Increasing the skill ceiling of the marine commander
migalski
Boston Join Date: 2014-07-02 Member: 197181Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Boston Join Date: 2014-07-02 Member: 197181Members, Reinforced - Shadow
With the new patch and the changes to med packs, the marine commander ceiling has been somewhat significantly decreased. Med packing a marine in combat has become significantly less effective as now they are only healed half and to heal the same as before 2 med packs would have to be dropped to negate damage by aliens. This was put forth using the argument that it decreases med spam and removes unkillable marines.
Why i think it hurts the skill ceiling of the marine commander:
By weaking the efficiency of med packs, good commander with high accuracy can no longer keep alive marines in engagements as easily, as they have to drop double the amount of meds and in less time, 2 in the time of a bite(don't believe this is actually possible) and it is way more devastating to the marine economy, in do to die fights marines are significantly weaker as now you need to land less bites to kill the marine even with med spam. This makes a very good marine commander much less effective and in doing so lowers how good you can become as a commander.
Why i think it was unnecessary:
Correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure the only lifeform you could actually out med is a lerk. Otherwise if an alien hits all of his bites even with med support the marine would die, so in essence you are making aliens less punishing to play if the alien cannot hit his bites or aim, for newer players i welcome this change but for more experienced players you only make it easier to kill marines (assuming the marine commander actually does hit his meds which in itself is a big IF).
What i think could be done to make marine commander more powerful:
1. Decrease the timer to pickup meds even more than it already is to allow the marine commander to drop 2 meds in the time it use to be able to pickup 1. This would decrease med spam efficiency as it would still take 2 meds to heal a marine to the same amount of heal as before instantly. So if you were spamming randomly in the general direction, if you are not accurate it would devastate your marine economy but if you were very accurate, it would be as rewarding as before. This would make the skill ceiling slightly higher as now you have to hit multiple med packs to have the same healing affect.
2. Change and make it so only med packs that fall on the ground have this effect(25 instantly then 25 slowly), while med packs that are accurately dropped have the old effect(instantly heals 50). This would essentially make it so if you hit your meds your golden but if you miss it does hurt your marines slightly as they have to wait a little bit to be fully healed.
3. Revert the change and re implement it in another way that does not affect the marine commander skill ceiling as much as it does.
In the end i think that this change is either to make aliens less punishing to play or making marines easier to be killed. Either or, this does nerf how good a commander can be with keeping his marines alive on the field. This just seems like an unnecessary nerf and targeted at making the game easier for newer players but for older experienced players can have huge consequences in engagements as well as making the commander have less an affect on the field. I personally don't think lower the skill ceiling for the commander is the way to go, hence this post, a good commander can only do so much as it is, a marine with poor accuracy or poor positioning will still die 99% of the time regardless of how good the commander is.
Why i think it hurts the skill ceiling of the marine commander:
By weaking the efficiency of med packs, good commander with high accuracy can no longer keep alive marines in engagements as easily, as they have to drop double the amount of meds and in less time, 2 in the time of a bite(don't believe this is actually possible) and it is way more devastating to the marine economy, in do to die fights marines are significantly weaker as now you need to land less bites to kill the marine even with med spam. This makes a very good marine commander much less effective and in doing so lowers how good you can become as a commander.
Why i think it was unnecessary:
Correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure the only lifeform you could actually out med is a lerk. Otherwise if an alien hits all of his bites even with med support the marine would die, so in essence you are making aliens less punishing to play if the alien cannot hit his bites or aim, for newer players i welcome this change but for more experienced players you only make it easier to kill marines (assuming the marine commander actually does hit his meds which in itself is a big IF).
What i think could be done to make marine commander more powerful:
1. Decrease the timer to pickup meds even more than it already is to allow the marine commander to drop 2 meds in the time it use to be able to pickup 1. This would decrease med spam efficiency as it would still take 2 meds to heal a marine to the same amount of heal as before instantly. So if you were spamming randomly in the general direction, if you are not accurate it would devastate your marine economy but if you were very accurate, it would be as rewarding as before. This would make the skill ceiling slightly higher as now you have to hit multiple med packs to have the same healing affect.
