Removed Alien Upgrades?
Samus1111111
Join Date: 2012-08-07 Member: 154930Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2012-08-07 Member: 154930Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Comments
i do think silence should grant obs invisibility provided you move slowly/ stationary.
silence/camo are replaced with phantom (which grants camo first, then as you get more veils you get silence combined with it)
The second upgrade is AURA, which makes it so you can see marines through walls at close ranges, by giving them a heartbeat type symbol
Just wondering because after having played with 8 ability choices it seems kinda sparse with only 6 and most of the time it being a no-brainer which to pick.
The main problem was that the commander could drop life form eggs for pres.
Still, Hypermutation should not be brought back (as an upgrade), as it was pretty inconsistent with the other upgrades.
More upgrades would be cool, but Hypermutation and Feign Death just didn't work.
Edit: Maybe an interesting 'redemption/feign death'-like ability would be something like revenge; where when you die, it does additional damage to the person who killed you.
Hmm, that is certainly frustrating, but then getting one-shot by shotguns (even with carapace) isn't exactly fun either.
If I remember correctly, in TF2, the Spy has an item that while activated allows him to feign death as soon as he takes one shot, becoming invisible for a short time and allowing him to run away.
Perhaps Feign Death could be a tier 2 or 3 upgrade for skulks only?
Hypermutation should have just been a Tres research to grant the ability to swap out upgrades on creep and gestate faster for all players
P.S. Hypermutation was a shift upgrade in NS2 beta that allowed aliens to quickly gestate to another lifeform without losing their Pres. This cause several problems like an onos running around a corner, going to skulk and getting all 75 pres back, then dying. Also, it had lots of bugs (got full HP whenever gestating, good times)
It wasn't in NS, it was in NS2 Beta, here's the NS2 wiki entry
I did like how it let someone change to fit the occasion, and I think it could have worked out really well, if it was properly tuned.
Or at the very least they need to give aliens the ability to change unlocks near a hive, as being stuck on 1 upgrade path on a higher lifeform can get pretty frustrating (i.e you go regen on higher lifeform because commander hasn't unlocked carapace or whatever)
Which, to be fair, won't be the case anymore with the new trait system.
But it still applies if you go Celerity Lerk first because you are not far enough to research any of the cloud abilities for which you would want Adrenaline.
So, prevent the player from upgrading Hypermutation if they got a lifeform from an egg, and either prevent players with the upgrade from picking a pre-evolved egg or remove their Hypermutation upgrade once they pick the egg?
I think Hypermutation would require the devs to handle way too many corner cases like that.
I see the exploits listed and I can think of a few ways to manage them without removing the core functionality. For one, the "disappearing onos", where a dying onos walks around a corner and quickly swaps to skulk. Make all evolutions take as much time as the higher lifeform (onos>skulk would take as long as skulk>onos) and make any refunds only occur after the evolution completes, so killing the egg means they lose all their invested pres. This also solves any concept of using HM to heal. The time it takes to switch to a lower lifeform (either skulk+regen or gorge) and back again would be too impractical, plus the risk while in egg form would just be too dangerous in most situations. If there is a situation where it still manages to work than I'd call it legit.
The other problem is that Tres eggs can be converted to Pres by evolving back to skulk. Simply make a lifeform ineligable for refund credit if you didn't have hypermutation selected when you first evolved to that lifeform. Because entering a Tres egg starts you with no upgrades, tres lifeforms would never be eligable for the refund. It would also make it possible to get rid of the sticky evolution feature, you could remove hypermutation when changing lifeforms, but you wouldn't be able to get a refund off of whichever lifeform you changed to if you changed again later, although that means it would never make sense to keep hm as a skulk.
Swapping upgrades without changing lifeform is off the table. That's not really the main appeal to me for HM. I think that swapping lifeform twice is an effective cost for changing other upgrades.
As for how to actually add it back in... I don't think it fits in with hive upgrades, it's too passive and it affects multiple lifeforms. I think it still works best as a lifeform upgrade under Shift, and I think the best way to add it in is to add a 3rd upgrade to all 3 paths. Hyper would be shift, Focus would be crag (yes, focus, doing double damage at half the attack rate, is technically a defensive upgrade based on how it is effectively used). Shade would need something new, since Feign death is understandably off the table.
That you could reclaim res by de-volving was part of the issue (and with feign death led to some very tough skulks...).
If it was changed so that if you die as lerk, when you spawn and evolve lerk a 2nd time in a row it costs 25, 3rd lerk 20 etc etc
Would get around the recouping costs of evolutions exploit and make it actually useful for normal players who actually die.
Feign death was cool though was useless for anything but fade and possible lerk...everything else was too slow to get away.
Meant marines had to check for points being awarded and not just kill messages appearing.
I would like some iteration of this
Balance...