How to fix Electro-Chimeras?

[Mazryonh 0]

I know that the AMK team was planning on throwing out these creatures entirely for version 2.0, but I think they could be great with just some minor changes.

 

For one thing, I think they are great addition to SoC in that they are one of the few ways that the game engine uses other damage types from a creature that is not from Impact-based, Bullet-based, or Rupture-based attacks. Most of the other damage types that armour protects against (such as burn damage, chemical burn damage--should have been called chemical corrosion damage, in my view--or electricity damage) come from anomalies, and because anomalies don't move on their own and have a small radius of effect, are easy to avoid so along as you are careful. Therefore when you wear armour that doesn't protect much against anomalies, such as the Exoskeleton or Berill-5M Armoured suit, it's not that much of a problem if you have the special anomaly detector from Sakharov that displays them as icons on the PDA map, or if you use lots of bolts. For the same reasons, there's often little to no point in using the artifacts that reduce damage from these more exotic sources as well.

 

Creatures like the Burer or the Pyrogeist (both of which use fire damage), and the Electro-Chimera (which uses electricity damage) are much harder to avoid, since they'll actively seek you out and try to hurt you, which is another incentive to use the right armour (or at least the right artifacts) to reduce damage. Since no one I've seen wants to give humanoid NPCs the means of non-bullet, rupture, or explosion damage, despite the fact that real-life methods exist for this, such as flamethrowers, incendiary grenades or bullets, electrolasers, flamethrowers or gas grenades modified to spray corrosive chemical weapons, etc., keeping creatures who can deal these types of damage is an important part of the gameplay in my view.

 

Having said that, the current version of Electro Chimeras is completely unbalanced. They often come at you in BIG PACKs and explode with electricity EVERY TIME they are shot (albeit with a small recovery time between explosions), so unless you are able to snipe ALL of them from a safe distance so that you can't be hit by their electrical discharges, you are very likely to die many times before successfully killing them all. There are two ways around this:

 

1) Either make it so that when heading into a level, the number of Electro-Chimeras is limited to three. For some reason, whenever you first enter a level there's huge hordes of mutants waiting for you. This could be a bug on the part of the A-life program (since you've never been there before, there's likely to be huge number of monsters that have accumulated there), but so as long as you've got a shotgun or a submachine gun, can sprint some distance, and carry enough ammo to kill them all, it's not much of a problem. Big packs of Electro-Chimeras are a real problem, though, with big packs of Bloodsuckers a close second (since they turn invisible and are very resistant to everything but buckshot from shotguns).

 

2) Change the abilities of Electro Chimeras so that they explode with electricity only when they die, and instead of having them deal rupture damage when they attack with their claws, have them deal electricity damage instead. This would make a bit more sense, because if they are coursing with electricity, they should be able to shock those they attack just by touching them, unlike other mutants who have to hit hard enough to make their rupture attacks get through armour. This time, their electrical explosion attacks are much more bearable and tactical, now that they will force the Marked One to get some fair distance away before delivering the killing blow, as well as stocking up on electrical-resistance artifacts or armour.

 

3) Make them only spawn in when the Stalker chat network mentions them, and have Barkeep or Sidorovich give rewards when the player kills the Electro Chimeras mentioned. This way, seeking them out for the bounty on their heads could be a great way to motivate players to kill them. It also makes their appearances more special.

 

These solutions could go a long way towards making these unique creatures less of an annoyance and more towards enhancing the mood of the Zone. There's lots they could do for the game without removing them entirely.

[Mazryonh 0]

Master Bates,

 

I think I tried that once, with a SEVA suit and a Universal Protection Duty suit. Both were somewhat worn down so I used a Battery artifact to make up for the loss in electricity resistance.

 

Didn't work too well for me, sadly. I think the AMK mod version I'm using (1.4, EN 92) caps resistance to the various types of damage at some level so you can't be healed by those damage sources at more than 100% resistance like you could in the vanilla game.