Staff of Necromancy rework

[boy2mantwicethefam]

• Can no longer skeletonize targets, can only zombify targets, skeletonizing targets pretty much removed them from the round instantly.
• Zombies raised by the necromancer can't evolve anymore, which would end up rendering them completely irrecoverable.
• The Staff of Necromancy now has a limit of 3 charges instead of being unlimited, and will gain a charge every 20 seconds instead of 8. It recharges even faster if the wielder is a lich (something already in the game!)
• The Staff of Necromancy can now revive zombies under the necromancer's control by targeting a dead zombie. However, reviving an undead that doesn't belong to you will still take multiple uses, the first one to bring them under your control and the second one to revive them.
• The Staff of Necromancy now only requires half a charge to zombify meat.
• Made the Staff of Necromancy provide more feedback in general in regards to the actions it can do.
• The Staff of Necromancy can no longer convert the leatherman to their side, because they aren't the boss of this gym.
• The Staff of Necromancy will no longer attempt to force creatures to the wielder's side if they are already on the wielder's side.
• The Staff of Necromancy is no longer a type of gun, because it didn't behave like one. It is now instead a subtype of /obj/item/weapon/staff.
• The Staff of Necromancy should now no longer be semi-broken; previously you could do things like repeatedly hitting windows without actually dealing any damage and with no cooldown. It is now a proper melee weapon.
• Staff weapons now have a hit sound, because for some reason they didn't. It's the default one that you get from hitting things with a wrench. Same sound as the wooden paddle, actually.
• Improved zombie evolution code, they now get feedback as to what they must do in order to evolve when trying to cast the spell.
• Added more text to the description of the Staff of Necromancy in the spellbook, including lich interactions (did you know that it recharged twice as fast if the user was a lich AND it healed them of 2 brute per tick while held? That's not added by the PR, that's already in the game!). Also includes a wizard-only description detailing the staff's features.
• The Staff of Necromancy should now properly give off particle effects when doing things such as zombifying targets, this was because it was causing those particles to emit from the original target that was deleted and thus nullspaced. It now tracks the turf where it happened.
• Player-controlled monkeys should now properly control animal ghouls.
• The code will no longer attempt to make ordinary meat control the meat ghoul it was transformed into.
• Fixed a 2-year old bug where the zombification processes were accidentally swapped. Meat will now properly turn into meat ghouls (meat with legs) instead of green meat and animals will now properly turn into animal ghouls (green animals) instead of meat ghouls.

Why it's good

More fun, far less buggy, and significantly more interesting with more abilities available, such as instantly reviving undead mobs under the lich's control. The Staff of Necromancy is now a real weapon worth using instead of an elaborate method of punishing a crewmember (especially with the skeleton conversion).

How it was tested

Turning dead crewmembers into zombies, turning the user into a lich, killing zombies and then reviving them, zombifying different types of targets ranging from monkeys to meat, attacking windows and other people with the staff of necromancy, becoming a zombie and attempting evolution.

🆑

• rscadd: The Staff of Necromancy now has a more elaborate description in the wizard's spellbook.
• rscadd: The Staff of Necromancy can now revive the undead that the wielder controls at the cost of a charge.
• rscadd: Staves, brooms and sticks now have a proper hit sound.
• rscdel: The Staff of Necromancy can no longer turn people into skeletons, which not only immediately prevented any recovery of the crewmember but was also generally punishing compared to zombification.
• rscdel: Zombies created by the Staff of Necromancy can no longer evolve into more dangerous types of zombies. Zombies that evolved would end up irrecoverable (and most players are unaware of this), and the zombie horde will no longer escalate to an insane degree due to an infectious variant that zombies could evolve into. Now go on and bring them back from zombification with your trusty bible instead of butchering them!
• tweak: The Staff of Necromancy now gains charges every 20 seconds instead of 8. The duration can still be halved if the wielder is a lich!
• tweak: Player-controlled monkeys will now properly control animal ghouls when converted into one.
• tweak: The Staff of Necromancy will now provide more feedback in regards to its uses, and now also shows the number of charges it has upon being examined. In addition, wizards can see a special description of the staff upon examining it, detailing its features.
• tweak: Zombies attempting to evolve will now be shown more feedback in regards to their capability to evolve, such as what they must do in order to evolve. They will also no longer have the spell button to evolve if they are not supposed to evolve.
• tweak: The Staff of Necromancy can no longer convert the leatherman to the wielder's side.
• tweak: Raising meat as undead with the Staff of Necromancy now costs half a charge.
• bugfix: The Staff of Necromancy will now properly behave like a weapon without having any odd interactions such as repeatedly hitting windows with no damage.
• bugfix: The Staff of Necromancy now has a proper limit of 3 charges instead of gaining charges indefinitely.
• bugfix: The Staff of Necromancy will no longer attempt to convert zombies that already belong to the wielder's side.
• bugfix: Fixed a bug where the Staff of Necromancy wouldn't show off its particle effects upon a successful zombification due to the original target being gone.
• bugfix: Fixed a 2-year-old bug where the Staff of Necromancy created the wrong zombies; zombifying meat will now properly turn it into a meat ghoul and zombifying dead animals will now properly turn them into animal ghouls.

