ICA Electrocution Phone removed from HITMAN 3

so it never goes wrong for you, or for me, but it COULD? so thats why its balanced?

anyway i just wanna share this as it sprung to mind, i used a phone a few weeks back to lure Zoe Washington in a spot I didnt expect to work, just using advanced knowledge of how the game audio works. I think it serves as a great example as to why its not believable that a decent player could struggle to simply get a target to pick up a phone.

This I find genuinely intriguing tbh, im very open to others opinions and I can see your point. I have another Ezra Electro, mind if I ask your opinion on that one?

PS you can screwdriver the power switch but the peekaboo is gonna be tricky to swap for another suitable lure tbh, so i can see why you wont use this kill

That, plus the fact that you still have to get to the target, figure out the best place to drop the phone so that it has the least possible chance of someone else picking it up, and getting out of the map without being caught. Add on the fact that not every target puts themselves in a spot where it’s easy to do so without requiring a lot of stealth or proper disguises, and the challenge of actually getting there and getting out makes up for whatever minor challenge the phone might take away when properly deployed. If a target wanders into a room by themselves, and the bulk of your time so far has been dedicated to getting in that room yourself, what difference does it make at that point if you dropped the phone and left right away, or stayed hidden to wait for the target and just shot them in the head from behind and then left? You encounter the same amount of difficulty in both of those scenarios. The main difference is, the character of 47 would choose to leave the phone because it’s cleaner, and a professional would want to be far away from his target when they died to reduce the chance of someone connecting them with the death as much as possible.

I suppose, put another way: I like the phone for story/lore purposes, not gameplay purposes.

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I miss that item so much

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That’s a really good summary actually.

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Yes, it’s fine. It broke the game in half, trivialised targets, and in general was an OP weapon. If you’re wondering why the items in 7DS and the deluxe pack are all reskins or slightly different to other weapons, then this is why as IOI went the other direction to avoid the same controversy.

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The 7DS introduced one of the most overpowered items in the game: Goldbrick Proximity Mine.

You can get free open kills (combined with a bomb). You can sedate and then openly shoot targets with it (utilizing the Tranq glitch). It knocks out multiple NPCs at once. And it’s not illegal to openly carry it or drop it in front of NPCs.

Everything you said about the Electrocution phone applies to the GB Proximity Mine.

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As I understand it, it’s a sleep mine. It has rather similar uses to the emetic grenade, only more reliable to use by nature of being place-able.

That isn’t intended behaviour of the game. You can do it, but that isn’t a good point to bring in this kind of argument as, by its nature, it’s not known by everyone that such a thing exists.

Again, same use-case as the emetic grenade and the Sieker. I don’t think this is as useful as many think it is. “Oh cool, I can KO five people…now what?”. Chances are, if there’s a small gathering of people, it’s in a public place. At that point, the emetic grenade would be more useful, because at the very least people in your way move from the area instead of being KO’d on the floor waiting to be discovered.

Very much like the KO duck is.

Except it doesn’t kill people by itself, which is what made the elec phone so powerful. You didn’t need to chain it with anything else to get a kill or create a puzzle to use it creatively. You lobbed it at the target, they picked it up, and they get killed when you ring it…and it counted as an accident. It was a braindead item that ruined the very concept of NPC loops, trivialised ET’s and broke the game in half. At the very least, other items have some gameplay utility; the elec phone was as close to a free kill button you could get in this kind of game.

The two items are in different leagues of power.

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It doesn’t. Sedatives and Emetics are two different things.

Irrelevant. Your argument is the EP was the most OP item in the game and broke it/trivialized targets. My point is, that’s still happening AND ioi helped by adding the Goldbrick.

Do you know how the Goldbrick actually works!? Because your comments make me think you don’t. Knocking people out with it doesn’t void your SA rating. So when you add a bomb, it registers as a clean kill. Same as the Tranq gun glitch. ALL SA kills.

All concussion Ducks/grenades void your SA rating if a body is found.

Nope. Both allow SA retaining, open kills.

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For the hundred millionth time, and this applies to everybody on Earth making this argument: If you don’t like that it does this, just don’t use it!

