Bringing In Coven's Best
You know what's a really great way to generate "new" content quickly and cheaply? Recycle it! Sure, in theory, adding the Tracker and the Hypnotist to the base game devalues the Coven DLC, but if we're being honest that entire package isn't going to grow a playerbase any time soon unless the cheaper base game starts bringing players in more and enticing them to buy Coven in the first place. For now, then, we should bring the best Coven role from each faction to the base game, helping give players a reason to return and giving them a taste of the best Coven has to offer. As for fixing the Coven itself, that can come later - right now the base game should be the devs' main priority.
Shaking Up The TP/LO Meta
Let's face it - the day one Jailor claim meta got old years ago, and the problems that cause it have been around for over four years now, having also been the root cause of Mayor games back in the day. It's time to stop halfheartedly treating only the symptoms and to go for the root causes. Perhaps the most important problem? Town Protectives work too well on being able to guard a early-game claimant from death. To this end, it becomes important to give the scum ways to find and eliminate Town Protectives that stick to obvious early-game targets, and what better way to do that while revitalizing player interest than a new Mafia role to rival the Consigliere? Adding the Osservatore, a Mafia-aligned Lookout/Tracker combo, will help fix this issue and shake up the meta from powerful roles asking for protection immediately and then proceeding to sweep the game. Another important part of this is reducing the likelihood a Town Protective will be able to guard you at all, and to that end, we need a new Town Protective that is much less reliable at protecting its target from death than the Bodyguard and Doctor, and where better to look than the humble Vampire Hunter? By reworking it into the Hunter, a new Town Protective, we can kill three birds in one stone: nerfing the TP/LO Meta, reworking a role designed only to hardcounter Vampires, and making it so that the Hunter appears in many more games, all without removing a Kickstarter-promised role. Elegant.
- New Mafia Support role: Osservatore (except it can't read whispers)
- Rework Vampire Hunter into a new Town Protective role: Hunter
Redefining Neutral Evil
As is, Neutral Evil may just be the swingiest non-Any alignment in the game. The sheer amount of pro-scum utility offered by the Witch is not at all met by the Executioner and the Jester, and for Ranked in particular this causes some pretty noticeable and detrimental effects on game balance. To make matters worse, both the Executioner and the Jester have their own issues outside of swing - notably, the Executioner causes ugly kingmaker scenarios, and the Jester brings with its punishment a reason to avoid correct lynches and a crutch for bad scum players. To remedy these issues, Jester should be moved to Neutral Chaos, and Executioner should be entirely reworked into a role whose win condition is to see X many Town players lynched. After these changes, we can add in at new Neutral Evil roles that have the same general win-conditions as and similar power levels to the Witch, allowing Ranked to balance itself around these actually evil Neutral Evil roles. I would personally suggest my own Trickster be added, but there are certainly others that would work well. Lastly, the Witch should lose the ability to see the role of its targets, bringing it more in line with the new Neutral Evil roles and removing its ability to find allies for free, a reward it should have to work for. To help compensate for this, the Witch's controls no longer count as visits.
- Rework: Executioner becomes Shapeshifter
- Jester changed to Neutral Chaos
- Witch no longer sees the role of its targets
- Witch no longer actually visits the player it is controlling
- New Neutral Evil role: Trickster
Finally Fixing Spy
This one is also long overdue. Both parts of the original Spy were broken. Reading whispers and being able to read the Mafia's night chat combined into a role that was insanely powerful and decimated the Mafia even in games it didn't spawn in. Unfortunately, the previous statement is still true, as the Spy can see the Mafia's visits passively, causing almost as many issues as it did before! In addition, the new bug ability that was added isn't enough to justify the role's existence if its ability to see visits is removed, so it becomes necessary to rework the role again if we ever want to end up with a role that is actually good for the game. To that end, the Spy should be changed so that it becomes a true, active Town Investigative, but one that operates in a much less linear fashion than the Sheriff and Investigator do. By focusing it on dealing with investigating the connections between different players, rather than going down a list one player at a time, we can create a Spy with a much higher skill ceiling than it has ever had, while also encouraging players to make their own associative reads while using it. And if that isn't the happiest end possible for a role as contentious as the Spy, then I don't know what is. Here is the Spy rework.
