I don't think the bite should be shifted around. Going in for bites becomes increasingly less reliable or worthwhile as the marine game continues, even if it is buffed. And biting unaware marines and flying away is fun when you have the best chance to get away with it.
Doesn't the lerk scale now with biomass? So this shouldn't be a problem, especially if you adjust the values of bite. But like you mentioned, who cares, it's t3. Bite could still be t1 as long as it's not primary fire. (I've suggested making it automatic when close enough as a compromise for sharing T1, if need be)
The real issue with the current bite is three fold,
1) noob trap. The life form's primary weapon is contrary to it's role of harrass & support. So noobs don't understand the level of risk vs reward at hand with the encounter and easily lose their pres, frustrated. Ranged weapons would prevent this and actually encourage more wiggle room to learn how to evade fire.
2) good lerks face roll the lmg marines too easily, again contrary to it's role. BT mod helped this but it's still there.
3) med packs were finally worked out to not be a hard counter to the dot poison, but it still pretty much is and makes it so there might as well not be any poison, which is the only thing making it not a pricey skulk with wings in those encounters.
I think spikes are actually the noob trap. Inexperienced Lerks don't realize how piddly they are and will hover in plain sight expecting to be able to compete with a rifle.
Since lifeform abilities are now researched on Crag/Shift/Shade, I found it very confusing trying to remember which chamber has what (different abilities requiring different Biomass levels and researched on different structures)! They are presumably ordered by defense/confusion/movement types, but some like Shadow Step (Shade, but is movement ability) or Xenocide (Shift, but is suicide/confusion ability) feels out of place.
Wouldn't it help simplify things if they're grouped by Biomass level? Crag - Gorge Tunnels (1), Bile Bomb (2), Umbra (3) Shift - Leap (4), Shadow Step (5), Spores (6) Shade - Xenocide (7), Vortex (8), Stomp (9)
Ironically, this order refers to the current state of Kharaa Hive types in most matches, go figure :P
I think spikes are actually the noob trap. Inexperienced Lerks don't realize how piddly they are and will hover in plain sight expecting to be able to compete with a rifle.
That typically only happens when they are ground lerking. Which would effect any weapon, to include umbra.
Otherwise, yes, you definitely can compete with a marine rifle, especially with no energy loss when flapping (though bt mod did lessen their accuracy *shakes fist *)
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
@Ironhorse
you're gona make me sound like a broken record over here.
I ment the mouse sway, strafe one. I have no problems with walljumping.
I know it aint bunnyhop, im just calling it hop for lack of a generally agreed upon term..
The hop requires strafing, forward, jumps and mouse swings to pull it off well.
My fine motor skill isnt that lovely so it takes a huge amount of focus compared to other stuff to pull this off, leaving almost nothing of my focus to actually play the game and do stuff like bite, or see that lovely marine.
By now I accepted that it will not change, but its a very tiring mechanic and I hope I wont have a skulk moving problem with mere walljumps.
Could pull of old bunnyhop back in ns1, barely, as a gorge. Anything else is just to much to ask for me.
But lets not bore everyone by me repeating this every x pages.. im sure it wont change at this point anymore for folk who lack fine motor skill like me.. I can live with that if the other movement is up to par.
@Ironhorse
you're gona make me sound like a broken record over here.
I ment the mouse sway, strafe one. I have no problems with walljumping.
I know it aint bunnyhop, im just calling it hop for lack of a generally agreed upon term..
The hop requires strafing, forward, jumps and mouse swings to pull it off well.
My fine motor skill isnt that lovely so it takes a huge amount of focus compared to other stuff to pull this off, leaving almost nothing of my focus to actually play the game and do stuff like bite, or see that lovely marine.
By now I accepted that it will not change, but its a very tiring mechanic and I hope I wont have a skulk moving problem with mere walljumps.
Could pull of old bunnyhop back in ns1, barely, as a gorge. Anything else is just to much to ask for me.
But lets not bore everyone by me repeating this every x pages.. im sure it wont change at this point anymore for folk who lack fine motor skill like me.. I can live with that if the other movement is up to par.
There is no need for mouse swaying whatsoever. And using the strafe keys at all its optional.
In fact, if any of you guys find yourself explaining the new skulk movement to people, I suggest not even mentioning the strafing bit. It just makes it sound more complicated than it is and is more likely to get people frustrated in the transition period.
Played a scrim today where the aliens went regen and their commander was using mucous membrane to heal their armor... it's broken as fuck. Its like an auto win button. If umbra is up, and aliens have regen and the commander uses mucous membrane, good luck killing anything.
