Zeta Posted:

Hackers can do… oh wait, they can’t do anything.

Exactly the problem. Average damage may be high enough for the clbum to be playable, but the clbum isn’t interesting compared to other clbumes. What do hackers do in combat? They attack and sometimes they heal themselves. Now this is probably what other clbumes do in combat, but Hackers do this because it is the only thing that they can do.

There’s nothing interesting about Hacker skill builds, since you only have free pbumives and and the one skill tree. Trolls have three skill trees (two for attacks, one for buffs), Camwhores have three (two for attacks, one for healing), Emos have three skill trees (two for attacks, one that consists of only one skill but it’s a really interesting skill). A lot of the skills in the trees for other clbumes may not be very good, but it at least encourages strategic respeccing (e.g. when Trolls get the good Evil attacks, they can use haxl to take the points out of TXT attacks and spend them on something else.) For Hackers, it’s really just “buy all the vandalism hax” (except maybe avtr, since it’s proc cost is huge), and then allocate the rest of your points to your stats however you like.

Would it be ridiculous to develop two attacking trees and one “other” tree for Hackers? If I had my druthers and could wave a magic wand to make neat things happen in this game, I would do the following:

Hackers get one tree for normal, comparatively high powered attacks (just normal hacker attacks like we have now).

Hackers get one tree for low-powered attacks that do damage over time (i.e. they “poison” forums with their hax).

Hackers get one tree that temporarily debuffs threads, reducing their statistics in ways like “thread takes more damage”, “thread does less damage”, “thread hits less frequently” etc.

The first skill tree would be things like ipz since posting somebody’s IP is really only going to **** them off the once. The second skill tree would be things like avtr and bg since if you mess with people’s avatars or the forum background, that’s going to **** people off until whatever vandalism you engaged in is fixed by the forum admins (represented by the damage over time lasting a limited number of turns, it could even reduce gradually until it expires because people are eventually going to get used to the new “My Little Pony” background). The third tree could represent things like DDOS attacks that gimp forums by making it harder for other people to post and similar hackery.

If the current attack power or the hardware hackers get would need to be nerfed in order to make this a reality in a way that hackers aren’t woefully overpowered, I would welcome that. It would just be neat if there was something about Hackers that made them interesting beyond “their secondary stat is a major liability” and “they can equip a lot of good equipment.” If my druthers, above, were had, I wouldn’t mind in the least if Hackers were the least powerful of the four core clbumes, they would at least be significantly more interesting to play than they are now.

Similarly, I would like it if the non-attacking abilities of other clbumes were fleshed out a little bit. IMO, the way to make combat with forums more fun is not to make forums harder by increasing their damage, pwnage, or whatever it’s to make it so there are more different things that you want to do or be able to do in combat than you can reasonably manage. So there are choices involved that are not “alternate the most powerful attacks, heal periodically”.

It used to be that Hackers were an appealing clbum since they could do ye gods ridiculous damage and nuke threads with ease and tremendous carnage despite their other shortcomings. With their damage having been brought back to the pack, they really could use something else that makes them interesting.

Maybe making combat something other than “spam powerful simple attacks and heal as needed” could be a project for episode 3 design, who knows?