take abilities from.
  - It's fine to have a goal (sacrificing people to the dark gods), but it would be nice if it was a little easier to exercise your antagonism to tell a different story if you wanted. As long as it's still one that involves someone making sacrifices in exchange for dark knowledge.
  - This still needs to be balanced with the idea that you should be able to have some reasonable idea of what any individual is capable of.

- Make expanding Heretic less of a nightmare.
  - Heretic path PRs are horrible to review because they need to contain a minimum of something like 13 unique abilities, often with new bespoke behaviour, components, and mobs.
  - It should be possible to add things to Heretic without creating a 16,000 line Pull Request which nobody wants to review.
  - The process is also overcomplicated with a significant number of conventions to remember. Paths should be simpler both to aid player understanding and developer understanding.
  - Preferably it should be possible to add some small things without needing to make an entire new Path at all. We already probably have enough of those.

- Loosen a few of the Cult Sim references
  - This one isn't a main goal but if I'm touching all the code it'd be nice to try and haul the antagonist a little further away from largely being composed of concepts copied and pasted from a different video game.
  - The effect of the current state on development has lead to an assumption that you are *supposed* to only add things from cultist simulator, which absolutely is not the case.

## Non-Goals

- Removing progression.
  * I do think we are maybe guilty of sticking progression mechanics on too many things where they don't belong, but the process of advancing along a path is clearly a core part of the Heretic fantasy.

- Make Heretic into "Magic Traitor".
  * Traitors, Changelings, and Wizards (even Spies to an extent) are all antagonists which operate with a "shop" of abilities they browse from.
  * A solution we choose should maintain a different feel to this antagonist by avoiding this route, picking some kind of "specialisation" and advancing down a themed route is core the the fantasy.

- Co-operative Heretics.
  * We do not want it to be easier for Heretics to cooperate with other Heretics, ideally they should still be competing over limited resources.
  * We also don't want it to be easy for Heretics to present as friendly, the default assumption should be that they are murderous lunatics. At present you can get quite a lot of player power without killing anyone- I want to change that.
  * Currently, as far as I am aware, multiple heretics aren't even enabled in config. I am hoping that changes to their late-stage power may allow this to be enabled again as I find the competitive element compelling.

- Make Heretics significantly stronger or weaker on average.
  - The ideal change here is that a heretic at minute 0 of a round is stronger than at present, and one at minute 90 is weaker than one at present, but the average does not shift significantly.
  - Heretics should be significantly threatening to lone players early on, and small groups of players later on (especially if accompanied by minions).

- Make Ascending more common.
  - Ascension is supposed to be a rare event. As written above, it was originally intended to be the mark of a pro amongst pros in terms of gaming skill. I... don't think that is a good idea, but I also don't want ascending to be a common sight.
  - But also, see below.

## Ascension

This gets its own heading because it will be controversial: I don't like Ascension and ideally I don't want it to exist in the same form as it does now.
The concept of some kind of capstone to work towards is core to the antagonist fantasy and there will likely need to be some kind of final reward for completing all of your provided tasks and reaching the end of your progression, but I don't think it should be the one that it currently is.

**TL;DR:** You should definitely get a capstone reward for completing every task but it should probably be less than it is now.

### Why I don't like Ascension

It is the job of a Heretic to end the round, but I think they should do that using the tools they are given over the course of the round rather than by unlocking a final "end the round" button.
The effect of the "end the round" button on player psychology has been negative as players tunnel-vision towards the big prize we dangled in front of them rather than exercising creativity in what they want to do in a round, and the crew become conditioned to the fact that they must annihilate every antagonist they meet because if they give them any amount of slack they'll come back as a living storm or station-consuming worm or some such. 

The presence of this all-consuming prize pigeonholes Heretics into largely just trying to do one thing, and doing it as efficiently as possible (because, remember, Heretics were designed to be hard to play as) which often also means "as boringly as possible". We should try to design our game so that the most well-trodden path is also a fun one.

Currently Heretics also don't have the tools to *do* anything other than try to ascend- that's something I intend to address as well as discussed above.

