Viral damage broken?

no. he will panic and recover. recovered will will get deducted, but virus will get weaker by same amount. so he should be fine after 3-4 turns of panicking…

It gets reduced by 1 per turn. So he would have to protect him for almost 30 turns at the current rate.

Actually no. Virus is reduced by 1 each turn (as the instructions says). I’m currently waiting to get to 0. I’m on 9. This needs to be fixed or at least act like acid … 2-3 turns.

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I agree with this. Draining Will Points is fine, but it shouldn’t last for the rest of the fight. This is purely from a having-fun-while-playing perspective, PP is a game after all, not a novel. Sure, the Pandoravirus eventually turns humans into mindless zombies and then mutates them into unrecognizable monstrosities. All this just doesn’t happen on the timescale of a single mission. In addition, this is a different strain of the virus, purposefully created for combat use.

I would prefer something like this, for example:

  • When the amount of Virus Points exceeds the character’s Willpower stat (not the current Will Points), the character’s Will Points are reduced to 0 and they panic.
  • The character is now afflicted with the virus until the mission is over. Causes reduced movement, reduced accuracy, or whatever. Just give me control of the soldier again.
  • When attacking afflicted targets with a Viral weapon, convert every Virus Point to +6 additional damage (instead of making the target panic repeatedly).

With current weapon stats, Redeemer assault rifle would look like this:

  • Before affliction: 3 x 20 Damage / 10 Piercing / 5 Virus
  • After affliction: 3x 50 Damage / 10 Piercing

This looks quite okay. Relatively easy to cause affliction with 0-15 Virus Points per 2AP attack. Maximum damage doesn’t look overpowered compared to assault rifles. Redeemer needs an afflicted target to deal 150 damage, assault rifles need shredded armor for that 180 damage.

Subjugator sniper rifle (currently 50 Damage / 20 Piercing / 10 Virus) could probably use a slight tweak. Only 10 Virus Points for 3 AP is quite slow (and Priests don’t get Quick Aim). I would probably bump it up a bit:

  • Before affliction: 50 Damage / 20 Piercing / 15 Virus
  • After affliction: 140 Damage / 20 Piercing

There’s also the Biochemist random skill, though. What would this mean for other weapons with that skill? Doesn’t actually sound too bad, 1 Virus Point per bullet means that they’re capable of eventually causing affliction, but not nearly as well as the actual Viral weapons. Once afflicted, that 1 Virus Point means +6 damage per bullet. How do explosives work, 1 Virus per body part? I guess that’s okay as well.

All numbers are for demonstration purposes and should be tested and balanced. But something like this would be more interesting than almost-permanently losing control of characters when shot with Virus damage.

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Well, had he been hit with 2 full bursts of another weapon he would probably be dead, and the Redeemer is the least accurate of all ARs.

Of course it’s frustrating waiting for +10 turns (how long it will take to recover depends on will - you will recover control once virus reduces to <0.5Willpower, and you can speed that up by timing it with a white WP pickup by a teammate), but it’s a bit of a freak happening to receive 30 virus damage in one go.

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I got 30 virus damage from 2 shots as well during an attack in a lair. Pandoran appeared out of nowhere so couldnt avoid the initial volley and the initial volley already panicked my soldier, a nearby soldier was unable to prevent the second volley and it took me ALOT more time to finish that mission then it would otherwise would have done.

Beeing able to pickup or aid a panicked soldier could also migrate this problem abit but thats not in the game.

Doing damage instead of will loss after a soldier is panicked sounds abit overkill honestly. The whole point behind it currently is that it panicks the victim rather then kills it. That idea is fine but the duration that you are disabled is just to long. Maybe make victims lose 10 virus per turn would already be enough to make it managable. You would still lose control of that soldier (or the Pandorans one of theirs) but you would lose him like 3 or 4 turns rather then a few dozen turns.

Would keep the concept in the game (and dispite the critisim, I do like the concept) and have it be something to avoid but it wouldnt neuter you.

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I agree that the concept is fine but the implementation needs a tweak. In no way you should’ve to wait 5 or more turns to regain control of a soldier. 3 would be ok for me, 4 at maximum, it’s already the same as losing the soldier for that mission in practice as most missions don’t take a lot of turns and even if you took the virus damage on the first turn, the guy would probably be out of the entire fight.

I don’t say this because of gameplay or balance reasons, I say this because you can’t evacuate the soldier if that’s all that remains to do. And anyone that’s not on this forum, not a huge enthusiastic fan, would like to put up with that.

The exact same applies to paralysis.