What's the state of the Lerk and Fade right now? (I'd go find out myself but it's proving tricky to get on BT servers)
I ask this because in classic they seem to be in an odd position of the Lerk having a much higher skill floor and much higher skill ceiling. I see so many newbies die with both of them but one good player can mop up an entire team. What's scary is how god damn effective the Lerk is at straight out killing things, and avoiding being killed itself compared to the Fade.
From what I've picked up it seems neither of them have found their sweet point yet?
Can't nerf regen on it's own to stop that though, I was testing it yesterday and god damn it's slow. I wouldn't mind an umbra nerf though.
Oh, I think nerfing regen would be terrible. Nerfing mucous membrane, or maybe making regen + mucous membrane have some sort of diminishing returns would work. I wouldn't really want to nerf umbra either... it's strong but it's not broken. Regen + Umbra is borderline broken. But regen + mucous membrane is insane, and adding umbra in there is pretty game breaking.
I realize that's a pretty complicated scenario where there has to be someone who evolved with regen, a lerk that's using umbra, and a drifter to use the membrane... but still. It's not like that's hard to do if you're planning it xD
But this is seriously so broken that I have to assume that sewelek hasn't seen it before.
Played a scrim today where the aliens went regen and their commander was using mucous membrane to heal their armor... it's broken as fuck. Its like an auto win button. If umbra is up, and aliens have regen and the commander uses mucous membrane, good luck killing anything.
And that's why the line stops with medpacks.. Alien drifter spam abilities are too strong/cheap/spammable.
Rock paper scissor mechanics must be maintained. This is done through proper role implementation.
This means Fades shouldn't be able to do everything. They have a role. Imagine if the fastest, evading lifeform had BB... We tried it before, it didn't work.
If you ask me, the fade shouldn't be able to do any structural damage...
Agreed, rock, paper, scissor is good, but where is that on the marine side? True, FT and GL aren't as good at killing aliens, but they can still do it. SG does everything. If the fade (marine killer) is going to do little to no damage to structures, why is the SG (alien killer) good at killing everything?
SG is only good when you are next to something. And when you are next to something, you are vulnerable.
JektJoin Date: 2012-02-05Member: 143714Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Why all the weapon upgrade exceptions? I don't understand the reasoning behind the rail, flamethrower or grenade launcher being exempt from weapon upgrades.
Why all the weapon upgrade exceptions? I don't understand the reasoning behind the rail, flamethrower or grenade launcher being exempt from weapon upgrades.
I'm not really a big fan of it conceptually but it does give the flamer and GL a niche that they didn't have before. They're comparatively much stronger early game.
I really really don't like abilities being researched on chambers. Completely pointless and confusing change IMO.
Much like a lot of BT. For example, the fade changes. Why? because we wanted to! hurr durr!
Its not a balance test as much as some good balance changes thrown in with random changes made just to annoy people. Which wouldnt be a problem if it was staying as just a test for new gameplay ideas, instead for some incomprehensible reason its becoming the real game.
I really really don't like abilities being researched on chambers. Completely pointless and confusing change IMO.
I'm assuming Sewlek wants to encourage people to make use of the unrestricted chamber placement by making them a neccessity for researching abilities? But I agree, it's confusing and a nuisance in general.
Let me start off by saying i love the mod/250. I have played a couple games on both sides foot soldier/commander, but i am by no means clear on everything in the mod. I will list my 3 issues and see if i am wrong or maybe i bring up a point that could be check into. My 3 issues are this:
Biomass - Very confusing at first. What is it trying to accomplish? It appears to me to be just another res dump like choosing the hive type. You gain nothing except being able to unlock new stuff. Biomass to me at first glance means to me that i need to build more structures. Anything Bio should add to my mass right? But i know from game play you wouldnt want me spamming the cheapest bio i could like whips to gain mass lol. Plus it seems like Biomass maxes at 9 but continues to 12? Is this for redundancies of having more than 3 hives? I am not trying to knock Biomass, i know a lot of people i respect in here put a lot of time into it. I think i just dont fully understand from my limited play with it
Upgrade Chambers - They are so damn big and hard to hide. 1 marines swept through my hive as i was setting up things else where and took out all my chambers. My fault of course but i had little choice in where to place them. I understand it takes a team to guard the hive and assets, but it is a little unfair that both the marines and alien upgrades both cost 180 tres in total but marines get theirs back when there 1 structure is rebuilt. Aliens are SOL and have to rebuild them individually.
It might just be a case of horrible scouting/response time by my team and I also. A L2comm moment let me know if im misguided.
Abilities upgraded through the passive structures - Just confusing and it was already mentioned above.
