What are the glancing blow mechanics? Why do we need glancing blows?
ElectricSheep
Join Date: 2003-04-21 Member: 15716Members
Join Date: 2003-04-21 Member: 15716Members
Hello! NS1 player here transitioning to NS2 and I am having a lot of trouble because of these "glancing blows". I try and do a good ambush, get right up on someone and start biting.... get four bites and they're still standing! Obviously, I always try and aim as best I can, but sometimes I can completely blindside a marine and still get glancing hits. It's very discouraging to carefully set up an ambush on a rampaging shotgun rambo, land 5 bites before he reacts, and still lose....
Is there some trick to not getting these glancing blows?
The other big problem for me with regards to glancing blows is that they add a lot of uncertainty into my multitarget fighting/ambushing. That is, I have no idea how many hits things will take to kill. In NS1, for instance, if I ambush two marines early in the round, I know for certain that landing by parasite-2bite combo or 3 bite if site misses will put me into a 1v1. That is, in big melees I can know if my next attack will kill, enabling me to quickly move from target to target. Alternatively, I can do a quick ambush to kill someone and then squeak away from the now reduced enemy threat. But in NS2, I drop from the ceiling onto a duo, land 3 bites, leap out.... and get splattered by 2x marine fire because my three bites did as much damage as ONE bite did in NS1!
I'm especially having trouble also with hit and runs with leap, lerk flight, and blink. That is, it's one thing to leap/fly/blink straight onto a lone target and beat him down. But when he's with his friends, you gotta whittle him by leaping/flying/blinking by his side and quickly hitting him without ever slowing your movement. In NS2 I am finding this laughably ineffective, because I can do literally six or seven drive by melee attacks and still fail to kill one marine! It's discouraging to say the least... In fact, it's so discouraging I find myself almost never playing fade in NS2 despite it being my favorite alien class in NS1.
Anyway, I need to figure out some way to overcome these glancing hits or my days as an alien are numbered. Any advice would be welcome.
Is there some trick to not getting these glancing blows?
The other big problem for me with regards to glancing blows is that they add a lot of uncertainty into my multitarget fighting/ambushing. That is, I have no idea how many hits things will take to kill. In NS1, for instance, if I ambush two marines early in the round, I know for certain that landing by parasite-2bite combo or 3 bite if site misses will put me into a 1v1. That is, in big melees I can know if my next attack will kill, enabling me to quickly move from target to target. Alternatively, I can do a quick ambush to kill someone and then squeak away from the now reduced enemy threat. But in NS2, I drop from the ceiling onto a duo, land 3 bites, leap out.... and get splattered by 2x marine fire because my three bites did as much damage as ONE bite did in NS1!
I'm especially having trouble also with hit and runs with leap, lerk flight, and blink. That is, it's one thing to leap/fly/blink straight onto a lone target and beat him down. But when he's with his friends, you gotta whittle him by leaping/flying/blinking by his side and quickly hitting him without ever slowing your movement. In NS2 I am finding this laughably ineffective, because I can do literally six or seven drive by melee attacks and still fail to kill one marine! It's discouraging to say the least... In fact, it's so discouraging I find myself almost never playing fade in NS2 despite it being my favorite alien class in NS1.
Anyway, I need to figure out some way to overcome these glancing hits or my days as an alien are numbered. Any advice would be welcome.
Comments
well, basically.... be glad you have glancing hits now. In the patches before release (like 223 and 224) the damage con (the zone in front of your alien model which do damage to marines) was much more narrow. So you needed to land perfect hits, otherwise you would get nothing at all.
So glancing hits are ingame to actually help new alien players, while the pros and veterans are able to land full hits.
So, practice, practice, practice. And here, a vanilla skulk needs two full bites and a parasite or glancing bite to kill a marine without upgrades.
And, I have the same problem with getting killed while running from a fight. I don't know why, but I nearly always only get killed when I am nearly around the corner and in safety... That really is annoying me. We blink a long hallway away with your last hps, and when you turn around the saving corner "BOOM" you get killed by a pistol shot...
