Combat Stim
What it is
A timer-triggered stat artifact. After avoiding damage for a fixed window, the ship gains a sustained weapon damage buff and emits a focused damage pulse around itself. The buff stays active until the ship is hit, at which point it is stripped and the timer restarts.
Identity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Display name | Combat Stim |
| Category | stat |
| Damage tag | (none) |
| Icon | bullseye |
| Primary color | ff4444 |
| Secondary color | cc2222 |
| Bright color | ff8888 |
| Proc audio cue | combat-stim adrenal pop / crackle / sizzle |
Per-tier values
The arm window is fixed at 8 seconds across every tier — only the buff strength, pulse damage, and pulse radius scale.
| Tier | Rarity | Damage buff (+%) | Pulse damage | Pulse radius (px) | Arm window (s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Uncommon | 80 | 60 | 140 | 8 |
| 2 | Rare | 130 | 100 | 165 | 8 |
| 3 | Epic | 200 | 155 | 190 | 8 |
| 4 | Legendary | 300 | 230 | 220 | 8 |
The common tier (tier 0) reuses the uncommon values record; differentiation at common is supplied by the shared flat passive bonus, not this table.
Effect
Two coupled effects run on the unified effect engine:
| Phase | Trigger | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Activate | 8s elapsed without taking damage | Apply weapon damage buff (flat additive to weaponDamagePct, no duration), deal area damage in a ring centered on the ship, play burst-and-ring VFX, flash the artifact icon, show a banner, play the proc audio cue. |
| Break | Player takes damage while the buff is held | Strip the buff. The arm timer then begins a fresh 8s countdown. |
Pulse damage is dealt as flat damage at the moment of activation. VFX is a burst-and-ring at scale 4.0 with 16 particles, lifetime 0.35 seconds, in the bright identity color.
Stacking rules
- The buff source is tagged
artifact:patient_fury. The break effect removes modifiers from that exact source, so taking a hit cleanly clears only this artifact’s contribution. - The damage buff has no duration on its own — it persists indefinitely until cleared by the break trigger.
- The 8-second arm window is reset by the
player_damagesignal; consecutive activations are impossible while the buff is already active because the break effect fires first. - The pulse is one-shot per activation; it does not repeat while the buff is held.
- Tier scaling is monotone in all three scaling values (damage buff, pulse damage, pulse radius). Arm time does not scale.
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE: the “timer-then-break” pattern (timer trigger paired with a signal-clear) is shared with Absorption Barrier; consider promoting to a cross-cutting page on the artifacts index when a second sibling lands.
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE: the rule that single-stat sustained-buff artifacts live in the small-radius / higher-per-proc-damage band (140-220px) is a system-level convention worth surfacing on the artifacts overview rather than re-stating per entity.