All in all thank you so much for this. I was on the verge of quitting NS and have hardly played as of late. I can actually see the skill ceiling far about what i can do now and i am excited. I can grow as a player again. I was limited by hardware and mechanics, but no longer. Thank you also to all those die hard players who help this mod get to where it is now. NS2 2.0 tbh =D
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
last I truly tried the speed increase for a lengthy period, to build and maintain momentum strafing was not optional.
If with strafing increases or better maintains speed, I for the moment shall call it not optional.
Did that movement change if the last few weeks? Because you all saying strafe & mouse are no longer needed sound confusing to when it was.
Biomass has gone through some various different stages, it was easier to understand in its original implementation where you got it directly from building hives or investing into biomass upgrades, and then instead of having the individual abilities researched you just unlocked a whole tier of stuff at once. I think it's stuck around in spite of significant changes because it's a nice way of giving the aliens some more scalability with the +hp stuff and it gives more room for res sinks in the alien tech tree I guess?
On an unrelated note I had a couple of issues today with spontaneously not being able to climb walls as a skulk for unknown reasons, I vaguely remember this happening some months ago but I thought it was fixed so maybe it was just something peculiar going on.
I felt that researching biomass levels and unlocking abilities without extra research was an amazing way to progress alien tech as it allowed them some abilities (like bile bomb) on one hive, which meant they could actually come back from losing one hive.
If ranged spores were in, I'd replace tier 3 crop duster spores with the spikes or primal scream.
Remember you need spikes from the get go for shotguns.
Ah, how I dream of the perfect lerk... One day.
If you have ranged spores from the get go that would fill the role that spikes has now against early game shotguns. It softens marines and zones for the skulks to clean up (the zoning is MUCH better on ranged spores than spikes though).
instead of having the individual abilities researched you just unlocked a whole tier of stuff at once.
Why was this genius idea reversed? It was one thing i was looking forward too.
Some of the reasons it was changed to what we have now:
a) To lower the cost of biomass so the alien economy wasn't pooling large amounts of res and there was more smaller expenditures.
b) People requested to be able to individually research things so the commander could control choices for the team. With the original biomass system the only tech choice the commander actually had was hive types.
That said I actually liked the old biomass system from the perspective of a player on the ground, it was just not as exciting as the commander.
Comments
And no one wants to adjust spores anymore, unfortunately, so might as well come to a compromise. Medium ranged.
Doesn't the lerk scale now with biomass? So this shouldn't be a problem, especially if you adjust the values of bite. But like you mentioned, who cares, it's t3. Bite could still be t1 as long as it's not primary fire. (I've suggested making it automatic when close enough as a compromise for sharing T1, if need be)
The real issue with the current bite is three fold,
1) noob trap. The life form's primary weapon is contrary to it's role of harrass & support. So noobs don't understand the level of risk vs reward at hand with the encounter and easily lose their pres, frustrated. Ranged weapons would prevent this and actually encourage more wiggle room to learn how to evade fire.
2) good lerks face roll the lmg marines too easily, again contrary to it's role. BT mod helped this but it's still there.
3) med packs were finally worked out to not be a hard counter to the dot poison, but it still pretty much is and makes it so there might as well not be any poison, which is the only thing making it not a pricey skulk with wings in those encounters.
Remember you need spikes from the get go for shotguns.
Ah, how I dream of the perfect lerk... One day.
Since lifeform abilities are now researched on Crag/Shift/Shade, I found it very confusing trying to remember which chamber has what (different abilities requiring different Biomass levels and researched on different structures)! They are presumably ordered by defense/confusion/movement types, but some like Shadow Step (Shade, but is movement ability) or Xenocide (Shift, but is suicide/confusion ability) feels out of place.
Wouldn't it help simplify things if they're grouped by Biomass level?
Crag - Gorge Tunnels (1), Bile Bomb (2), Umbra (3)
Shift - Leap (4), Shadow Step (5), Spores (6)
Shade - Xenocide (7), Vortex (8), Stomp (9)
Ironically, this order refers to the current state of Kharaa Hive types in most matches, go figure :P
Otherwise, yes, you definitely can compete with a marine rifle, especially with no energy loss when flapping (though bt mod did lessen their accuracy *shakes fist *)
you're gona make me sound like a broken record over here.
I ment the mouse sway, strafe one. I have no problems with walljumping.
I know it aint bunnyhop, im just calling it hop for lack of a generally agreed upon term..
The hop requires strafing, forward, jumps and mouse swings to pull it off well.
My fine motor skill isnt that lovely so it takes a huge amount of focus compared to other stuff to pull this off, leaving almost nothing of my focus to actually play the game and do stuff like bite, or see that lovely marine.
