About The Pull Request

Overhauls the bloodsucker antagonist with a huge suite of re-balances (and fixes/QOL updates), primarily intended on buffing the standard clans near roundstart (tremere is mostly untouched, although will benefit from the extra leveling) while dampening the exponential power growth vampires could previously achieve at very high levels. Also removes sol. Though it is primarily a buff, there are a couple nerfs and other changes here and there. Overall intended to make vampire more fun to play in general, and making it less reliant on a few meta picks (looking at you, obfuscate).

Full list of changes:

• Sol is GONE, but you still get free levels every 10 mins - the cap on free levels has been increased from 3 to 6.
• All clans (except tremere, unchanged) now get every vampire ability at lvl 1 roundstart, but only level up 1 ability at a time.
• The bonus to max blood volume and regeneration per level has been slightly nerfed.
• Bloodsucker abilities are now fixed to actually take blood to activate again (this was broken for idk how long)
• The bloodsucker maximum blood volume is now the actual bloodsucker maximum blood volume, instead of letting you have up to double the listed max blood. Extra blood drank still counts towards blood thickening.
• The amount of blood required to level up from drinking from sentient mobs (blood thickening) starts higher by default but increases a bit less per level. It also no longer increases when you receive free levels, but rather only when you actually use blood thickening to level up.
• Ventrue has had its max level increased from 3 to 4 (you now advance to level 4 before having to spend levels on your favorite vassal)
• You can level up multiple times inside a coffin without having to open and re-shut it.
• Buffs/changes vanishing act: Vanishing act is now an ability every vampire gets when they make a lair, and you can use it instantly at any time, but it has a 5 min cooldown. Similar to heretic blade breaks, but way more counterable. You also still drop all your shit if someone sees you in a lit area. Being full stunned, silver cuffed, or bluespace grounded will all still prevent vanishing act.
• Buffs trespass: Higher levels now increase the range of trespass, +1 per level.
• Buffs predatory lunge - the "spinning" thing has been reduced to 1s, and is gone at level 3 instead of 4. The ability now has a range that starts at 4 tiles and increases every level. It was also previously bugged before level 4 and would never work unless you were adjacent to the target (lol), so that's been fixed.
• Changes cloak of darkness: only makes you unable to sprint rather than forcing walking. You also can now start your cloak even if others can see you. However, similar to the current behavior of tremere's obfuscate, if you attack or get attacked while in cloak, your cloak will break.
• Changes fortitude: Removes fortitude forcing to walk, however: you are still unable to sprint, and the ability is a limited duration, starting at 10s with a 30s cooldown. Higher levels increase the duration and reduce the cooldown. Level 4 is still full stun immunity, for the duration of the ability. Also, activating/ending fortitude gives chat messages and an icon above your head to everyone around you, as the old tell (force walking) is now gone.
• Buffs mesmerize: mesmerize now silences the target on lvl 1 instead of 2.
• Fixes some bugs with brawn: Brawn now doesn't let you break doors until level 4, as intended. (Was previously allowing it at level 3), brawn now properly checks for pacifism.
• Feed now requires you to be pulling someone, and automatically ends when you stop pulling someone.
• Feed is now a lot more obvious to other players around when you start it, displaying an icon above your head and playing a sound. (don't feed in the public halls you sickos!)
• The time it takes to feed by default is a little bit faster, and still gets faster every level, but also now can't go below 2 seconds.
• "Immortal Haste" has been renamed to "Sweeping Dash" (the old name was not very good) and nerfed to have a range- the range starts at 2 tiles and increases 1 per level. The knockdown still increases with every level as well.
• Revenge and favorite vassals can now be deconverted by mindshield - previously the only way to deconvert them was by staking the vamp (revenge vassals also used to be deconvertible by mindshield but that was changed recently, I'm changing it back).
• Vampires get "Escape on the escape shuttle alive and not in custody" objective instead of just survive, and also their random vassalization objective is no longer optional.
• Vampires can no longer cure deep-rooted/permanent traumas by sleeping in a coffin/entering torpor, making them both paxxable and lobotomizable (lol).

Why It's Good For The Game

Alright! I'll break this down into a few major parts. First of all, I am a SECURITY MAIN (believe it or not) so my goal here is not to make vampires OP. I want this PR to be testmerged for a while to make sure I didn't overtune them, and I'll gladly dial some things back if I ended up making them too strong. However, all my changes have been well thought out from the perspective of someone who frequently fights vampires.