You just need to learn to retreat at the right time and the right way...
so long
SOOO, basically the skulk's skill floor was too high for the average player, much higher than the marine one. The skulk was NOT AT ALL forgiving to play or fun to play, despite it being the class you spend the most time playing. Glancing bites were implemented as a sort of compensation for this, i.e the skill floor is lowered a bit but the skill ceiling is still in place, i.e with proper practice you WILL learn to land more 75 dmg bites instead of 25 and 50 ones, and thus be a become a better skulk. But at least for your average skulk it's not as frustrating and outright unforgiving, not landing any bites...
It's a good mechanic imo, though I would have personally much rather seen them decrease skulk model size and implement a proper movement mechanic to build way more speed. (That way marine skill floor is brought closer to skulk and skulk play overall is more forgiving)
Either way, practice! I have no trouble landing parasite + 2 bites for kills, but then again, I've played over 400 hours of NS 2 :P. Keep the marine to the center of your screen. You could also get a crosshair mod, it will add a crosshair to the skulk bite so you can better practice landing proper 75 dmg bites. I.e making sure you are hitting the marine on the middle of the screen.
Then they introduced glancing bite, which seemed like a good middle ground and compromise between the two. I feel it still needs a tiny bit of tweaking though. Some glancing hits are too easy to hit, and there are definitely times I thought I would land a 75 hit and don't (not that often though, usually it's pretty spot on). I'm pretty happy with how it is though.
I still think the hit reg needs some looking into aswell coz i still see numbers that should be higher. 50's instead of 75's on high moving marines.
I had a marine running away from me i leaped and bit him right in the back....50 are you kidding me?
I reckon it should only be two number sets 50 and 75...25 is just too harsh.
The only answer to OP's question is "get a crosshair mod and practice aiming more".
The audio cue is still there but it is drowned out by the skulk bite sound. It needs to be adjusted a smidgen.
Glancing blows were added to help new players and latency problems, without making the skulk too powerful.
I think that was called Focus in NS1.
Reduced your rate of fire but doubled your damage.
Effectively it's just a big nerf.
You have an hp counter on skulks? Well aren't you special?
He is talking about doing damage to a marine as a skulk. It's easier for a marine to know the amount of damage he did to the Skulk, the othe way around is harder to do with medkits and armor values on the marine. Also post a bit less "flamebaity" please :)
I tend to never get below 100 ping since I live in Hawaii, so melee is incredibly inconsistent due to all the latency and the low framerate I sometimes get due to the poor optimization of this game.
On top of that, aliens are already fairly underpowered compared to Marines so it just makes them even more inferior since Marines can do the same amount of damage no matter where they hit but you have to somehow aim your melee hits when there really isn't any good indication on when your swing results in a glancing blow. The Marines kill you in 5 to 6 shots pretty much no matter what, but as a skulk it can take 10+ swings due to the weird inconsistent glancing blow system which is ridiculous. You'll be long dead before you can hit 10 swings.
I also don't really like the movement in this game compared to old NS1 (or any Source/GoldSRC engine games) because it almost feels like you have no air control. I like how the old one gave you full air control, it felt much smoother and more intuitive than the weird mushy movement this game engine has. I kind of wish they just used Source, actually, because that kind of movement seems to be built into the Source engine, and it would have ran much better since Source is fairly well optimized. Kind of a shame.
So yeah, all this stuff has basically kept me away from wanting to play as the aliens, and without better movement I kind of don't see myself playing much anyway even though I really like this game. I'm glad I could at least buy the game to support these guys because it's a great game at times, but hopefully it'll be greatly improved.
I also don't really like the movement in this game compared to old NS1 (or any Source/GoldSRC engine games) because it almost feels like you have no air control. I like how the old one gave you full air control, it felt much smoother and more intuitive than the weird mushy movement this game engine has. I kind of wish they just used Source, actually, because that kind of movement seems to be built into the Source engine, and it would have ran much better since Source is fairly well optimized. Kind of a shame.
