/tg/Station 13

General nanite nerfs.

While armor nanites can get really silly when worn armor and stacking are involved, I don't agree with necessity of other changes. Remember that you pay for all that awesomeness of nanites with risk of someone slapping something extremely dangerous into cloud server or one ion shot not only utterly destroying volume, but also potentially removing cloud ID and adding toxin buildup programs. Last time I saw something like that happen with nanites, it was ninja who tried to powergame everything from station, got EMPed and died.

On a general note im tired of invisible armor/death mechanics and would like to see most of the number-shifting manifest into an indicator, ideally visual.

In regards to nanites specifically, I'm not a science player so I may be missing some portion of information but if I had to roll the dice i'd be willing to guess that the ease of people getting le epic health/armor/etc. good nanites is quite high while the amount of times the nanite pool actually gets sabotaged is quite low.

The ease at which you can sabotage the nanites is very contextual, and I think balance discussions seem to gloss over that.

I've shared my thoughts on the PR in the comments; personally i'd revert some parts of it, although the armor nerf was justified.
I am a bit stumped on how to encourage more players to learn nanites and therefore become able to sabotage them when they are used in a round, because it's necessary to keep them balanced.

anecdotal i know, but i've only ever seen people who arent me make nanites twice since this change hit live. its pretty hard to justify the risk of taking nanites you didnt personally cook up atm (and pre-nerf nanites already had a pretty bad case of this). regardless of this, even before they got nerfed, nanites were only particularly good at giving you an edge against poorly-equipped assailants. the usual suspects either circumvented nanites entirely (batons) or overwhelmed them (any murdery antag weapon).
personally if i were to rebalance nanites, i would hit charge rate and consumption rate. increase the recharge rate notably, but make nanites drain faster across the board. makes you seem less like a god in drawn out fights without making nanites a 1-and-done style deal. throw in a buff to how much emps kill you if you have nanites in you and wham, "balance". not that nanites were even practically strong given how rarely they were used and how minorly they impacted the rounds they existed in.

I don't use nanites, but there's a fundamental misunderstanding of reduced diagnostics that's pretty clear to anyone who thinks about it for more than a second

This effectively eliminates the possibility of stealthy traitor nanites.