Sol:
Sol was just a terrible mechanic, for so many reasons. Of course everyone has heard the argument that it stifles RP, which is very true, but even putting that aside it's just a bad way to balance an antagonist. For one, having to stop what you're doing and sit the game out for a minute or more every 10 mins (which will usually add up to like a MINIMUM of 10 mins of doing nothing in a round) is just unfun for the antagonist player. It's also a shitty way to make a weakness - if we let vampires be too strong when they ARENT in Sol, they become unfun to fight for the majority of the round. Nobody wants to lose a fight to broken OP bullshit and be told "you shoulda ran away until sol". Similarly, your weakness making you completely defenseless is just a lame way to die. Oh great, I died because someone stumbled on my lair in my 60 seconds of being force sleeped, guess my round's over.

Sol also encourages boring gameplay for security players too. I guess the intended strategy for security is just to base camp lairs, but not only is this boring for the vampire, it's also pretty boring for the seccie to sit around doing nothing camping too. Stakeouts can be fun in the right circumstances, but when they become the intended way to fight something they become a chore.

Leveling Changes:
Vampires suffered from being way too weak roundstart while also having way overtuned power scaling from exponential growth if they can get past a certain level (about level 5-6 is where it really starts to snowball). I'd like to make vampires substantially stronger at roundstart so they are encouraged to actually go out and do things. To go along with this, I've made a lot of abilities much more useful at level 1, to give people a proper toolkit they can play with at roundstart. Despite adding a bit of UI clutter (although no worse than changeling), I think this will also help new players learn vampire, as being able to test out and play with (and read the description for) all your powers is a great way to learn them.

The old system also had the added downside of forcing vampires to plan out "build orders" in advance, since whatever ability you pick first is gonna end up being your most leveled one (this particularly fucked over new vamps who didn't understand how that worked/what every ability did). Now, while you can certainly still plan ahead, you can also just put ranks into things as you need them.

Vanishing Act:
With removing sol, vanishing act needed a new purpose. Vampire was already lacking a lot in proper escape tools, so I decided to give them basically a weaker version of the heretic's blade break. It's similar to blade breaking but has a lot more counters (simple base-camping being one) and also a hard-coded cooldown as opposed to being spammable.

Predatory Lunge:
This ability was both bugged and useless before level 4, so I made it not complete shit. Gave it some range limitations to compensate (although it actually already had range coded in... but only at level 4 or higher? For some reason).

Immortal Haste/Sweeping Dash:
This was actually one of the more OP abilities in regular vampire's arsenal (unlimited range, near-instant, crowd control knockdown) except it was totally slept on because of the name that 90% of players didn't realize was actually an offensive ability. I seriously almost never saw this used by vampires in combat. Now, hopefully the new name and roundstart accessibility will encourage it to actually be used. Added big range limitations to compensate, but it's still a pretty strong stun especially once you put some levels into it.

Fortitude:
Fortitude was a tricky one. On the one hand, I do NOT want to make vampires more anti-stun in general, since that would go against my idea of having them be non-armory/KOS threats by default. On the other hand, I wanted to remove the force walking since it makes the ability pretty ass to use. I ended up on settling on this as a compromise- this takes the ability at low levels into an emergency 'get to cover or retaliate' button to use while you're actively getting stunned/shot, but it's not something that will make you unarrestable with stuns on its own. At high levels (i.e. if you invested into it) you can use it to totally facetank stuns and kick ass at normal movespeed for a while, but it will leave a short window of stun vulnerability which I think could encourage interesting combat.

Other Minor Power Changes:
Made mesmerize a bit more useful at level 1 to encourage its use as part of the roundstart arsenal. It's still pretty counterable since the rework of it. I made cloak a bit stronger since force walking was garbage, but also made it more counterable by attack/being attacked. Trespass was basically useless to level up ever, so I gave leveling some more purpose.

Vassal Deconversion:
Non-deconvertable vassals made a lot more sense when vampires were KOS. Now, they cause 2 issues. The first is that it encourages RRs even if security captures everyone involved non-lethally, as the only way to deconvert these vassal types is by staking the vampire. The second is that if you capture the non-deconvertable vassals before the vamp, they're basically stuck in limbo because it doesn't make sense to release them while you're still actively trying to catch their master, but you also cant process them properly until you catch and stake the vamp. Best solution currently is just to stick them in perma temporarily, which is a headache on its own, but a lot of times they just end up sitting in cuffs for a while too. Simplest solution is to just let them be deconverted.