- Rework Spy
Taking Care of Powerful Town
In general, I would say that there are 5 Town roles that stand head and shoulders above the rest, especially if you exclude the current two Town Protectives. These are, in rough order of power, the Jailor, Transporter, Veteran, Retributionist, and Mayor. Of these 5, the Veteran is the only one I wouldn't change, as it comes with significant enough drawbacks that letting it have such an absurdly high skill ceiling is fine. As for the rest, well, they should all see various changes. The Transporter is different from the other four roles in that it is not unique, and I believe that this should remain the case. Thus, to help bring it more in line with the rest of the Town, I would remove its ability to transport itself and remove the notification that you were transported from the game entirely. The role is more than powerful enough to deal with being much harder to confirm, and adding in the Trickster from above will further serve to reduce its ability to confirm itself, making it an extremely high-risk, high-reward role. For the remaining three unique and powerful Town, a new alignment should be created. While the common name for this suggestion is Town Power, it makes more sense to clear up any confusion between it and the other "TP", Town Protective, and just call it Town Leader, or "TL" for short. To prevent having multiple extremely powerful Town roles, there may only be one Town Leader spawned in any game. In order to make them fit into this new category on a relatively even playing field, the Jailor should lose its ability to jail the same target twice in a row, be reduced to having only two executions and only grant basic defense to its targets, while the Mayor should regain the abilities to be healed by Doctors and to whisper. These changes will help bring balance to the more notoriously overpowered members of the Town, and will prevent randomly spawning in a Retributionist and Mayor alongside your Jailor for an almost free win.
- Transporter may no longer self-transport and no longer notifies its targets that they were transported
- New alignment consisting of the Jailor, Retributionist, and Mayor: Town Leader
- Only one Town Leader may spawn in any given game
- Jailor now only has 2 executions and may not jail the same target twice in a row
- Jailor now only grants its targets Basic Defense
- Mayor may now be healed by Doctors
- Mayor may now whisper
Dealing With Weak Mafia
In general, I would say there are four Mafia roles that are significantly weaker than the rest. These are, in rough order of power, the Blackmailer, Disguiser, Framer, and Forger. The main issue the Blackmailer has is that using its ability reveals it exists and makes its passive whisper-reading useless by virtue of players knowing their whispers are 100% open to the Mafia. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, this is best fixed by removing the Blackmailer's ability to read whispers. In return, it should be buffed such that blackmailed targets can't change their vote once placed for eight seconds, and they shouldn't even be able to say "I am blackmailed." when voted to the stand. This allows the Blackmailer to more aggressively pursue mislynches without their target vote-spamming to indicate they have been blackmailed. As for the Disguiser, it should no longer be required to continuously visit a target to keep disguising as them, allowing you to disguise yourself as a role and then kill the player off without losing your disguise the next night. Additionally, the Disguiser should receive all external feedback messages its target does on the night it disguises as them (exactly like the current Spy), allowing it to better determine where the game is going. The Framer simply needs to be able to make it appear as if their target is visiting someone they are not, and with the Spy rework discussed above, the Framer can now affect all five Town Investigative roles, rather than a measly two. The Forger, which is currently little more than a discount Janitor, needs the most love. It should inherit the Blackmailer's ability to read whispers, helping it to construct believable fake wills. It should also now have its fake wills carry over into the day, allowing the Forger to push mislynches onto a "Disguiser" or erase critical will information more flexibly than a Janitor can. Lastly, it should be able to forge four fake wills rather than three, giving it more uses than a current Janitor if it does decide to go for purely wiping information from wills. With all of these changes made, the weakest Mafia roles should all be much closer to the best.
- Blackmailer may no longer read whispers
- Blackmailed players must now wait 8 seconds before changing their vote
- Blackmailed players may no longer speak on the stand at all
- Disguiser now retains its last disguise until it adopts a new one
- Disguiser will receive all external feedback its target does when it disguises (this works exactly like the current Spy)
- Framer now chooses who their target appears to visit
- Forger may now read whispers
- Forger now has 4 forges instead of 3
- Forged targets will have the forged will show up if they are lynched the day after being forged
Shoring Up Vigilante
The Vigilante can be a powerful role in the right hands. In the wrong hands, however, it can turn an extremely Town-sided situation into a loss extremely quickly. This swing is due in no small part to the Vigilante's suicide guilt mechanic, which essentially automatically doubles the effects of any missed shots with no good reason to do so. Luckily, the fix for this is easy - by reducing the Vigilante's guilt mechanic to match the Jailor's, causing it to lose the ability to kill any more players if it shoots Town rather than shooting itself as well. To compensate for this change, it should lose one bullet, only being able to shoot twice, in order to reduce the hardcarry potential of the role. These changes also have the side benefit of making outed Vigilantes a less insanely powerful target for a Witch to control, cutting the fatalities caused in half. On that note, however, the Witch also needs a change for the benefit of the Vigilante; its magic barrier should only work against attacks made by scum, as opposed to all basic attacks, but should be stronger against them. If a Vigilante has decided to shoot a Witch, you were either playing badly or have been found out, and in both cases you deserve to die.