[Eneocho]

>staff of necromancy now has 3 charges instead of being infinite and takes ages to recharge
>can't do the funny meat zombie spam
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[angryturnip]

Yeah, the 3 charge limit makes it useless, man. Why ever spend wizard points on it for 3 zombies?

[boy2mantwicethefam]

@Eneocho Come on, it's a 20 point investment. You can still do the zombie spam, you just have to be thoughtful about it. Make the dead in Medbay suddenly attack the living and piss Medbay off.
@angryturnip The charges recharge, one for every 20 seconds. It recharges twice as fast if the user is a lich (something already in the game)... It's technically a bug fix because everything points to it being intended to have up to 3 charges at a time but the limit wasn't set properly.

[angryturnip]

Ahhh, I didn't realize they recharged. That seems fair then. I should have realized such a large nerf didn't sound right.

[angryturnip]

Though I kind of agree with Eneocho. Maybe consider having the tiny meat zombies not cost charges while normal zombies do. Though that's something for another PR probably.

[Dacendeth]

infinite meat zombies is not a good gimmick let it die.

[boy2mantwicethefam]

For now I mostly want to get the PR through as is, though I think I will add a feature to it where zombies can be immediately revived by the necromancer at the cost of a charge to make up for some of the nerfs.

[Eneocho]

@Eneocho Come on, it's a 20 point investment. You can still do the zombie spam, you just have to be thoughtful about it. Make the dead in Medbay suddenly attack the living and piss Medbay off. @angryturnip The charges recharge, one for every 20 seconds. It recharges twice as fast if the user is a lich (something already in the game)... It's technically a bug fix because everything points to it being intended to have up to 3 charges at a time but the limit wasn't set properly.

Thing is that the meat slab ghouls are weak as shit, so they're only strong in numbers, and 3 meat ghouls a minute is shit and completely ruins the fun of meatslab zombies.
I get nerfing it for proper zombies, but meat slabs are super weak by themselves.

[boy2mantwicethefam]

I'll see what I can do about reduced costs, but tomorrow (technically later today).
Current idea is to make the process grant charge every tick and then simply have different charge consumption rates depending on action. Walking meat being half the cost should be fine.

[boy2mantwicethefam]

Zombifying meat now costs half a charge.

[Blithering]

Rather than removing the ability for staff zombies to evolve, it would be nice QOL to have all zombies get a popup warning telling them once they evolve they can't go back to being human. There's no loss in keeping the choice, since someone desperate to be revived has always had the option to just not evolve and hope someone prints a bible.
I do have some half finished sprites for skeleton warriors and mages from an idea I had a while back, but losing skelly revive is no big loss.