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The snail is fine tbh. If people want to exploit a glitch with it then that’s on them. The distinction here is that the Elec Phone was just outright OP and was designed to be an instant SA kill without any sort of exploitation, where as the snail is merely a part of a method to abuse a glitch.

If IO removed every item that could be used to exploit a glitch, then be prepared to wave goodbye to the tasers since there are various glitches that cause NPCs to pick them up and put them in their “inventories” that will just electrocute them when activated.

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Correct, but the snail doesn’t require doing anything special, other than dropping it and then dropping a bomb for an easy SA kill.

Remember, the debate here is Dribbleondo’s claim that the Electrocution Phone “broke the game in half, trivialised targets, and in general was an OP weapon”. I’m simply pointing out that the Goldbrick Proximity Mine does the exact same things. And TBH, not only is it more reliable (no chance of the wrong NPC picking it up), but it’s faster.

Whether or not it’s a glitch/exploit is irrelevant when it comes to that point.

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That’s not how meta’s work. Meta’s are formed by people using a weapon and trying to find ways to use it that’s beneficial to them. That gets posted on forums like this one, and seen by more and more people, to the point that items need to be removed or nerfed/ buffed. And we’ve had quite a few items like this in WOA:

  • Between 2016 and 2, all fire extinguishers were made non-lethal, This was in direct response to players repeatedly using this method to kill ET’s pretty easily and quickly, not to mention regular targets once they’re isolated. Mark Faba even makes a joke about this!

  • Between 2016 and 2, the gas canisters radius was reduced. Probably for the same reasons as above.

  • The Elec phone, for reasons I’ve already mentioned, got removed between H2 and H3 as it was OP and due to how controversial the item was, among other reasons i’ve mentioned above.

  • Sedatives got buffed in the middle of 2 to be more useful and are essentially knockouts that don’t void S/A, making them on-par with emetic weapons and lethal poison, and sometimes better (the goldbrick).

Stop ignoring this facet of game design already. “Just don’t use it” doesn’t work as a method of balancing a game because people bloody do use it! You don’t fix a problem with game balance by ignoring the problem! Even in single player games, meta’s and “the intended way to play the game” are something that needs to be considered.

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…I didn’t say they were the same…I said they have similar use-cases…I’m a little confused on how you misread what I typed.

It’s entirely relevant, and the elec phone was OP without resorting to glitches. And as I said, in any discussion like this, glitches are immediately disregarded as not every player does them, even if they are easy to do.

Yes I do, but what’s happened here is that you’ve totally misread my comments.

In this part, I was referring to how the rubber duck allows you to carry an explosive without drawing attention. That’s it, really. Again, you’ve misread my comment.

One was designed to be OP, the other has to use glitches. I stand by my statement.

I’m sure there is a better thread somewhere in the forum for the EP thing, and I think anyone willing to continue the discussion should move it to there.

I don’t think whether an item was overpowered or not is relevant to this topic.

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And I stand by mine. Meanwhile, people are still using the Tranq-Gun and Goldbrick-bomb so the game is still broke in half, targets are still trivialized, and in general, there’s still OP weapons in the game.

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If people want to use what’s in the game that way, that’s their choice when they’re making the game less fun. For a game where everybody is always going on about playing how you want, this should be readily apparent. Seriously, what difference do any of those things you pointed out make, in a game where a player is free to just gun down everything in their way until they get to the target?

The reason why those things were a problem was because of how it helped people gain advantages to their rankings in the leaderboards, that’s all.

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Sure you can play like this, and hell i’ve done so in the past, but it’s clearly not the intended experience.

The game actively punishes this behaviour with a lower rating and point penalties, It’s a stealth game, not a looter shooter or survival horde game (wrath notwithstanding).

It’s not just to curb leaderboard advantages. it was an OP weapon that broke the game. There are still powerful weapons in the game, but the elec phone was the only one that was risk free and killed its target with basically no downside or counter. This is what game developers call “bad weapon design”.

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There’s a difference between an innately powerful weapon and one that you have to use glitches to make powerful. That’s my point in a nutshell.