Nerfs Carp- and Eel AP and Tweaks Eel Speed

[lavillastrangiato]

• An alternative to Adds Expedition Shotguns And Machetes to Mining #17810, after I realized editing damage values are actually really easy.
• Spectral eels and carp had their damage values and armor penetration values nerfed.
• Eels also have a reduced speed value, in keeping with the fact they are supposed to follow you at a slow and creepy pace.
• With simplemob AI being changed to be very aggressive, these will make existing on a mineral asteroid less ridiculously lethal.
• Reavers remain able to do 30 damage, in keeping with them being more rare.

[lavillastrangiato]

!review

[DreamySkrell]

I am very much against this, being huge nerfs across the board.

If the problem is that miners die from simplemobs when they go mine stuff on asteroids or planets, then this PR is not the solution, as this affects much more than just the survivability of miners (event arcs, away sites, random horizon events, whatever).

The proper solution to that problem, should be to reduce or remove the tougher simplemobs from spawning on asteroids or planets, or keeping them only to random ruins. That would keep these simplemobs dangerous (which is fine, some things should be dangerous), but at the same time make mining a bit more chill and easier.

If this is wanted, it should be test-merged imo.

[FluffyGhoster]

I concur, if the issue is the survivability of the miners, something that addresses the survivability (not fighting capability) specifically should be added for the miners, instead of trivializing the risk from simplemobs with the side effect that it also affects everyone else in every other situation

[SleepyGemmy]

i think it's fine. it's just lowering the armour penetration so your armour actually protects you, which is literally a direct change to survivability.

[lavillastrangiato]

If you play mining, or even if you play adjacent to mining, it's easy to tell that miners die very, very often. Why is this?

For one, the simplemob AI change has made mobs a lot more aggressive. My limited understanding of coding tells me that the mobs "check" their state faster, which means they attack and move faster. They also move around the character they are attacking faster. This makes it hard to hit them, and it also means they do more damage than they used to.

At the moment, eels have an armor-piercing variable of 25, and damage values of 20. Mining voidsuits have armor values of 30. This means that if a miner were to be attacked by an eel, their armor would reduce the damage they take by maybe five percent.

So five percent of twenty is, uh, one. The mining voidsuit will reduce an incoming eel's damage by 1 point. Let's do some testing to see how many attacks an eel can pop off in a few seconds...

In about five seconds (the time it took for me to right-click and delete the eel), it nabbed me seven times. This is how much damage I took:

127.6 / 7 = 18.22. So I was slightly off-- per attack, the eel is doing about 18 damage to a human. This doesn't seem like a lot, but remember that eels move really, really fast. Even on a test server, there was a moment where another eel fucking teleported behind me (nothing personnel, kid), giving me a ripped tendon and arterial bleeding.

How much damage will an eel do in theory, after my nerf? Post-nerf, eels still have their 20 damage values but have an AP value of 15. This means the mining voidsuit will reduce eelosity by about 15%. 15% of 20 is (drumroll) 3. Give or take, the eel is now gonna do about 16/17 damage to a human in a mining voidsuit.

Reducing the eel's speed also means they're not going to teleport behind you. Eels still have 150 health; they are hardy and should not be tangled with in melee, even post-nerf. They're still dangerous, they're just not instant-death.

With regards to hivebots, especially given that they are also affected by this AI change and move around you a lot, I think it's fairly obvious that it is ridiculous for them to have more AP than anything but the riot and heavy armor. Seriously, 40 AP on a hivebot?

[github-actions]

This pull request has conflicts, please resolve those before we can evaluate the pull request.

[Arrow768]

This has been discussed by the maintainers:

• The speed nerf needs to be documented in the changelog
• Revert the changes to the hivebot beacon / hivebots -> They are primarily encountered by sec and the occurrence is reduced in Hivebots require an active person who can access an armory to spawn #17182