- Vigilante now has 2 bullets instead of 3
- Vigilante no longer kills itself if it shoots another member of the Town; instead, it puts its gun away and can no longer shoot
- Witch loses the ability to block Town roles' attacks with its magic barrier
- Witch is now given Invincible defense against all non-Town attacks on the night its magic barrier is activated
Equalizing Neutral Killers
The Serial Killer remains, to this day, the best Neutral Killing role for its preciseness and its consistency, although its weaknesses to Escort, Consort, and Jailor are notable. The most recent changes to the Arsonist made it better, but focused far too much on the Investigator in particular when there are multiple other roles that can catch it. The poor Werewolf, on the other hand, has never been good, due to a lack of consistent kills or being able to control who exactly it kills. All the Serial Killer needs is to give it at least a tiny chance to escape death if it is ever roleblocked, and so the role blocker's death message will now be "You were stabbed by a Serial Killer!" instead of "You were stabbed by the Serial Killer you roleblocked/jailed!". As for the Arsonist, I'm inclined to give it even more ways to remain stealthy and sow chaos amongst investigatives, so allowing the Sheriff to detect it but also detecting doused targets as "Suspicious", just like the Investigator does, seems to work. It still needs a bit more killing power to be around even with the Serial Killer though, so it should be able to ignite once per game on the same night that it douses a target, allowing it to kill more gradually over the course of the game without losing a night to ignite. As for the Werewolf, it just needs a rework to make its kills more consistent. Here is the Werewolf rework.
- When the Serial Killer attacks a roleblocker, the roleblocker's death message will now be "You were stabbed by a Serial Killer!" instead of "You were stabbed by the Serial Killer you roleblocked/jailed!"
- Arsonist may now ignite on the same night it douses once per game
- Arsonist now appears as suspicious to Sheriffs
- Doused targets now appear as suspicious to Sheriffs
- Rework: Werewolf
Ranked Refresh
With so many changes and new roles here, it makes complete sense to end this season with this update and begin a new season of Ranked. Without adding Tactical Mafia Kills, it's hard to justify dropping one of the Random Mafia slots, and dropping the Mafioso slot leaves Escort and Jailor way too powerful (as we have discovered in the past). As such, it makes sense to run this new season with a role list that is either the same as the one we have now, or extremely similar to it. If Town Leader is not added, then the Town Support slot should be swapped for a Random Town; however, if Mayor and Retributionist are moved to Town Leader and Transporter is nerfed, then the slot could be left as Town Support. While you could in theory swap out the Jailor slot for a Town Leader slot, I personally believe that Jailor is much more conducive to a competitive Ranked game than Retributionist and puts much less focus on having a great player specifically as your Town Leader than with Mayor.
- A new Ranked season should begin with the launch of ToS 3.0
- The role list should stay mostly the same for now
- Mafia Tactical kills should be added at the start of the next season, and the role list should be changed to accommodate them then
Miscellaneous Improvements
- Bodyguard can not be healed when sacrificed protecting somebody
- Janitor now only has 2 cleans instead of 3
- Janitor now no longer loses a usage of its ability unless it successfully cleans a target
A Word On The Investigator
Until such time as I receive dev confirmation on which of these suggestions are being implemented and when, it is incredibly hard to create an actual Investigator results list for a suggestion that involves reworking several roles and adding so many new ones. Additionally, I am currently on vacation in New Zealand, and so don't have enough internet access to reliably spend time working on an Investigator results list for this suggestion anyways. I may get around to it in the future, but in general I am hopeful that adding new evil counterparts to Town roles (such as the Trickster and Osservatore) will make creating a new list easier than ever before, as the number of Town roles that cannot be fake-claimed by any evil role will drop substantially with the implementation of these suggestions. That being said, however, it is much better to push some large updates out the door now, and worry about fixing the Investigator soon after - the game could really use an exciting new update.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is it. I know, I know, comparatively short to my previous megathreads - but I aimed to capture what could reasonably come in an actual Town of Salem update 3.0 in the near future because I honestly believe a large single update is exactly what this game needs to re-kindle the fire in its playerbase, and it needs it pretty quickly if they're going to do it at all. Although I am sure that adding this many roles would be a ton of work, the Coven DLC showed us it is something the devs are willing to do to help secure the future of this game, and I really hope they agree with me enough to do it again now when it's needed most. Obviously, this should kickstart a steam of larger patches than we've had in years now that Unity is here, and I hope to be back up to a normal update schedule by Q2 2020 if all goes well. I really hope we can make this work in a way that will leave me playing this game for years to come.
Thanks for your support, and please don't hesitate at all to give your feedback on anything I've suggested here or remind me of anything I forgot! I look forward to debating with you in the comments below.