Competitive Players Balance Thoughts
SquishyOne
Join Date: 2005-01-11 Member: 34963Members
Join Date: 2005-01-11 Member: 34963Members
Hello everyone, there are a lot of balance threads every day in the general forum but I think a more interesting discussion could come from the competitive forum. So this is a thread hoping for the balance thoughts of either very skilled, or very experienced NS players to talk about competitive balance.
I have two main issues with competitive balance at the moment. One, dropping 3-4 Crags near a hive make it nearly impossible to shoot down with lmgs/shotguns. And two, marines don't have a great way to deal with onos no matter how much res domination the marines have had for the first 20 minutes.
My two suggested solutions would be to lower the amount of healing crags do to hives, or buildings in general, and to give marines an additional way to deal with onos. To deal with onos we would probably need a new gun and it would have to be ridiculously expensive to be balanced. That said, the point of the new weapon would be to reward marine teams that dominate the map for 25 minutes with a way to deal with onos, while still allowing onos to steamroll marines when they pop out if the marines have not been dominating. There are other possible creative solutions like expensive onos mines or somesuch that only blow up if an onos steps on them, but a weapon akin to an hmg would be the simplest solution.
And yes I am ignoring exos because imo you simply can't afford to have marines that can't teleport or beacon in a game with a maximum of 5 marines on the field.
I have two main issues with competitive balance at the moment. One, dropping 3-4 Crags near a hive make it nearly impossible to shoot down with lmgs/shotguns. And two, marines don't have a great way to deal with onos no matter how much res domination the marines have had for the first 20 minutes.
My two suggested solutions would be to lower the amount of healing crags do to hives, or buildings in general, and to give marines an additional way to deal with onos. To deal with onos we would probably need a new gun and it would have to be ridiculously expensive to be balanced. That said, the point of the new weapon would be to reward marine teams that dominate the map for 25 minutes with a way to deal with onos, while still allowing onos to steamroll marines when they pop out if the marines have not been dominating. There are other possible creative solutions like expensive onos mines or somesuch that only blow up if an onos steps on them, but a weapon akin to an hmg would be the simplest solution.
And yes I am ignoring exos because imo you simply can't afford to have marines that can't teleport or beacon in a game with a maximum of 5 marines on the field.
Comments
And yes a pseudo-HMG would be the best solution to onos spam.
Yes, all people need to do is shoot things more. Then aliens are easy to kill.
Also, a HMG replacement would help marines immensely in mid-lategame.
I wouldn't like any marine ability similar to infestation spikes. As it will always be used when aliens retreat, alien play will become more static, and you will effectively be able to commit to less attacks as a lifeform.
Against a competetent team with jetpacks, an onos already have to watch out to not get chased down and get killed.
Another huge problem in my mind is the tech explosions caused by PRes, one solution could be to have an upkeep cost on weapons and lifeforms. So a % cost increase equal to % of team already having that weapon or lifeform, so it is expensive to spam one specific lifeform or weapon. This will adress the mass early shotguns, mass early fades, mass onos problems. The upkeep cost and % of players having each specific lifeform/weapon can be shown at the buymenus for ease of understanding.
Due to being percentage based, it scales with player numbers. So it works well for both 6v6 and 16v16 for example.
With that suggestion the PRes will drain more from both teams. To slightly balance that out, I would also add PRes for kills. But not random 1-3 this time, you simply get too much res with that. Just 1 PRes per kill should be fine.
I know some people like to do the same thing over and over but others don't. Hopefully the content patch will give us some more options.
Oh and the rest of the maps (ie Refinery) need to be refined (uh uh) to be more suited to competitive play so it isn't just tram summit and veil.
- Comm-ability that causes the targeted alien to take more damage when being shot by more than one marine
- Making a cheaper/weaker version of the Exo available quicker (and allowing you to get out of the exo without needing to kill yourself)
I've always thought getting rid of the basic structure preregs (e.g. armory, obs, robo, arms lab) such that you could start with any of them would help. Right now, forced-armory first means I have to initially sink 10 of my starting TRes before my desired tech path. Opening it up to arms lab + w1 or robo + ARC tech first would help vary the potentially viable build orders.
While I would like to see more viable tech paths (focus on shade hive might help (also help with skulk scaling), what I think is far and away the largest problem from a competitive viewpoint is the drifter. The drifter is ridiculously OP although touch to reveal is a step in the right direction. I would like to see the cost increased to 5res. With the proliferation of using drifters as cannon fodder for your skulks, they are only proving to be even stronger then they originally appeared (unlimited, difficult to detect and cheap scouting information). Mixed with the speed advantage of the aliens, drifters allow for nearly 0 tactical movement from the marine side which is really damaging since they are typically the more aggressive team.
I think a cost increase is the right solution because it creates a trade off in the early game vs economy/upgrades and a larger risk to their use. I don't think alternative balancing methods such as a decrease in sight radius will really make much difference. Another possible balancing method would be to signfiicantly reduce the max drifters per hive. To be honest though, I think even 2 drifters would be enough to cover 75% of the chokepoints you would be interested in, so it would have to be a reduction to 1 drifter per hive.
IMO alot of the potential excitement in a NS match is tactical in nature, and as long as drifters remain in their current state, I suspect each match will be largely determined on a engagment by engagement basis, which is not desirable. Even with a cost increase of 5, I suspect that they will still be spammed hard because they are just that good, but we should balance always in baby steps.