Lerk Bile Bomb
PowerfuryOA
Join Date: 2012-03-07 Member: 148314Members
Join Date: 2012-03-07 Member: 148314Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Should be Gorge Bile Bomb</div>I still don't quite understand the abrupt change of moving the Gorge bile bomb to the fastest unit in the game, the Lerk.
The Lerk has the capability to move throughout the map extremely quickly harassing resource nodes, phase gates, and the Marine base. It has a large splash radius and is damage over time (DoT). The damage also stacks. The Lerk also has the ability to disengage at any time.
The Marines cannot weld if the structure it is bile bombed. This makes it incredibly frustrating, and game breaking, as a single Lerk is capable to harass vital marine base structures which no time to breath/repair. This problem will become dramatically worse if adrenaline is going to be implemented in the near future.
Coupled with hit registration where bullets escape to another universe (perhaps the Warp?), but enough blood is left to fuel a hive, makes it difficult to swat away the Lerk.
In the meantime, I will be bile bombing the Marine base and killing all of their structures.
The Lerk has the capability to move throughout the map extremely quickly harassing resource nodes, phase gates, and the Marine base. It has a large splash radius and is damage over time (DoT). The damage also stacks. The Lerk also has the ability to disengage at any time.
The Marines cannot weld if the structure it is bile bombed. This makes it incredibly frustrating, and game breaking, as a single Lerk is capable to harass vital marine base structures which no time to breath/repair. This problem will become dramatically worse if adrenaline is going to be implemented in the near future.
Coupled with hit registration where bullets escape to another universe (perhaps the Warp?), but enough blood is left to fuel a hive, makes it difficult to swat away the Lerk.
In the meantime, I will be bile bombing the Marine base and killing all of their structures.
Comments
1.: reapers in sc2 are fast anti building.
2.: ns2 is mainly a fps and fast anti building works here, too. Until late game, skulk is the main anti structure class. Works quite well.
While Lerk bilebomb is anti structure, too, it has some limitations to it. Lerk costs res, bilebomb requires 2 hivs and a lot of energy and lerk is very fragile when concentrating on a single harvester or building.
Bilebomb is rather for harassing than for fast-killing specific building, like skulk is imo.
I also agree it can be frustrating to deal with a lerk just hit and running extractors and buildings all over the map, a good lerk is hard to catch, which means you'll just have to go in and weld structures after the lerk has passed by them.
I've seen fast-attack, anti structure units in almost every FPS game I can imagine.
RA3 capitalized on air power for that role, but there were also land based alternatives. The biggest I can think of was the Commando unit, which could hop into any troop transport, ride into a base (with the appropriate support), and start demolishing structures. More conventional examples included Mirage Tanks and IFVs.
TW3/Kane's Wrath had the Shatterer for GDI, Corrupter for Scrin, and Nod had the same staple Attack Bikes and Stealth Tanks they've always had to fill the role.
Keep going back and you'll keep seeing examples; fast-moving base killers are about as old as RTS.
Bile Bomb provides a good way to support at range, when using spike just isn't viable (flying reduces your accuracy, and Spikes do have huge spread...); I often find myself tagging along with a few Skulks or a Fade, then lob a BB from far away using my flight momentum. Marines may be able to replenish health on the go with Medpacks, but welding in combat is much harder to pull off.
While I do miss being a siege cannon as Gorge, I welcome the new Lerk with open claws :)
RA3 capitalized on air power for that role, but there were also land based alternatives. The biggest I can think of was the Commando unit, which could hop into any troop transport, ride into a base (with the appropriate support), and start demolishing structures. More conventional examples included Mirage Tanks and IFVs.
TW3/Kane's Wrath had the Shatterer for GDI, Corrupter for Scrin, and Nod had the same staple Attack Bikes and Stealth Tanks they've always had to fill the role.
Keep going back and you'll keep seeing examples; fast-moving base killers are about as old as RTS.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I didn't play much of the C&C series after the first couple, but were these siege units "fast" as in "not superslow like a catapult" or "fast" as in "can hit and run without getting hit"?
I've been hearing alot of people say this. I think its not a case of bilebomb preventing welding as it is cancelling out the welding? A bilebombed structure doesn't drop in hp when you weld it, but neither does it increase. Atleast thats how i remember it.
Yes, I believe it is cancelling out the welding.
You can see the health go up and down as the welder/bile do their thing.
I agree, let's take a look at the statistics:
<b>Welder</b>
Structure Repair Rate, Min: 60 Health/Armor per second
Structure Repair Rate, Max: 350 Health/Armor per second
<b>Bile Bomb</b>
Damage per second: 80
Duration: 5
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2012/03" target="_blank">Build 200 change</a>: Welders won't scale up their repair rates for structures which are under attack.
So a single Welder will only repair 20 health per second, which Bile Bomb can out damage due to base repair rate only.
Reapers are not air units, and they are also <i>incredibly</i> easy to kill in the midgame.
