I’ve thought about this before, but I wanted to have a real thread for it.
Boomers are probably THE least dangerous variety of zombies around. They are pitifully easy to dispatch - simply equipping a pipe and bashing it to death is sufficient, and you’re almost guaranteed to have almost no injury from it, even if you have no melee skill. No other zombie is like this.
And on top of that, as far as the niche they fill, their role is extremely specific. Blinding you to a single tile radius is…really not important. It MIGHT prevent you from seeing something you want to run from, MAYBE, but the odds of that happening are very slim. I’m not above having a useless enemy to kill, and they drop almost no loot, but as far as the lore is concerned, having a waste of a host and spending an entire individual simply to inconvenience someone doesn’t fit the Blob’s style.
Now, glowing boomers make more sense; they mark you and make you visible to enemies that you might not necessarily be able to see in return. THAT is dangerous. But even that is kind of a specific occurrence; by the time boomers have evolved, the average player doesn’t need cover of darkness for safety anymore. Odds are they have the means to actually fight things, or are confident enough to loot in daylight. Still not all that useful.
Why not make Boomer bile sticky? Not only does it blind you, it makes you less able to deal with the threats that you CAN see, and it serves a real purpose in a fight. You only really need to see the 1 tile around you in order to attack something, so that’s not all that important - being able to do so, though? That’s the danger. If you’re all gunked up, your ability to fight will be reduced by some degree or another, and make boomers actually dangerous combined with something else, even a regular zombie.
It’s also more gross, which is all boomers really are right now. Just…annoying and gross. My suggestion is just to make them annoying and be worth something while maintaining their grossness.