Removing this incentive also means that crew-sided players will be less inclined to have to treat any Heretic they stumble upon 5 minutes into the round as a potential nuclear weapon if left alone. At present, any amount of leniency shown may result in that same player enjoying a one-sided victory lap while everyone else watches 30 minutes later. I hope that removing that outcome leads to more harmonious treatment between opposed players.

### Downsides of Removing Ascension

The thing about Ascension is that it is very cool. It would be a big shame to remove this from the game, however I have come to believe that despite having a large amount of affection for these mechanics they're not actually *good* in the long run.

As I said above, we do still also need to have *something* at the end of your path to denote that you finished it- but this could just be a single more powerful ability rather than one that is quite so all-consuming as the current ones.

However ultimately there is no denying this: the flavour of Heretic is that you are travelling along a path to a destination. If I remove that destination, there's not really anything I can do that will be *as flavourful* as achieving that ultimate reward and I don't have any particularly strong ideas for solutions to this. It is inevitably going to be more underwhelming than present.

## Blade Breaking

This mechanic seems to mostly exist *because* Heretics are so weak initially, as I am aiming to change that I am assuming this mechanic won't be required any more. This potentially means we don't need a crafting limit on the blades either, although I may still keep one for practicality reasons.

## Basic Mechanics (I'm probably going to need to split this into subheadings)

Heretics still start the game with a Living Heart, which they use to track their four sacrifice targets (selected the same way as they are currently).
In the same way as they do currently, the Heretic will at an early point sneak away to draw a circle somewhere in Maintenance and select their Path.

Each Path will *immediately* grant some kind of useful active ability which can be used without a focus, the ability to craft your special knife, an augment to your magical grasp skill, and some other passive ability.

Each time you sacrifice one of your four targets, you will advance one stage along the Path. Resultingly, Paths are now simply composed of four steps (plus the starting step, and one final step, so I guess actually it's six steps).
Each step will award one active spell (usually requiring a focus) and a passive ability or ritual. Ideally, some steps will upgrade previously acquired spells and abilities to add additional effects rather than granting new ones.

Path abilities are still likely to mostly revolve around making you personally more robust, or giving you minions, and share a common theme. Ideally (like current Cosmic heretic) they will share some kind of themed mechanic as well.

Once you have made four sacrifices you will unlock (like now) a path-specific final task which will unlock the path's Capstone skills, the final achievable level of power. Unlike now, we may try and make these somewhat more randomly generated.

Draining Influences will no longer advance your knowledge of your chosen Path- instead Influences will allow you to draft a utility skill (which may be a passive bonus or active ability) from a choice of three, drawn from a larger pool of generic abilities.
These will largely not be combat effects and will contain a lot of Heretic's more circumstantial bonuses (aid with breaking and entering for example), although some will probably take the form of traps and the like.

The exact number of these you can learn is yet to be determined but it will probably be somewhere between three and five. Draining further influences will award "respec points" (with a more spooky name) which you can use to replace your drafted skills with different ones.

Drafting is being used here as it's not something we do in any other antagonist (you could *maybe* argue that Spy sort of does) and I believe that not necessarily being able to get exactly what you want fits the flavour of researching occult knowledge. It also conveniently helps avoid a meta and encourages you to try out new thing- you can't have a meta pick if you don't get to pick from every option at once.

Draining influences should, in addition to awarding you points, make the environment around the place more hospitable to the Heretic in some way (eg: spreading Rust for a Rust Heretic). This has the dual purpose of allowing you to "claim territory" and also give the crew a clue about what kind of enemy they are dealing with.

It would be nice for some of the "generic" Heretic abilities to interact with influences or people you have previously sacrificed in some way (but likely not Path abilities, as they need to be more universally useful).

## Specific Details

I'll write out some examples of what Rust and Flesh or something will look like here, and also what some generic powers could be.

## Other Stuff

Nobody enjoys the current long-term effects of being sacrified (the Heretic Phobia) and we direly need to replace it with something else. Frankly speaking, it is probably important enough that I should do this before I even start work on the larger Heretic rework, so I am not documenting it here as I intend to have that done sooner.

I would also like paths to have their own different "minigames" while escaping from "the mansus" after you are sacrified, but this isn't an essential part of the rework and can come afterwards.