What is the consensus now on Shade Hive?
Bhauk
Join Date: 2012-12-28 Member: 176491Members
Join Date: 2012-12-28 Member: 176491Members
Comments
Unless you want to troll your team and have a high chance at losing, then it's the best pick.
Camouflage can be sort of OK until multiple obs counter it with passive.
Phantoms are a joke.
Ink doesn't work.
Camouflage is absolutely worthless.
Hallucinations are still pointless.
The only thing Ink usually manages to do is maybe make ARCs not retarget after they kill a target. And sometimes that doesn't work either.
Silence and the cheapness of the upgrades are the only things shade has going for it, the other features are plain bad. I do prefer shade start to shift start simply because it gives a far, far larger advantage in combat than celerity.
good players can use silence to max effect, it's pretty useful against good players (idiots just walk straight) in that they are always on edge, so they always check their backs, hence slowing their progress down.
You just have to be situationally aware to use it.
Overall, silence is far better* than camo, but camo is still useful.
*Playstyle depending.
Which just shows how useless its been made again.
The purpose of camo is not to allow you to run through the map cloaked. You are still invisible when not moving just like you always were. You're just more transparent when moving. The new camo makes more since. It has always been called "camo" not "invisibility". Camo is great for a lot of rooms. Not all of them. You can just stand next to the archway in conduit as marines run from smelting and you can just kill them one by one. Couldn't do that quite as effectively without it. I don't know why people have always assumed and have become so butthurt because camo wont let them just run along side or behind every marine and just hold down the left mouse button until they die. There is no skill in that and I don't think that's how they ever intended camo to work. And camo DOES protect you from sentries. Just not sentries if there is an Obs around.
I do agree about the overall usefulness of camo. I never pick camo late game because there are so many obs everywhere that it kinda makes it pointless. If camo was adjusted to where you are only picked up by an obs if it has line of sight in that room instead of through walls I think it would make it even more viable. It sucks to sit in the halfway hall between Eastwing and Terminal showing up on radar. Its a long run.
It's easy enough to hide without camo, yes it makes it easier but it's not worth sacrificing carapace or adrenaline for. My build order is ALWAYS carapace->2nd hive->leap->adrenaline->bile bomb->blink->3rd hive->what ever is requested. Shade first is stupidly risky, shade second is feasible (but for silence not camo) but it needs a better than pub team to pull off.
It wasn't ok BEFORE the nerf, how is it remotely ok after?
Two simple words: not true.
I just tested it and not only will sentries open fire when you are sneaking with camo, but also if you sneak into their fov when they're "not looking" and stand perfectly still just a sec after that. They still open fire when you're totally invisible...
Such lack of flexibility and spontaneity is no good for a NS comm
Why would anyone want to hide from sentries? I generally ignore them (leap/blink past them) and let the Piggy do his Bile on these puppets.
I guess as interesting as a tactic it might be, it could also be aggravating for a building to have a hard counter to it, effectively rendering it useless at that point in the game.
Yeah. And the Aura (aka Scent of Fear) is pretty OP actually, but it probable matches the potential stealth advantage that you give up for it.
And he fixed the Ink on Shades so it actually manages to stop ARC targeting now. Which is a fix that will hopefully soon make it into the vanilla game.
Of course this is plenty risky and its very nerve wracking when skulks are bouncing around the room and you're just hoping a stray bullet doesn't hit the hive. But when it works its very satisfying - especially when your first Hive has been pinned down and suddenly, hello another Hive marines.
It was OP before the nerf.
At least IMO.
The problem is the playerbase, not the skill.
Pre-Nerf:
Too many people cloak walked around maps, instead of running around, hearing marines, hopping on the wall, and cloaking.
Post-nerf:
Too many people try to cloak walk, marines see the shimmer/the shimmer breaks, and they shoot them.
Right now, when you take cloak you basically have to play like you don't have it, except for how you ambush people.
Truth be told, I only take cloak if it is the only upgrade option for shade.
That said, I think really only two simple things need to be evaluated for shade stuff to work to a decent degree, and those are 1) ink, its effects and applications/potential applications, and 2) how camo and silence are affected by obs/scans.
I'm gonna go check out some balance mod games now, I recall the last time I played one it was awesome - didnt get to khamm to experience this biomass stuff but it seemed to be working well from what I gathered in chat.
YEAH.
Cloak was hardly OP, it didnt fit any criteria for being OP. Yes it did make some average skulks, that could use cloak properly, perform better ... however ...really good skulks still did way better when they had cara/cele ... and terrible skulks were even more terrible with cloak.
btw Shadowstep is pretty 'OP' if you know how to use it right ... does that mean we have to nerf shadowstep ? your in denial, infact you pretty much prove with your previous post that cloak is now rubbish
Seriously? I always shoot at the tech point to make sure there's no cloaked hive growing! Always!
100% invisibility wasn't overpowered?
Cloak isn't rubbish, it's just different and people don't want to acclimate to the changes as they preferred the "old way."
That being said, silence is all-around better than either iteration of camo.
Silence counters good players(That is, people who use audio cues), and is borderline broken versus terrible players(people who don't react to being bitten, without the skulk nomming noise).
Edit:
The only reason silence isn't OP, even though it was/is better than cloak:
You can still see the guy using it, so it only helps if they don't know you're there.
The old Cloak basically removed any thought from ambushing, as you could just stealth walk in the middle of a hallway and eat people as they went by.