I personally will avoid any further comparison of the two games, because you really just can't.
I agree. It makes the Lerk a lot more enjoyable to play. Usually I would just wait for Fade or Onos but now if we need a Lerk to bile bomb I will fill that role.
Now the spikes suck and I have to use bile bomb to destroy any structures -- a role the gorge should have kept.
For RA3, as I said, air units were predominantly the fast-attack building destroyers. IFVs were speedier than most other game units though, and Mirage tanks were quicker than most of their tank counterparts, allowing both to escape from anything short of a helicopter attack wing.
For TW/Kane's Wrath, GDI and Scrin kept their most powerful hit-and-run building killers in the air (Firehawks and PACs were devastating; Firehawks in particular could literally teleport anywhere on the map to completely bypass enemy defenses or escape from an ambush), but the Attack Bike was actually the fastest unit in the game (and one of NOD's cheapest vehicles at 1/3 the price of a standard tank and three times the firepower), and the Stealth Tank would literally turn invisible and untargetable after each devastating 12-missile salvo.
Fast attack building destroyers are nothing new in RTS, and flying fast attack building destroyers are practically a staple. These units are usually balanced by an inability to meaningfully impact enemy units and/or low health, both of which the Bile-Bombing Lerk has in spades. RA3 had Vindicators, Twinblades, and Striker VXs for its three factions, while TW/KW had its Orca, Vertigo, and Stormrider bomber craft.
I don't find them that hard to hit, you just have to calm down and take aim, get them as they fly into the base and when they fly out, not when they're in the middle zig-zagging allover the place and everyone else is spraying bullets everywhere like crazy trying to hit it, they also die really easily to a couple of close range shotgun blasts, which are easy to hit if you wait in the doorway for the lerk to escape and hit him as he flies right past you
^THIS
Lerks have to leave the room somehow, and the doorways are small gaps. If 2-3 people focus fired on that doorway as the lerk made its exit, it would go down instantly.
Best way to kill a lerk is staying in medium range of it, you can easily see its movements that way and you can pick it out.
Lerks have to leave the room somehow<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
yeah, what I like to do, is hide just outside the doorway where I know the lerk will be escaping from, and I can usually kill them as they leave because they've already taken some damage inside the room, and they don't expect to have to dodge anything once they have a wall between them and the marines in the room they are fleeing
Mutalisk flocks.
I was totally wrong about moving bilebomb to the lerk. I like it. In UWE, we trust.
They kind of kill buildings through numbers, but they are in no way cost efficient in doing that. In SC2 numbers you need like 1200/1200 investment (+ 200/200 spire) to kill a 100/0 turret without bigger damage. I guess the NS equivalent would be something like having half of your team going lerks to spike down buildings.
As for SC2, reapers are a better example I believe. They were nerfed to death because of the huge issues on certain situations, including the fact that you can't really counter them with defensive buildings. Lerk is a bit similar to reaper in the sense that it probably needs its strengths in more direct player vs player figths too and can't be limited to a very specific role to justify the huge potential in some area.
As usual, I'm not going to say that the mobile anti-building unit is an impossible equation, but it's a tricky combination that can get out of hand in many situations. It's kind of a thing where you have to consider whether you want the specific thing X or maybe some more possibilities in map design and/or other gameplay design areas.
If we had unlimited time and resoucres to see where the lerk goes I'd be willing to see if there's a way to make it interesting, but right now I don't know. It wouldn't be nice at all if this turned out to be a dead end two months from now.
Compared to gorge bile bomb I think it's inferior, mainly because it doesn't require much teamwork, while gorge and fade were working very well together (gorge billing and fade covering him).
As a minor point, I also liked the fact you could gorge in the ceiling or on top of something and try to bile from there, you could really interact with the map, try to find a good spot, manage to sneak there as a skulk, evolve and laugh at the marines while biling. It also required a specific answer form the marines; find a way to climb (mines, marine ladder,..), get a fire line from somewhere else, get a gl or a jetpack, etc.
ditto..
plus knocking out multiple mines and dropping a nice spore screen not so much for kills just supporting a team...
lerks save lives and waste marines time and res
:)
I think it's really performance issues that are making him so hard to hit. In fully built marine bases I lose FPS quick and also seem to see other lag, which makes hitting the bile-bombers that much more impossible. Certainly I can't be alone on this.
except lerks using bile/spores do all the other things mutas do too (like keeping marines in their base, threatening counterattacks/base trades, killing reinforcements and so on) - it's not just about attacking structures (and bile is honestly quite bad at that in anything but a 5-10 minute campaign of slowly digesting the base)
if marine players could reliably hit lerks (including spores being more transparent), the mutalisk analogy would be nearly perfect (right down to the part where ricocheting muta attacks kill repairing SCVs, while bile prevents repairing for a time)
also, I like bile on the lerk but the game needs to be in a different state for people to even begin looking at how to balance it