I am stealing YOUR ideas for Water Poisoning

Game Discussion
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1

The most infamous member of Team Immersion, the poster child of bad game design - welcome the Water Poisoning mechanic!

Nobody here needs me to explain what that thing is and what it does, so I’ll skip over it. All I will say is, receiving an eventually-lethal damage source at a completely random point in your playthrough, just for existing in a location, is dumb. Adding an always on-hand, easy way to clear it is even dumber.

Originally, (and I still stick to that claim) I said in Team Immersion’s suggestion topic, that this mechanic is unsalvageable and must be removed entirely from the game, along with the Soap tool. But, many people told me they, for some weird reason, want to keep it alive.

So, here’s when I need your help once more. Drop your ideas on how to revamp Water Poisoning and make it not obnoxious, and I will consider them when making my suggestion on it.

I will even start the chain. I think that a good way to reimplement Water Poisoning is to make it an indicator of points of interest appearing near the player.

In lore, the poisoning exists because of magic pollution. So, why not we make the usual Dark Sea’s magic pollution not enough to cause harm to us, but when a magic-related object or entity is present, the level of pollution gets amplified and it starts damaging the player, alerting us.

When the point of interest generates, the player responsible for it receives Water Poisoning for a short time - about 5 seconds. Not enough to kill, but enough to alert that something has happened, and you probably need to toggle on Sensing.

The list of points of interest is: Giant White Eyes, Giant Poison Jaws, Kraken, Giant Kraken, The Omen, Athena’s Page (is removed from the list after collecting all of them), Athena’s Statue Island, Hecate Essence, Dragon (excluding the younger ones).

When replying to this topic, please avoid talking about Water Poisoning being unsalvageable, or just blindly agreeing with my version of the fix - I need thoughts, not emotions.

2

I would turn water poisoning from a random and deadly inconvenience into something that has to be maintained by bathing or taking cover. Long story short, you have a meter. If that meter gets too high, you get water poisoning, which starts out as a weak DoT effect (1 or 2 per tick) that grows much stronger over time, eventually being lethal. The meter increases faster and decreases slower as you go deeper into the dark sea. Soap and bathing will always clear the meter instantly, but standing under cover will slowly but steadily reduce it until it’s gone.

Additionally, when water poisoning gets to a lethal level, the meter will begin flashing red, and hovering over it will explain how to not die

3

i0: no water poisoning
i1: 10m, 10% loss/s
i2: 7m 30s, 7.5% loss/s
i3: 5m, 5% loss/s
i4: 2m 30s, 2.5% loss/s and soap/bathing reduces it by only 50% (gotta use it twice)
i5: 1 second. ur not meant to be there anyway chud

33% meter - 1% HP per tick
66% meter - 2.5% HP per tick
100% meter - 5% HP per tick

4

I’d just have it be as a visible bar that shows up on screen like oxygen when under water

Also perhaps have a type of potion or item that makes you temporarily immune to the effects of the rain for a short period of time while also draining the bar (so we’d be able to go for longer periods of time without getting water poisoned)

Or an alternative to the previous option, an item that can be worn overtop of you to give a small nerf while making it so the water cannot poison you at all (and might also be able to protect the gear underneath that extra suit from being damaged at the cost of getting itself damaged)

5

Sure, the most popular opinion on how to remake the mechanic - just make it not random and actually let the player know, when it will affect him! Dark Sea could use less RNG to it.

6

Eh, this still keeps the annoyance factor, just makes it possible to predict. No one’s gonna be exploring the Far Reaches with a stopwatch, after all

7

Yeah, just strap this to the Soap, makes the most sense

No, I don’t like tools or game mechanics, designed specifically to render another game mechanic useless. The devs did a brilliant job with fall damage - the Glider is far more useful than just preventing it, and has a lot of not yet uncovered potential uses (getting to Skyhall seems to me as a far more secondary use of the Glider than combating fall damage, despite that being the intended main use)

8

Maybe, just maybe, the damage of Water Poisoning could be reduced by a large chunk for every God Soul one has interacted with, in addition to whichever other changes are made? Give a little more purpose to collecting all of Athena’s Pages, and any other future God Soul Sidequests that have relatively little effect for non-Oracles.

