Game Mechanics An alternative approach to fixing stealth and invisibility

Human

Queen Bee
As I scrolled through the upcoming changes list, one fix in particular left me mortified: invisible players will no longer have health bars below them if they are wounded. This means that the only reliable visual cue will be gone, making PvP a random mess since there will be no way to reveal someone, no matter how hard you bash or shoot them. Also, keep in mind that items are in infinite supply on major non-survival servers, meaning potions can be chugged down indefinitely.

Stealth shouldn't be an option when one is revealed and is getting shot at: that's the core philosophy of stealth in pretty much all games that have stealth elements. So I want to propose a game mechanic that would prevent invisibility from becoming game-breaking and unfun in 1.3.6, yet would keep the health bar fix intact and PvE completely unchanged.

When an invisible player receives damage, they will get the Revealed debuff for 12 seconds, with a tooltip along the lines of "Visible to other players". This debuff will cause a bright, continuous visual to appear whenever the afflicted user is cloaked via means of Invisibility Potion, Psycho Knife, Shroomite armor and Vortex armor. This will only affect the visual aspect of these items: mob aggression reduction will be unchanged and all respective damage bonuses will still work the same way.

The debuff will be removed automatically whenever the player regains full health (which is when the health bar disappears as of now). Any subsequent damage will reset the timer back to 12 seconds. In addition, "Revealed" will not occur unless the player receives damage while in PvP.

I know that PvP communities are most likely not even 0.01% of the game's player base, but this game mode is very dear to me and my friends, and I'd hate to see it go down in flames due to an incomplete fix.
 
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That might prove to be difficult due to most damage sources being treated the same way, down to invincibility frames. However, I image it would be feasible to implement a check that will only make this debuff possible while the user is in PvP.
 
That might prove to be difficult due to most damage sources being treated the same way, down to invincibility frames. However, I image it would be feasible to implement a check that will only make this debuff possible while the user is in PvP.
There already is a pvp check. If you pvp die, you respawn on full hp
 
How about instead of having a debuff, players become visible when their immunity frames are active. Or another idea is that players become more and more visible as they lose health. Also remember that you become visible when you attack.
 
How about instead of having a debuff, players become visible when their immunity frames are active. Or another idea is that players become more and more visible as they lose health. Also remember that you become visible when you attack.
Invincibility frames are far too short for this purpose: one would have to unleash a barrage of perfectly timed shots with perfect accuracy in order to kill an invisible character, and that's not something even the most experienced players can do.

Gradual visibility would be iffy: most revealing attacks are done with low-damage, high-coverage weapons like Lunar Flare, which deals ~100 damage per hit on average to someone in Vortex armor and ~50 damage to Beetle armor users.
 
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