By now I accepted that it will not change, but its a very tiring mechanic and I hope I wont have a skulk moving problem with mere walljumps.
Could pull of old bunnyhop back in ns1, barely, as a gorge. Anything else is just to much to ask for me.
But lets not bore everyone by me repeating this every x pages.. im sure it wont change at this point anymore for folk who lack fine motor skill like me.. I can live with that if the other movement is up to par.
There is no need for mouse swaying whatsoever. And using the strafe keys at all its optional.
What's the state of the Lerk and Fade right now? (I'd go find out myself but it's proving tricky to get on BT servers)
I ask this because in classic they seem to be in an odd position of the Lerk having a much higher skill floor and much higher skill ceiling. I see so many newbies die with both of them but one good player can mop up an entire team. What's scary is how god damn effective the Lerk is at straight out killing things, and avoiding being killed itself compared to the Fade.
From what I've picked up it seems neither of them have found their sweet point yet?
Oh, I think nerfing regen would be terrible. Nerfing mucous membrane, or maybe making regen + mucous membrane have some sort of diminishing returns would work. I wouldn't really want to nerf umbra either... it's strong but it's not broken. Regen + Umbra is borderline broken. But regen + mucous membrane is insane, and adding umbra in there is pretty game breaking.
I realize that's a pretty complicated scenario where there has to be someone who evolved with regen, a lerk that's using umbra, and a drifter to use the membrane... but still. It's not like that's hard to do if you're planning it xD
But this is seriously so broken that I have to assume that sewelek hasn't seen it before.
And that's why the line stops with medpacks.. Alien drifter spam abilities are too strong/cheap/spammable.
SG is only good when you are next to something. And when you are next to something, you are vulnerable.
Its not a balance test as much as some good balance changes thrown in with random changes made just to annoy people. Which wouldnt be a problem if it was staying as just a test for new gameplay ideas, instead for some incomprehensible reason its becoming the real game.
I'm assuming Sewlek wants to encourage people to make use of the unrestricted chamber placement by making them a neccessity for researching abilities? But I agree, it's confusing and a nuisance in general.
Biomass - Very confusing at first. What is it trying to accomplish? It appears to me to be just another res dump like choosing the hive type. You gain nothing except being able to unlock new stuff. Biomass to me at first glance means to me that i need to build more structures. Anything Bio should add to my mass right? But i know from game play you wouldnt want me spamming the cheapest bio i could like whips to gain mass lol. Plus it seems like Biomass maxes at 9 but continues to 12? Is this for redundancies of having more than 3 hives? I am not trying to knock Biomass, i know a lot of people i respect in here put a lot of time into it. I think i just dont fully understand from my limited play with it
Upgrade Chambers - They are so damn big and hard to hide. 1 marines swept through my hive as i was setting up things else where and took out all my chambers. My fault of course but i had little choice in where to place them. I understand it takes a team to guard the hive and assets, but it is a little unfair that both the marines and alien upgrades both cost 180 tres in total but marines get theirs back when there 1 structure is rebuilt. Aliens are SOL and have to rebuild them individually.
It might just be a case of horrible scouting/response time by my team and I also. A L2comm moment
Abilities upgraded through the passive structures - Just confusing and it was already mentioned above.
All in all thank you so much for this. I was on the verge of quitting NS and have hardly played as of late. I can actually see the skill ceiling far about what i can do now and i am excited. I can grow as a player again. I was limited by hardware and mechanics, but no longer. Thank you also to all those die hard players who help this mod get to where it is now. NS2 2.0 tbh =D
If with strafing increases or better maintains speed, I for the moment shall call it not optional.
Did that movement change if the last few weeks? Because you all saying strafe & mouse are no longer needed sound confusing to when it was.
On an unrelated note I had a couple of issues today with spontaneously not being able to climb walls as a skulk for unknown reasons, I vaguely remember this happening some months ago but I thought it was fixed so maybe it was just something peculiar going on.
Why was this genius idea reversed? It was one thing i was looking forward too.
If you have ranged spores from the get go that would fill the role that spikes has now against early game shotguns. It softens marines and zones for the skulks to clean up (the zoning is MUCH better on ranged spores than spikes though).
Some of the reasons it was changed to what we have now:
a) To lower the cost of biomass so the alien economy wasn't pooling large amounts of res and there was more smaller expenditures.
b) People requested to be able to individually research things so the commander could control choices for the team. With the original biomass system the only tech choice the commander actually had was hive types.
That said I actually liked the old biomass system from the perspective of a player on the ground, it was just not as exciting as the commander.