Objective Changes:
Monkestation may not be a greentext server, but the truth is that people still chase the holy green, and who can blame them. There is something satisfying about seeing that you have succeeded at the end of the round. However, vampire objectives previously were kind of a total nothingburger and could be greentexted by making a coffin and AFKing in maints for the whole round. Now your vassalization objectives are not optional anymore (why were they even?), so if you want that holy green you better get out there and do some things. Since vampires have also been recently changed to be more arrestable and less KOS, I also made it so that bloodsuckers actually want to escape on the shuttle in freedom rather than just being alive at end of shift.

Trauma Changes:
Being able to paxx vampires seems like a sensible way to hamper them, a lot of their powers are still usable even when paxxed, so it doesn't totally fuck them over (doesn't even stop them from killing someone by just draining all their blood). The side effect of being able to lobotomize vampires is just funny.

Changelog

🆑
balance: Sol is GONE, but you still get free levels every 10 mins - the cap on free levels has been increased from 3 to 6.
balance: All clans (except tremere, unchanged) now get every vampire ability at level 1 roundstart, but only level up 1 ability at a time.
balance: The bonus to max blood volume and regeneration per level has been slightly nerfed.
fix: Bloodsucker abilities are now fixed to actually take blood to activate again (this was broken for idk how long)
balance: The bloodsucker maximum blood volume is now the actual bloodsucker maximum blood volume, instead of letting you have up to double the listed max blood. Extra blood drank still counts towards blood thickening.
balance: The amount of blood required to level up from drinking from sentient mobs (blood thickening) starts higher by default but increases a bit less per level. It also no longer increases when you receive free levels, but rather only when you actually use blood thickening to level up.
balance: Ventrue has had its max level increased from 3 to 4 (you now advance to level 4 before having to spend levels on your favorite vassal)
qol: You can level up multiple times inside a coffin without having to open and re-shut it.
balance: Buffs/changes vanishing act: Vanishing act is now an ability every vampire gets when they make a lair, and you can use it instantly at any time, but it has a 5 min cooldown. Similar to heretic blade breaks, but way more counterable. You also still drop all your shit if someone sees you in a lit area. Being full stunned, silver cuffed, or bluespace grounded will all still prevent vanishing act.
balance: Buffs trespass: Higher levels now increase the range of trespass, +1 per level.
balance: Buffs predatory lunge - the "spinning" telegraphing effect has been reduced to 1s, and is gone at level 3 instead of 4. The ability now has a range that starts at 4 tiles and increases every level.
fix: Fixes predatory lunge not working before level 4 unless you were adjacent to the target.
balance: Changes cloak of darkness: only makes you unable to sprint rather than forcing walking. You also can now start your cloak even if others can see you. However, similar to the current behavior of tremere's obfuscate, if you attack or get attacked while in cloak, your cloak will break.
balance: Changes fortitude: Removes fortitude forcing to walk, however: you are still unable to sprint, and the ability is a limited duration, starting at 10s with a 30s cooldown. Higher levels increase the duration and reduce the cooldown. Level 4 is still full stun immunity, for the duration of the ability. Also, activating/ending fortitude gives chat messages and an icon above your head to everyone around you, as the old tell (force walking) is now gone.
balance: Buffs mesmerize: mesmerize now silences the target on lvl 1 instead of 2.
fix: Brawn now doesn't let you break doors until level 4, as intended. (Was previously allowing it at level 3)
fix: Brawn now respects pacifism when attacking someone.
qol: Feed now requires you to be pulling someone, and automatically ends when you stop pulling someone.
balance: Feed is now a lot more obvious to other players around when you start it, displaying an icon above your head and playing a sound. (don't feed in the public halls you sickos!)
balance: The time it takes to feed by default is a little bit faster, and still gets faster every level, but also now can't go below 2 seconds.
balance: "Immortal Haste" has been renamed to "Sweeping Dash" and nerfed to have a range- the range starts at 2 tiles and increases 1 per level. The knockdown still increases with every level as well.
balance: Revenge and favorite vassals can now both be deconverted by mindshield.
balance: Vampires get "Escape on the escape shuttle alive and not in custody" objective instead of just survive, and also their random vassalization objective is no longer optional.
balance: Vampires can no longer cure deep-rooted/permanent traumas by sleeping in a coffin/entering torpor, making them both paxxable and lobotomizable.
spellcheck: Fixed a number of typos in vampire ability descriptions and code comments, as well as updating many ability descriptions.
/:cl: