No need to "pull in" the marine, imo... just re implement vortex like it used to be as a ranged weapon, and have it apply to whatever marine you specifically target (bonus points for highlight color on marine changing to denote which one out of a group)
I've wanted to see this as far back as a couple of weeks after launch..
I don't think it would be OP either (even if it were, who cares at biomass 9??).. ending up sharing a private space with an A3 W3 Shotgun JP marine after you just used a decent amount of your energy on Vortex guarantees nothing... it just makes the fade's T3 ability fun for once, and accessible to anyone.
I just think it would be highly effective at ending turtles as well, considering it allows you to pick out a singular marine from a group: exactly how marines travel and how they end up in a turtle. You wouldn't be able to see the marine or the fade either, just hear them battling. After the marine dies or the time expires, they come back from the ether... and goodluck to the fade with escaping the room, i hope he planned well.
Speaking of escaping the room, you could make the ability seal them both inside the room in order to force them to fight to the death and make the ability a bit more dangerous inside a marine base. Still, I think that the fade should be given some sort of support role, although this ability does sort of fit into that category depending on how it is used.
ending up sharing a private space with an A3 W3 Shotgun JP marine after you just used a decent amount of your energy on Vortex guarantees nothing... it just makes the fade's T3 ability fun for once
It makes it a fucking deathtrap at anything other than green level of play tbh :P
i think vortex being triggered on attack is so you can't use it as a get out of jail free card. they intentionally did it so that you can't use it and attack effectively at the same time.
Frankly fade should really have a win-securing ability at high levels of biomass. Stab doesnt cut it and vortex is generally useless. Not completely useless, but generally.
Here's my suggestion.
Stab - Biomass 5/6 - Decrease activation time by 1/2 so it becomes a viable finishing move while still leaving a fade exposed for a short time.
Vortex - Biomass 8 - Use a second time to teleport (doesnt teleport you on attack) - If you're on biomass 8 then your fades deserve to be kept alive. They can still die by engaging a couple of marines with good aim, it just makes them much harder to pinch. Which is perfectly reasonable given the biomass level, right?
Hmm what if vortex would be a bit like scorpions pulling skill? I mean we're talking about vortex but if we think about different alternatives to fix it, why not skip vortex alltogether and call it something else and make a skill that does something different. I kinda started liking the idea of the fade being able to pull out a marine from his group, or even pull a single marine towards him and then blink in the opposite direction to really throw the marines aim off. Fades have a tough time lategame against shotgunners, and usually the whole alien team is needeed to take down high teched marines. (this is cool not saying its a bad thing) But like lerk has umbra for support, gorge heal and onos stomp etc that all together do great things for the massive alien assault force, the fade feels like he's there to try to fly around and maybe get a swipe or two in. You only finnish of already hurt mariens or give them a small blow for the lerk/skulk/onos to take care of mostly.
If the fade would be able to pull out a marine from the group, not into 1v1 space in ghostland, but already 10m away from the main fight, he has already taken one gun off of the onos and now has a chance of 1v1'ing the guy. Jetpacker chasing ur ohnoes? pull him away! guy shootin at your gorge? Pull him out and land a few hits before he manages to turn around 180!
try pulling guys who are facing away from you to reel them in and land a successful STAB for the first time in your life! or just shadowstep away so he looses track of you. To me it sounds like fun and requires a bit of skill to pull off without getting badly hit, the shotgunner you just pulled in might get lucky and take you down with a twitch shot.
So, skill to be used only when in full health and full adre, so high risk high reward, pull out weak targets from the marine turtlesquad.
To me it feels like the fade should somehow affect the marines and not itself or other aliens. Like the lerk supports aliens(ok spores i know), gorge supports aliens,drifters support aliens. -> onos stomps marines, fade disorients marines? Dunno..
skulk does a bit of both with para for scouting and xeno for luls. No anti armor/building crap for the fade, bilebomb already does that. The fade is missing a role in a all-in alien push. The skulk works just as fine in a onoslerkgorgepush and doesn't cost a crazy amount of res to loose in a push. I think the other idea of making marines get stuck in a slow-mo vortex would be maybe a bit OP.
ending up sharing a private space with an A3 W3 Shotgun JP marine after you just used a decent amount of your energy on Vortex guarantees nothing... it just makes the fade's T3 ability fun for once
It makes it a fucking deathtrap at anything other than green level of play tbh :P
i think vortex being triggered on attack is so you can't use it as a get out of jail free card. they intentionally did it so that you can't use it and attack effectively at the same time.
Frankly fade should really have a win-securing ability at high levels of biomass. Stab doesnt cut it and vortex is generally useless. Not completely useless, but generally.
Here's my suggestion.
Stab - Biomass 5/6 - Decrease activation time by 1/2 so it becomes a viable finishing move while still leaving a fade exposed for a short time.
Vortex - Biomass 8 - Use a second time to teleport (doesnt teleport you on attack) - If you're on biomass 8 then your fades deserve to be kept alive. They can still die by engaging a couple of marines with good aim, it just makes them much harder to pinch. Which is perfectly reasonable given the biomass level, right?
no, just because it comes late game doesn't give it license to be imba. we already have our game ender, contaminate, powernode, whips, mucus, xeno, bile... you know coordination. fades don't need a boost really, it's just that the current abilities are pointless and not fun. vortex, when it was disable, was fun and had specific applications where it was actually useful. the current vortex is only good for:
A. showing off, at the cost of damage
B. harass, at the cost of damage
C. speed up healing
those are the ones that i've seen. none of which changes the role of the fade to any significant degree. the disable gave the fade the ability to support team pushes by disabling structures like obs, IP, or exos. could probably use vortex on onos too, to save it when it's running away, though that's a l33t maneuver i've never seen. the fade is more single-purpose than the onos, and it wasn't always.
let them keep their crappy teleport mechanic, give us back the disable instead of stab. bonus, you could troll your own team by keeping the CC alive for minutes.
I'm loving this thread. Awesome ideas. I like @TheKarva 's idea on vortex. For stab I have my own idea:
Make it do high structural damage and low marine damage. Fade structure damage was already nerfed a few builds ago because of the fade explosion and usefulness, but when you have enough biomass for stab you might as well help end the game. Fades become the op thing they were with skulk structure damage. Maybe even buff the damage higher than skulk.
at that point why Nerf marine damage at all? just make it a 1 shot of anything short of a3, leave them in parasite range
I don't really understand what you mean. Can you elaborate?
I'm loving this thread. Awesome ideas. I like @TheKarva 's idea on vortex. For stab I have my own idea:
Make it do high structural damage and low marine damage. Fade structure damage was already nerfed a few builds ago because of the fade explosion and usefulness, but when you have enough biomass for stab you might as well help end the game. Fades become the op thing they were with skulk structure damage. Maybe even buff the damage higher than skulk.
at that point why Nerf marine damage at all? just make it a 1 shot of anything short of a3, leave them in parasite range
I don't really understand what you mean. Can you elaborate?
for stab, if you really want to make it a game ender, just have it take a max hp a3 marine down to 10 effective health. so it's actually usable. if your only goal is to make it a game ending thing, just go all out.
ending up sharing a private space with an A3 W3 Shotgun JP marine after you just used a decent amount of your energy on Vortex guarantees nothing... it just makes the fade's T3 ability fun for once
It makes it a fucking deathtrap at anything other than green level of play tbh :P
Hey, its better than the rest of the equally equipped group up against you.
One thing you could do for Stab is to keep the high damage, but only use the increased cooldown on a successful hit.
Interesting idea (assuming you mean the attack delay and not actually "cooldown")... it would even make sense, as the Fade needs a moment to pull his claws out of the target after a hit, but not after a miss.
It should still take a bit longer and use more energy (even on a miss) than Swipe, though.
ending up sharing a private space with an A3 W3 Shotgun JP marine after you just used a decent amount of your energy on Vortex guarantees nothing... it just makes the fade's T3 ability fun for once
It makes it a fucking deathtrap at anything other than green level of play tbh :P
Hey, its better than the rest of the equally equipped group up against you.
Except you can't escape if your health gets low, and the rest of the equally equipped group are quite possibly waiting for you to finish up so they can blast your butthole to smithereens upon exit of this magic realm of death :P
Fade needs an OP lategame ability, just let it teleport where it likes >_>
ending up sharing a private space with an A3 W3 Shotgun JP marine after you just used a decent amount of your energy on Vortex guarantees nothing... it just makes the fade's T3 ability fun for once
It makes it a fucking deathtrap at anything other than green level of play tbh :P
Hey, its better than the rest of the equally equipped group up against you.
Except you can't escape if your health gets low, and the rest of the equally equipped group are quite possibly waiting for you to finish up so they can blast your butthole to smithereens upon exit of this magic realm of death :P
Fade needs an OP lategame ability, just let it teleport where it likes >_>
uhhh.. why exactly can't you escape if your HP gets low??
The details of the implementation i suggested weren't hashed out there, i agree, i hashed them out elsewhere..
But basically you enter the Vortex ether/world with the marine you selected at any range, and every entity and structure washes away and you both turn invisible /non collide-able to the rest of the players while you duke it out.
The vortex world dissipates when: 1) One of you dies 2) One of you moves out of range of one another at X distance 3) X time runs out
Meaning you could escape just fine if you wanted to.. hell, you could even use Vortex to just get a singular swipe in one one marine out of a group if you really wanted to..
I maintain that Vortex and Stab should be combined into one ability that does an attack and then warps you back to where you were a second or two ago. As it is right now it's just a Herculean feat to use them together in anything resembling a useful combination. Vortex feels more like a liability because it tempts Fades into doing some tricky stunt that ultimately gets them killed.
That aside I definitely think Fade upgrades are not important enough - Fades are perhaps a bit too good with no upgrades, and the upgrades don't give them enough benefit. Shadowstep is cool and all but ultimately it's just completely superfluous with Blink doing almost the same thing. +1 for Metabolize - it's a perfect synergy with the Fade playstyle and it adds a great deal of value, we know this from years of NS1.
Would someone mind explaining to me how Metabolize was useful at all? I never played NS1, but from what information I can find it restored 20hp on a 3 second use time for a cost of 1/3rd of your energy. So basically you get to spend all of your time and energy in order to gain an effect equivalent to Regen.
ScatterJoin Date: 2012-09-02Member: 157341Members, Squad Five Blue
Metabolize would consume a minimum of energy and restore both energy (more than was consumed) and health. It reduced downtime between engagements and was something to do in between blink and bhop.
twilitebluebug stalkerJoin Date: 2003-02-04Member: 13116Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited January 2014
Instead of Metabolize, Vortex could call upon the power of the void to summon the fattest Gorge to your service.
On a more serious note, how aboout Vortex being an instant teleport to a friendly player/unit near the crosshair in the LoS? That would be a lot simpler and user-friendly Fade ability.
I maintain that Vortex and Stab should be combined into one ability that does an attack and then warps you back to where you were a second or two ago. As it is right now it's just a Herculean feat to use them together in anything resembling a useful combination. Vortex feels more like a liability because it tempts Fades into doing some tricky stunt that ultimately gets them killed.
Agree with the last two sentences.. but i disagree with your idea.. i would never want to be "warped back to where i was a few seconds ago" ?? You mean rubber banding? Ew.. no thanks, that provides a loss of control in which i would never use nor want.
I may have just missed it, but do you know of any reason that vortex was changed from what it was originally? I thought that implementation worked well with the fade's playstyle, especially against Exos (maybe it should have prevented reloading and slowed movement speed though)
I'm loving this thread. Awesome ideas. I like @TheKarva 's idea on vortex. For stab I have my own idea:
Make it do high structural damage and low marine damage. Fade structure damage was already nerfed a few builds ago because of the fade explosion and usefulness, but when you have enough biomass for stab you might as well help end the game. Fades become the op thing they were with skulk structure damage. Maybe even buff the damage higher than skulk.
at that point why Nerf marine damage at all? just make it a 1 shot of anything short of a3, leave them in parasite range
I don't really understand what you mean. Can you elaborate?
for stab, if you really want to make it a game ender, just have it take a max hp a3 marine down to 10 effective health. so it's actually usable. if your only goal is to make it a game ending thing, just go all out.
Oh I see. That would probably work, but if you think about rookie servers, and how horrible it would be to new players, it ends up being a noobtube. Whereas a fade being able to do structure damage would be able to take down rts, or invade their base effectively, and help win the economy war. Since imo marines can't really turtle anymore I don't think we need more lategame killing power.
Comments
Speaking of escaping the room, you could make the ability seal them both inside the room in order to force them to fight to the death and make the ability a bit more dangerous inside a marine base. Still, I think that the fade should be given some sort of support role, although this ability does sort of fit into that category depending on how it is used.
Oh yes, please! I would headbutt marines all the time even if it did only 10 damage.
swipe > swipe > headbutt > vertical suplex
Here's my suggestion.
Stab - Biomass 5/6 - Decrease activation time by 1/2 so it becomes a viable finishing move while still leaving a fade exposed for a short time.
Vortex - Biomass 8 - Use a second time to teleport (doesnt teleport you on attack) - If you're on biomass 8 then your fades deserve to be kept alive. They can still die by engaging a couple of marines with good aim, it just makes them much harder to pinch. Which is perfectly reasonable given the biomass level, right?
If the fade would be able to pull out a marine from the group, not into 1v1 space in ghostland, but already 10m away from the main fight, he has already taken one gun off of the onos and now has a chance of 1v1'ing the guy. Jetpacker chasing ur ohnoes? pull him away! guy shootin at your gorge? Pull him out and land a few hits before he manages to turn around 180!
try pulling guys who are facing away from you to reel them in and land a successful STAB for the first time in your life! or just shadowstep away so he looses track of you. To me it sounds like fun and requires a bit of skill to pull off without getting badly hit, the shotgunner you just pulled in might get lucky and take you down with a twitch shot.
So, skill to be used only when in full health and full adre, so high risk high reward, pull out weak targets from the marine turtlesquad.
To me it feels like the fade should somehow affect the marines and not itself or other aliens. Like the lerk supports aliens(ok spores i know), gorge supports aliens,drifters support aliens. -> onos stomps marines, fade disorients marines? Dunno..
skulk does a bit of both with para for scouting and xeno for luls. No anti armor/building crap for the fade, bilebomb already does that. The fade is missing a role in a all-in alien push. The skulk works just as fine in a onoslerkgorgepush and doesn't cost a crazy amount of res to loose in a push. I think the other idea of making marines get stuck in a slow-mo vortex would be maybe a bit OP.
i'd pay money for them to add a headbutt.
no, just because it comes late game doesn't give it license to be imba. we already have our game ender, contaminate, powernode, whips, mucus, xeno, bile... you know coordination. fades don't need a boost really, it's just that the current abilities are pointless and not fun. vortex, when it was disable, was fun and had specific applications where it was actually useful. the current vortex is only good for:
A. showing off, at the cost of damage
B. harass, at the cost of damage
C. speed up healing
those are the ones that i've seen. none of which changes the role of the fade to any significant degree. the disable gave the fade the ability to support team pushes by disabling structures like obs, IP, or exos. could probably use vortex on onos too, to save it when it's running away, though that's a l33t maneuver i've never seen. the fade is more single-purpose than the onos, and it wasn't always.
let them keep their crappy teleport mechanic, give us back the disable instead of stab. bonus, you could troll your own team by keeping the CC alive for minutes.
for stab, if you really want to make it a game ender, just have it take a max hp a3 marine down to 10 effective health. so it's actually usable. if your only goal is to make it a game ending thing, just go all out.
Or are UW done with ns2 additions? Save bugfixes..
Interesting idea (assuming you mean the attack delay and not actually "cooldown")... it would even make sense, as the Fade needs a moment to pull his claws out of the target after a hit, but not after a miss.
It should still take a bit longer and use more energy (even on a miss) than Swipe, though.
Except you can't escape if your health gets low, and the rest of the equally equipped group are quite possibly waiting for you to finish up so they can blast your butthole to smithereens upon exit of this magic realm of death :P
Fade needs an OP lategame ability, just let it teleport where it likes >_>
So basically 'speed up healing'
Isn't that what metabolise did? Hmm :S
The details of the implementation i suggested weren't hashed out there, i agree, i hashed them out elsewhere..
But basically you enter the Vortex ether/world with the marine you selected at any range, and every entity and structure washes away and you both turn invisible /non collide-able to the rest of the players while you duke it out.
The vortex world dissipates when: 1) One of you dies 2) One of you moves out of range of one another at X distance 3) X time runs out
Meaning you could escape just fine if you wanted to.. hell, you could even use Vortex to just get a singular swipe in one one marine out of a group if you really wanted to..
I got the impression from the ideas in this thread that the vortex would only end when one of you dies :P which would be... yeah, not good.
That aside I definitely think Fade upgrades are not important enough - Fades are perhaps a bit too good with no upgrades, and the upgrades don't give them enough benefit. Shadowstep is cool and all but ultimately it's just completely superfluous with Blink doing almost the same thing. +1 for Metabolize - it's a perfect synergy with the Fade playstyle and it adds a great deal of value, we know this from years of NS1.
On a more serious note, how aboout Vortex being an instant teleport to a friendly player/unit near the crosshair in the LoS? That would be a lot simpler and user-friendly Fade ability.
I may have just missed it, but do you know of any reason that vortex was changed from what it was originally? I thought that implementation worked well with the fade's playstyle, especially against Exos (maybe it should have prevented reloading and slowed movement speed though)