So yeah, all this stuff has basically kept me away from wanting to play as the aliens, and without better movement I kind of don't see myself playing much anyway even though I really like this game. I'm glad I could at least buy the game to support these guys because it's a great game at times, but hopefully it'll be greatly improved.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I agree with glancing blows being more of a pain than anything. I just hate not being able to effectively plan my attacks like OP was talking about, it's just too inconsistent.
And I also agree with the things you mention about movement, although I don't think NS1 had FULL air control - but I agree it definitely felt better to move in.
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/CkEAk.png" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/CkEAk.png</a>
Some people don't get it, so this is why I described it as a massive nerf against the aliens. It just makes crackhopping marines that much more effective. The top diamond is the old bite pattern from NS1. If you hit a marine, you did the damage you were supposed to, and the game was balanced around that.
The second diamond is what we have now. Poor bite accuracy is punished, which effectively means your aim must be MUCH better than it used to be to do the SAME DAMAGE THE GAME IS BALANCED AROUND. I'm not saying that bite accuracy shouldn't matter, but the problem was balancing the game around everyone hitting the 'perfect bites'. Glancing blows do so little damage that against A3 marines you might as well not even bother attacking at all.
If you actually wanted to reward accuracy, then the bite pattern on the bottom is what you'd want. A perfect, solid bite would do EXTRA damage, mitigating the impact of glancing blows, and rewarding an alien with good accuracy.
This point is moot, however, because of how terrible the balance currently is anyway. Jetpack marines can already outmaneuver almost every alien, and skulks with leap cannot even jump high enough to reach a jetpack that's around the top of your average room. Trying to kill an A3 jetpack marine with skulk bites is nearly impossible because it's that much harder to land a "good bite" against them.
Likewise, Marines aren't punished for hitting a Fade's legs, arms, claws, or the space in between, are they? The answer is they are not. MISSING is not the same as a glancing blow. Missing is missing, and a skulk who misses a bite does zero damage, same as a marine.
All this has done is encourage marines more than ever to leap around like imbeciles when skulks show up, because it's that much harder to land a bite that actually does the damage you're supposed to be doing.
Do you want to know what the marine equivalent of this would be? Making people score headshots to do their listed gun damage, with bodyshots doing reduced damage, and arm / leg shots doing very poor damage. Skulks are almost bigger than they used to be, and they're slower as well. This nerf was not necessary and is partly why skulks completely lose all effectiveness when marines get A2 and above.
Even if you had a point about skulks being small and hard to shoot and thus making it a tradeoff, this argument completely loses all water when you talk about the Fade or Onos. They are literally impossible to miss due to their size, and therefore it makes zero sense to punish them for less than optimal accuracy while marines just get a free ride to hitsville.
this would be really nice.
my biggest difficulty is that the HUD is quite small and it's therefore difficult to see if you've dealt damage or if you've received damage.
the uncertain dealing damage is mainly a problem with aliens, because you're often not looking directly at your target - you have to be looking elsewhere to get the best mobility and make yourself a hard target.
with both alien and marines i'm often dying to what seems like a single hit, purely because i mistakenly thought i was full health. it's confusing :o
There's also the issue of audio when biting/shooting or being bitten/shot. It doesn't work. in ns1 you know exactly when you've been hit, the audio there helping immensly. In ns2, half the time i'm at 30 hp as skulk and there's barely any feedback that i've been hit. The skulk lets out a screen literally .75 seconds after taking damage. Super annoying.
I will note, however, that these melee mechanics are a pretty stark contrast to Team Fortress 2. TF2 actually tried to willingly increase the viability of switching to your melee weapon, even when they're not CoD-instant-kill knife attacks, by basically allowing people to swing in very off-the-side directions and still land a hit. You can test it by standing next to a wall, aiming out into empty space, and swinging with the wall in your vision; it's actually not hard to make a dent in the wall this way. I guess in TF2, the rationale was that players are "swinging" their weapons, and thus need nowhere near the precision of firing a bullet.
PS; it should be noted that inferior technology should probably lose to highly-developed weapons. Skulks will have a hard time against jetpacks, just like assault rifles will have a hard time against Fades.