Board Thread:Role Ideas (Town)/@comment-35121393-20190914030837/@comment-28092296-20190919142523

I would remove the "5% chance to heal ignited target" thing, since that's pretty random and Town of Salem isn't a "random criticals" or "random hits" type of game.

I think you intended to make the healing ability like a debuffed Doctor heal with the 1-night cooldown, and that could work. However, I'd question why someone would have the ability to heal themselves, as I don't see anything in your role that suggests that the player only gets one self-heal. Not sure if this is a mistake, but being able to protect yourself every other night, forever, is unbalanced and you should add a 'self-healing' cap where you can only heal yourself 1 time or not at all.

I have the same problem with the Thorny Bush ability. Especially in the beginning of the game, when it's very unlikely that you'll die in the first few nights, it's pretty easy to stack up your defensive value, and when someone randomly attacks you and sees that you're night-immune, you can regain that defense in the next night or so.

The fact that your role combines the Doctor and Trapper mechanics is cool, but I think that in most games the Herbalist will serve as a discount Town Protective role. Think about it: When you choose to use either ability, you're using an ability that can already be performed better by another role. The Doctor can heal more efficiently and the Trapper can trap more effectively. So even though you have two abilities, no matter which one you use, you're doing something that can already be done better by somebody else.

Yes, the point of this role is to be worse at protecting people in exchange for versatility. The Necromancer is a good example of this: You can do everyone else's jobs less efficiently, but in exchange you get to do things like trap sweep and fake that there's another Mafia member alive killing people.

The options between two different abilities in exchange for being 'not as good' doesn't work for the Herbalist, as the result for this role isn't something that has a 'different gameplay to the same abilities' (PM and Consort are good examples of using other role's abilities but still making gameplay different) feel to it, but instead the Herbalist feels more like a that role doesn't do either of its jobs very efficiently. To me, it doesn't matter if you have a large range of abilities if your abilities themselves still aren't good. Why heal someone every other night if that means they're going to be exposed to dying half of the time? Or why use the thorns ability when you can use the trap ability and not only protect someone from dying but kill the attacker?

Both of your abilities are cool and they do feel like abilities that could go together in the same role, but right now the Herbalist feels more like a discount/not great version of two roles.

Currently, I think there's lots of potential for a role that has a cooldown ability, but like the trapper, can still technically 'do stuff' even on that cooldown. I'd suggest that you work on the thorny bush idea. Maybe if you automatically gave people powerful defense, and over the next two nights the defense decays away that would be a cool idea? That ways, you would have a role which has the 'standard' powerful defense level but still could stand out as a role that effectively uses cooldown times and defense that lasts more than one night to your advantage.

Overall, I'd recommend that you make this role more distinguishable than two debuffed abilities. Change up the every-other-night system and look into maybe tweaking the two protecting methods.