Summary

SUMMARY: Balance "Martial arts rebalance for Snake Kung Fu"

Purpose of change

Partially implements #32422
Update for the martial art: Snake Kung Fu

Describe the solution

One of the five Shaolin animal styles. The Snake focuses on sinuous movement and precision strikes.

Current Buffs, Techniques, and Special Abilities

Snake Kung Fu is pretty simple to use and understand. It adds Perception to damage and has all the basic techs that makes a style good: Rapid, Feint, Grab Break and even a stun for good measure.

Problems and issues

• Bash damage increased by 80% of Perception.
  This is common problem with most the animal kung fu's. Having 10 in the given stat is worth +8 bash damage and when you consider that normal bash damage is 75% of Strength you will realize just how powerful this static buff is.

• Snake Kung Fu has trouble standing out.
  Snake Kung Fu has a bunch of well known basics that are good to have but it doesn't have anything especially useful compared to the other kung fu styles. As a result, Snake style tends to get overlooked a lot.

Rebalance Goal
Snake Kung Fu has a good foundation but really needs something to make it stand out, especially since it is going to have it's Static Buff changed. In this case, I think there only needs to be one major new addition to make Snake style worthwhile.

New Buffs, Techniques, and Special Abilities

Important Changes

• Perception determines bonus Accuracy instead of Dexterity.
  A theme between all animal kung fu's is that the static buff will change what stat is considered for a damage or accuracy calculation. Snake's Sight add 25% of Perception and subtracting 25% of Dexterity to Accuracy. This effectively changes which stat is used for to-hit calculations. The base accuracy calculation can be found in
  character.cpp - line 2371:

float Character::get_hit_base() const
{
    /** @EFFECT_DEX increases hit base, slightly */
    return get_dex() / 4.0f;
}

• Added Arm Block.
  Snake Kung Fu does teach blocking. It was strange that this wasn't already part of the style.

• Added Snake's Coil OnPause buff.
  Taking a nod from how actual snakes defend themselves. Snake's Coil is now the core part of Snake Kung Fu. By waiting in place for a few turns, you can dramatically increase your chance to hit and can bypass a large amount of armor with your next few attacks.

• Added +50% bash damage to Snake Strike.
  Snake Kung Fu only has a Rapid for another technique and even with Snake's Coil, the style is still hurting for a way to actually fight opponents without the fight taking forever. Thus, I increased the damage on Snake Strike to improve the killing power of the style.

Advantages

• Snake Kung Fu has the largest amount of armor penetration in the game but only for a brief time.
• The style still has all the basic techniques that makes a style good: Rapid, Feint, Grab Break and even a stun.

Disadvantages

• You need time to "charge up" Snake's Coil and doing in the middle of combat probably isn't a good idea unless your opponent has a lot of armor.
• Armor penetration will let an attack ignore armor but it has no effect beyond negating the armor. If an opponent with little or no armor is attacked, their armor will be negated by any extra armor penetration will have no effect.
• The style is better at fighting one-on-one instead of fighting groups.

Describe alternatives you've considered

If the style is too strong...

• Reduce the Armor Penetration on Snake's Coil.
• Reduce the bonus damage on Snake Strike

If the style is too weak...

• Increase the stun duration of Snake Strike to 2 turns.
• Increase the duration of Snake's Coil.

Additional context

References:
Snake Style | Coil Technique
Five Animals in Shaolin Kung Fuhttps://www.shaolin-wahnam-wien.at/kungfu-5-tiere-1-en.php)
Five Animals wikipedia page
Kung fu animal styles