[MercuriusGH]

I don't like how the fixes and QoL is bundled with balance changes
Zombies should still be able to evolve, it's up to the player if they want to get revived or get epic frags more easily

[boy2mantwicethefam]

@Blithering I intend to disable zombie evolutions from the Staff of Necromancy for now and then see how the Staff of Necromancy fares afterwards, it has a lot of bang for its buck and every round with a necromancer wizard would end up with a lot of unrevivable players and/or a zombie apocalypse beyond what the necromancer was merely reviving. At least other means such as the soulstone use a limited-use item with more limitations (such as being in close range) and have far more interesting mechanics going on than what zombies are getting. Evolutions still work for other means of zombifying such as through the Virology virus, which I also think is more thematically appropriate.
Skeletons couldn't actually evolve, the evolution mechanic is for zombies only. It's one of the reasons raising skeletons was seen as punishing.

@MercuriusGH I do have a problem with scopecreeping changes, initially it was supposed to be just preventing zombies from evolving but both the Staff of Necromancy and the zombie evolutions were broken enough that I also included fixes, and then it just escalated into reworking the Staff of Necromancy somewhat. I attribute it to a general lack of patience in attempting to exercise bugfixes while still remembering them and wanting to do them, and making multiple overlapping PRs would mean revisiting to fix conflicts even when I might not be in a mood to do it, which led to a few PRs taking far longer than they should to be merged just because I was lazy.

I already considered the merits of letting a warning for evolving instead of disabling it from Staff of Necromancy zombies but I think this change would be better off for everyone; evolutions not only encourage players to butcher every zombie they come across (regardless if they are revivable or not, because I don't think most players care about the description distinction) but at the same time most players probably wouldn't stop themselves from evolving to gain an edge.
I do want to experiment with an idea where necromancer zombies would immediately revert into dead players to make it easier to retrieve them but I think that's for another PR.

[Blithering]

A couple of notes, soulstone wizards aren't limited so long as they think ahead enough to make an artificer who can then create infinite stones (and shells but that's something the wiz has too).
Also without the ability to evolve and in doing so become infectious, and also (in a later pr) turning into dead players on death, eliminating their revival, what makes these zombies... Well, zombies?

[boy2mantwicethefam]

You're right about the artificers but I think it'll be overbearing if I touched that one. I want to make the Staff of Necromancy less of a round gunker while making it significantly better to use, not nerf the wizard's entire capability to remove people from the round.
What makes the zombies zombies is being undead. Zombie evolution is typically associated with disease-based undead (think Left 4 Dead, CDDA, The Last of Us, CDDA, Halo, Prototype and so on) whereas necromancy involves raising the dead through arcane means, and any zombie evolution for necromancy'd zombies is usually done by the necromancer itself deciding to upgrade their undead army. Not sure how to implement it for the Staff of Necromancy, perhaps bring back the ability to select which type of undead to raise and to just create a whole lot of necromancy-variant undead, but that would be for another PR, I can already imagine the headaches of trying to implement it in a cohesive way such as skeleton soldiers becoming skeleton crewmembers. Did you know that changing species involves fully healing the mob? I really need to look into adding a variant that doesn't do that.

[Blithering]

I meant more in the lines of it they can't evolve, infect or revive, they've not got any undead flavour left and may just as well be any other simple mob.

[boy2mantwicethefam]

You've got a point, I should probably scrap the "instantly turn back into a regular human" plans.
But still, necromancer zombies should remain necromancer zombies, not virulent zombies. They're the shambling dead that overwhelm and eat the living. The necromancer should say cheesy lines to his undead underlings.

[Blithering]

I do like the idea of the necromancer upgrading undead, maybe staff charges could be used to level up minions.

[west3436]

Unatomic - split this out into separate bugfix and tweak PRs.

[angryturnip]

The Staff of Necromancy can no longer convert headcrab zombies, ghouls, necromorphs and the leatherman to their side.

seeing it pop up again from being reopened, something I didn't notice before was how lame this is to remove. Was a cool feature that happened so rarely (seeing any of those mobs on the station at the same time someone with a necromancy staff is also there) that I really don't see the need to remove it.

[boy2mantwicethefam]

I removed every other type of zombie except the leatherman from the blacklist, because the lich will never be the boss of this gym.

[west3436]

This is too divisive and I feel that there may be unintended consequences of merging this. As with the other mega-PRs you made, I'd recommend breaking out just the bugfixes then create a new PR with the rework goals clearly outlined.