The idea of Water Poisoning being something of a brief alert triggered by the presence of certain beings (or fragments thereof) also seems interesting, though it being caused by traces of the divine in the Dark Sea feels… off, to me.

9

Make it only show up near dark sea islands and i1 and beyond or you stay in ds water for more than 15 seconds. buff all dark sea monsters if they are affected by it (you get a alert when you get water poisoning).

10

The annoyance factor isn’t going anywhere with this. It might get low enough to the point of passive healing outmatching the damage, but then what?

11

Gods were made by both Creation and Chaos combined

12

Again, the core problem isn’t going anywhere with this. And the “staying in water” condition just adds unnecessary difficulty to boarding Atlantean ships and collecting Dark Sea diamonds

13

T jump onto them

14

I figure the God Souls lowering the damage of the “Hey, there’s something here somewhere” notification idea you wrote about might be nice, reducing it from “the rain is melting my skin” to "slight, sudden headache”

15

would also somewhat make sense, since the fragments of hectates soul can somehow keep a sea cluster safe, why can’t these souls protect us from a small bit of rain?

16

This is some niche interaction that doesn’t impact anything, but adds a bit of lore, so it fits right in

17

turn it into a bar on the side of the screen that slowly increases the longer you’re in the dark sea
the rate you accumulate water poisoning is the same in the close ranges, but it becomes 25% faster in the far ranges

specifics

The bar goes from 0-100 (nice and simple)
When exposed to the rain, you get 0.5% added to the water poisoning bar, and 0.625% in the far ranges, for a total of 200 seconds water poison free (or 160 in the far ranges) (while unprotected)

Standing under cover for 5 or more seconds, will drain the water poisoning bar by 1% per second

you might think “gosh this sounds even worse than how water poisoning is now!”
and yes, it kinda is, but that’s where the next part comes in:
Protection
Beast defense[1] now affects water poisoning gain. (if the armour is good enough to protect against massive animals, it’s good enough to protect against some rain)
So at max beast defense, you’ll be able to spend 10 minutes in the dark sea without having to worry about maxing out your water poisoning.

But to balance this out with something else, water poisoning is now no longer completely cleared by soap, instead, regular soap (including the brig bath) removes 10 percentage points of the built up water poisoning .
Additionally, there are several more cosmetic changes depending on how full the bar is
At 25% and higher, your character gets 2 new animations (one where they try to shake/brush water off themselves, and one where they hold themselves and shivers)
At 50% and higher you get similar messages to the red insanity text, but now white, in which your character complains about being soaked and their skin/eyes hurting a bit , or that they want to take shelter from the rain, or that they should’ve put on more protective clothes.
At 80% and higher the edges of your screen become a bit distorted and you regen stamina and health 25% slower
at 100 % you start to take water poisoning damage like usual (but instead of lasting for 5 minutes or something, it lasts for 5 seconds and gets refreshed constantly)

  1. could maybe be renamed to something like wilderness defense? ↩︎

18

Nothings worth discussing if Vetex won’t read em, We’ve been at this for a year atp

19

So, positives: You gave Water Poisoning a visible meter, so everybody knows when it will start.

Negatives: You made Water Poisoning appear far more often, made ways to remove it far less efficient, tied multiple side effects to it prior to the effect even beginning to affect you, and made Beast Defense reduce the damage (I assume, this isn’t tied to vanity slots anymore, like many suggested before).

A bit too much forced difficulty

20

However, I like what you made here. So, how about this?

These visual effects (not the reduced stamina and health regen, though) will be tied to starcitadel’s version of the meter, removal methods aren’t nerfed (but Soap is deleted from the game), and the damage only starts at 100%, but ramps up over time, eventually reaching the damage rate it currently has. The meter flashing red at high percentages and the cue to remove it also stay, since those are good additions