Perk

[LilithReiNightShade]

Something Zombie Fortress hell has needed for a long time is alot of rebalancing.

I am here on behalf of all Zombie Fortress Hell regulars in an attempt to convey our thoughts, or at least what i've heard from others is a shared opinion of what 'MUST' be rebalanced or added, or banned.

First, the perks.

Survivors:

Trapper: Trapper is one of those perks WIDELY regarded as near useless. The mines do little damage, but set the zombies on fire. However, they can be disabled by a Magnetic, and even with the fire, the damage they do won't stop much. My solution is this. Give Trappers a 25% speed bonus, and a 10% attack bonus, permanent, and buff the mines damage a bit. This  gives Trapper what it should be, a perk for denying access with at least semi-decently powerful mines, while giving the trapper him/herself the ability to escape or at least try to fight, instead of having to rely on crap-ass mines that do very little to zombies.

Failing that, an increase in mines would also be nice, doubling the limit to about 6 or so gives alot more potential, and let's face it, even 6 of those put together would kill a heavy just barely, and that takes a while to set-up by itself.

Wise: Ah... Wise. You broken as fuck perk. Wise is a hit-or-miss perk with many people. It slowly gives damage and defense buffs on kills, but lowers the other stat depending on what happens, attack being temporarily lowered when hit, and defense being lowered with kills. However... balanced correctly, like persay with a black box/concheror, or a medic worse yet. One could tank themselves into a near unkillable state with extremely high attack and defense. And all it takes is camping in a corner with and/or health, and the zombies are literally screwed.

I will now bring in a zombie perk suggestion, to balance both out.

One thing many people agree on, is Toxic needs a buff, even with crit-cola or buffalo steak sandvich mini-crits, the damage is hardly ever crippling or useful. Toxic itself needs two buffs. A damage buff, and a Stat debuff.

The damage buff will increase the Toxic 'Aura' Effect's damage. The damage you do when standing still and all. The stat-debuff isn't for zombies, it would be for WISE-Perk survivors, which will temporarily lower both their stats as long as the toxic effect is on them. This balances both perks considerably, forcing a wise survivor to abandon their defensive position at that corner, or high place, or wherever, and go out into the open to hunt down that evilly smiling toxic, who now finally has a use.

Tarred: Let's face it, Tarred is a 'normal' perk. It has its uses with no debuffs. And that, to many, is kinda bullshit. So here is my PERSONAL thoughts on a nice balance for it.

Tarred should have -25% speed on themselves due to the fact tar is sticky, and thus it makes sense for them to be slower. HOWEVER, to keep it nice to use, any time they HIT a survivor in melee, or a survivor melees them, the speed penalty applied is CRIPPLING, it goes down very slowly, however this does not apply to the SPIT they can use, that would function as it did before.

Vampiric: Alright let's face it, Vampiric is cheap, stupid, and completely bullshit... And i use it all the time because of such. It needs a nerf, i can say this with honesty. I have done so many tactics with vampiric that are just nothing but pure troll.

The only nerf i think anyone could agree on, is a defense drop of like 10 or 20%. At least give a survivor a damn chance to kill the vampiric without worrying about whether that crit shot will kill it or not, or whether they can even melee it to death amongst the hordes. Then there's a vampiric horde, and everyone dies without a chance of killing them all, unless there are medics everywhere, and so on.

Hunter: Hunter needs a nerf like Snow Leonardo needs his kinks. There are only two ways to go about this.

One is to downgrade or REMOVE completely Hunter's spawn attack buff, its unnecessary, and quite easily abused to be perfectly frank, especially on high ledges where few survivors can go to destroy the spawns, allowing endless hunter heavies to rain down and destroy them after they respawn from being scouts.

Two: is to give hunter a defense down like Vampiric would have, again, it gives the chance to kill before they strike.

This is just my two cents from opinions i've gathered.

If any of these are implemented, i know it will change how the server works dramatically, but it could be good or bad, depending on how people adapt, there are other perks than just the cheap ones people, start using them, you'll be surprised at what you find is useful when all the OP and Cheap perks are rebalanced.

Feel free to suggest more below, or to call me out for being an idiot and putting this as a post~ 

[Lunacy]

Trapper is pretty much weak and useless, especially since the fire does 3 damage per tick and zombies passively regenerate half of that.
I like the speed bonus, but the attack bonus isn't completely necessary if mines get buffed.  maybe +50% fire damage and 25-50 random damage on explosion I'd say may be fine.  Engineer Trapper is even more pointless since they just go magnetic and bypass both the mines and the sentries.

While wise does snowball crazily, it's still countered by things like Roar and Horrifying.  You can camp on a health pack and let a Fan-o-war scout come hit you until you have 70 defense if you want to troll with it, also pocket medic.  If you want to be so tryhard you can try to get everyone on the team to focus that one person, but good luck getting anyone to listen on Zombie Fortress pubs.

While something like a single medic or any Holy 100% counters Toxic, there's no incentive to hunt them down with these classes and perks available.  If it also lowered attack and defense by 1% per tick up to a maximum of 25%, they'll be a little less useless.  It currently does its job, but is easily countered by anyone with a healing effect.  I guess after the toxic is killed they will regenerate 5% stats per second until they're up to normal.  Basically makes it so leaving that one guy alive because he seemingly isn't doing much will be a growing mistake.

maybe only -10% for tarred if you do touch it, but they're only dangerous in maps with running space, as long as there is additional players behind you.
But honestly anyone you would use tar against would be moving faster than you anyways, ie Ninja.

Speaking of Ninja, even with a -50% speed penalty, they still move at maximum speed while they are jumping, often abused on Medics who just live forever because of their escape potential and regen, because heavies and spies can never catch up to them, even when they're moving as slow as possible. (unless they Leap)

Yes Vampiric is OP in all regards and can only reliably be taken out by damage buffs or crits.  They regenerate 12 health per tick and heal a fuckload on hit, making them near impossible to out-melee.  Taking 20% more damage would be a reasonable nerf, concidering the only thing that can kill them at a reasonable distance is a sniper.

Hunter seems fine right now, their damage buff is pure incentive to remove their spawns, but it is a problem in spots that are impossible for survivors to reach (lots of places of ZF_Dustbowl).  I guess if it was possible to not have the damage buff in certain areas of the map, but that would just take a lot of time and effort.  Also I once racked up 250+ deaths in 1 map because I was hunter and got spawncamped the entire time.  My average lifespan was about 0.03 seconds.
Also there was a guillotine crit glitch on the server at one point, so with hunter I could 1hitkill pretty much everybody, it was fun.

Also, any ways to fix thieving vs Cow Mangler/Pomson or will it forever be stuck being stolen in 1 hit because of the way the items are.

[h_twenty]

The way the entire ZF gamemode was built didn't have "fairness" in mind, almost none of the perks are balanced, either too powerful or too weak. Even the maps work against the zombies/survivors. While both of you brought up great points, I don't think anything should change (I cleaned one spot, might as well do the rest syndrome).