It’s an easy fix for me: make the standard medkit and technician arms deal with those. You use a medikit to cure panic or paralysis, you won’t have another for curing your soldier if needed, simple as that. If you have an engineer, good for you, but you’ll lose the engineer’s turn as if you had to heal. And this will work for faction soldiers also, they’ll be able to recover from your “viral hits”.

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This may be true. Personally I haven’t experienced yet those kind of stacks of viral damage - I have done 40+ to enemies with the Biochemist trait and a Deceptor, but I never got more than 15 viral damage, and the recovery for that seemed reasonable to me, creating some tense moments to protect the panicking soldier.

That would render viral weapons largely useless. Getting or doing 15 viral damage with a Redeemer is not easy, and for the same APs if all shots in a burst hit the target it would be seriously injured.

I think that’s too easy for the player. The Pandorans don’t have medkits and the human AI is terrible when it comes healing - they would be better off if they didn’t carry any medkits, imo.

Oh no … I like it when the defenders run to me and heal my squaddies … for 10 HP :rofl:

Or when you throw a fire grenade at a human enemy, his buddy runs into the fire to heal him, next guy runs in to the heal the second guy, and so and so forth…

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Well pandorans could get a mutation or even better a new enemy type capable of healing… maybe at least a frog/triton that can heal others besides just itself by spitting on friends? They have high mobility already, would be a good fit. Or a healing chiron that launched another goo type that hurt your soldiers like poison/virus but healed pandorans?

However there are other solutions beside giving this capability to the standard medkit, the upgraded one could come sooner in the game, or another one in-between that came in play early-mid game and was PX tech. Another option is to just cap the effect for a maximum of 3-4 turns, as in, you can’t deal more than X viral damage.

Even then… imagine a situation where you’re: playing hardcore (no reloading a save), you lose your entire squad but one soldier, and it’s facing a viral enemy that does only 1 damage but X viral: you’re stuck forever! You’ll die from age before losing the game! Of course this is an extreme situation and serve only as an example, but the only option remaining to the player is rage quitting. In the original x-coms, at least panicking sometimes meant running all you could in another direction and hiding. If this was in the game, you could at least get out of enemy sight and stop the panic loop sometime.

And even then… there’s no escape if we’re talking about paralysis instead of virus. I don’t know if this is still in the game but I’ve seen Pure technicians paralyzing enemy structures to death, what if they do that to your soldier?

Not sure how that would be possible, tbh

http://phoenix.server317.com/Priest_%2B_Infiltrator

If damage - armor = 1 damage, then virus damage applies. Is it not so? However the example is not important, it’s just that, an extreme example. The point was that you can be locked in a situation of a very long unplayable state.

Belial on Discord just suggested what I believe is a great solution, I wonder what you guys think:

Have Recover grant immunity to Panic for 1 turn.

So now if you get hit by several stacks of viral damage, on turn 1 you panic, on turn 2 you recover, on turn 3 you can act, on turn 4 if you don’t have enough WPs you panic again, etc.

The point is you still have 1 turn out of 3 to Evac, gather WPs, kill the last opponent, blow yourself up with a grenade :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see much logical sense. However, looking at it purely as a mechanic to fix the problem, then I would like to be able to choose to recover again on the immunity turn and this would subtract the will points gained from the total viral value. Whatever positive will point remains would lead to the new positive number of will points.

If will would still be negative, then I could go on recovering until it’s not. This would be however a difficult mechanic to explain, one of the worst ones I guess as it probably wouldn’t fit into a loading screen tip.

Why not?

IMO (though I might be wrong) if you think of it outside the context of viral damage (that is, not just as a solution to long-term stunlock), it makes sense gamewise because that’s what you really want from Recover: to gain some breathing room. More than for the player, this is important for Pandas, because they usually fall victims to panic from which they can’t recover, because while they are recovering you kill more Pandas and next turn they go into panic again.

A similar thing happens to the player, especially with suicidal or passive allies. Often you just know that they are going to get mowed down on the next turn and throw your rookies into panic, but you can’t really do anything to prevent it.

Because the soldier isn’t panicked because of mental stress and needs some breathing room to get it together, he’s panicked because there’s an active substance in his body affecting his mental health (virus).

I can accept it as a mechanic, but that’s why it does not fit the theme for me lore-wise.

Causing him mental stress that he can try to fight back using Recovery that allows him some brief respite :slightly_smiling_face:

Sure you can say that, but then the virus wouldn’t be much strong then, would it? :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m not a fan of everything having to be “realistic”, I would’ve no problem with the mechanic, I’m just explaining my thoughts because you asked :slight_smile:

I would like to have the other mechanics that I mentioned together with it, though. It would help being able to actively fight the virus and you would be trading more turns for recovery, which is keeping the original recovery mechanic, and to me this seems like a fair trade.