Shade hive first needs a boost
aeroripper
Join Date: 2005-02-25 Member: 42471NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation
Join Date: 2005-02-25 Member: 42471NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation
I would love to see a shade first hive be as viable as crag or shift hive first. Hallucinations are useful, but they should automatically follow the alien they're spawned from after the initial 'fly away' spawning mechanic. Anybody else have good tips for commanding shade first?
Comments
Competitively it is a strong start (if and only if not used as a substitute for proper ambushing), but not helpful once marines establish. And they will establish better because you have shade.
Maybe if cloaking was removed and something more cool replaces it
Maybe if the Hallucinations automatically move around like the AI to at least pretend to be a real person, that might help.
Hallucianations can be good, but first of all they are a pain in the ass to manage. Try to hallucinate a group of aliens: every hallucination runs in some random direction. You basically have to select them individually and send them where to go. And when a hallucination stands inside an alien: good luck clicking it;)
Aside that they probably only work well in pubs. Any experienced player will be able to tell if an alien is hallucinated or real.
Microing a drifter on shade hive doesn't have a direct impact on your players (healing them/making them faster).
Cloaking and Aura are definetly not bad, I don't think they need to be changed. It's just the drifter that needs something better imo.
How about Drifters being invisible on shade hive?
Or a ability that instantly cloaks your aliens?
Or Ink in combat as a drifter ability?
I'm a big fan of how the game plays on shade hive, but It's a little weak.
I would really like something changed so we can see it more often in pubs and comp play aswell
Ink.
If a alien with the ink upgrade gets shot, ink spawns around the alien. the more health lost, the bigger the cloud. (with a max)
This changed in build (260?) I believe. While selecting the drifter you can click "F" to select all hallucinations to remove the need for individual selection. It took the empty spot that storm used to occupy. I successfully duped a comm the other day on descent into sending lots of ARCs into receiving outside hydro by hallucinating a hive there, which was pretty fun. Would like to see more of that deception stuff expanded upon.
No need to hassle yourself to select Hallucinations running in every direction, everything just drops dead xD!
oh that's neat, didn't even know that:D
[EDIT] Even if they were moving
Also about cloaking... maybe if obs had a tougher time nailing down where an alien player is, it would be more beneficial. I've got a couple of ideas: 1) maybe it will only detect aliens if they stand still for a while, letting the obs "lock" onto them... but of course moving allows marines to see them in game, so pick your poison! Alternatively 2) maybe if they have phantom, instead of it being a red dot showing exactly where they are, it would be a much bigger, fainter red circle that is randomly offset from the player whenever they enter the obs range. That way, marines know there's aliens about, but not their exact position.
Perhaps a hallucination could cause a marines vision to go all distorted and vivid images appear, you know, like a hallucination
the other first/second step would be a buff to hallucination. My first and personal favorite buff i'd like to see would be to make hallucinations as realistic as a player, this means giving them ragdoll animations, common player movement patterns (wall running for skulks, belly sliding for gorges) and most importantly of all, when they die it does NOT say "Player x killed hallucination" It instead says "Player X killed player Y". with player Y being the name of the player who was hallucinated. this means you don't really know if you killed an actual fade, or a hallucinated fade, which is FANTASTIC deception and should be relatively easy to code in.
Please please please make that a reality.
PS: I would love to see the ability for the khammander to create and assume direct control of a Hallucination of their choice. Obviously it wont do any damage.
I think that would piss people off. all about the vision clutter. maybe (I know this is like CoD) make the marine who is near a hallucination to have their minimap go fuzzy? or have the alien upgrade to bite a marine and then make things a bit static-like to sorta confuse them. but that may b op and clutter too much...
That depends so hard on stuff
What I would do is add some bot AI code to the created hallucinations. There is some pretty good code out there, much better than the current "walk to the waypoint" option you have as a khammander.
On the other end shade hives are generally the one I fear the most early on as marine because good skulks and lerks are annoying as fuck with it.
The main thing holding Shade back is hallucinations. They just aren't that good and nowhere near as useful as Mucous or Enzyme
But then we will have the problem of unarcable (yes unarcable is now a word) hives as ink blocks arcs from arcing.
ps. did i mention the word arc?
Perhaps it could have more of an effect on alien players though. Like an alien that runs through an ink cloud is then protected from 1 scan? Or can't be detected by passive obs range. Or both.