2. Change and make it so only med packs that fall on the ground have this effect(25 instantly then 25 slowly), while med packs that are accurately dropped have the old effect(instantly heals 50). This would essentially make it so if you hit your meds your golden but if you miss it does hurt your marines slightly as they have to wait a little bit to be fully healed.
3. Revert the change and re implement it in another way that does not affect the marine commander skill ceiling as much as it does.
In the end i think that this change is either to make aliens less punishing to play or making marines easier to be killed. Either or, this does nerf how good a commander can be with keeping his marines alive on the field. This just seems like an unnecessary nerf and targeted at making the game easier for newer players but for older experienced players can have huge consequences in engagements as well as making the commander have less an affect on the field. I personally don't think lower the skill ceiling for the commander is the way to go, hence this post, a good commander can only do so much as it is, a marine with poor accuracy or poor positioning will still die 99% of the time regardless of how good the commander is.
Comments
No because that's just artificial difficulty.
How does it affect difficulty in any way? It rewards being able to aim and predict bites, but otherwise doesn't make the game any harder?
I mean if you're putting yourself in the alien view i guess you can consider it harder but then it would be the same as it has been for a long time.
Not to mention that the skilled skulks will have an easier time killing marines and shine, while marines who play well will also shine more, because they have to rely on their own skill to get them out of trouble, rather than the medpacks. All the skill ceilings have been lifted to new hights. The only thing that might take a step back is that A2 has become alot more viable. It is still to be seen how high an impact these meds will have, and they are still up for discussion. The only thing i would consider is increasing the time and/or the cost of A2.
I don't see how the skill ceilings at all have been risen, could you elaborate please? Marines could always shine based on how well they play, a good marine can wipe 3 skulks with 1 clip without even getting bite so i just don't understand how getting less meds raises the skill ceiling at all. I mean i guess it makes marines look better in general but weakens marine side in general.
A2 has always been very viable especially in comp, It has generally been a more NA strat but many teams have rushed A2 in the past as it helps marines stay up longer on the field.
Previously very good commanders could hide the flaws of field players by keeping them alive and hoping they manage to do something, now not so much. In a game past the lets say 20 mins mark a good commander will have a major of the upgrades researched and then it boils down to strategy and can the marines kill lifeforms/win engagements, with this med pack nerf it just becomes more difficult to do so.
The hand of God mechanic of direct commander involvement In combat is one of the most infuriating things to play against as alien. For far too long we've seen perfect skulk ambushes, fades landing every swipe, only to be thwarted or have combat extended to the point where they die by attrition. This is bad enough for comp players, but is 10x worse for greens and casual players.
Commanders never should never be able to directly affect the outcome of combat - that should purely be up to the skill of the field players. All the recent changes does is highlight the fact that the current role for marine commanders is a glorified med dispenser and tech path clicker. They have no real depth beyond this unless they are directing troop movements.
But without fundamental changes these are the issues we have to deal with. As for your alternate ideas, they are well thought out and would probably work, but I feel they are just reintroducing the hand of God in another way, so you may as well just revert the changes. I feel the new changes are necessary, if only to highlight how lackluster commanding and the current RTS implementation is in NS2.
But isn't this punishing very good commanders as a result? A "good" commander will have a good strategy and will have good communication otherwise i wouldn't really call them good. If a player were to be shooting constantly 40% in every engagement simply because of how focused and good he were at the game would you nerf his damage output because others could not keep up? I feel like this change is simply too harsh to what a good commander can do now.
If an alien were to overextend should he not be punished as a result? A smart alien will realize the marine is being med spammed and simply disengage or risk dieing, it just feels like this change is nerfing marines by giving the aliens more room for error. As well as the fact there are very few good/great commanders in this game remaining.
Why shouldn't commanders be able to affect how the game flows? As you said Ns2 is very weak rts and with most of your units constantly disobeying you why would you command? I use to occasionally command both pubs and gathers but with this change why should i? I can barely affect fights and if i try it can devastate the marine economy. Whats the point of having a commander if they just research tech and drop structures and occasionally a med here or there, it would make commanding at a high level extremely easy.
As for attracting and retaining good commanders, I think mechanical features are very important. There's only that much you can strategize and communicate with an average public team and chances are you never really even get to make proper decisions unless the teams are very even and your marines are hitting the necessary shots. In such situations you want some kind of micro scale challenges that can give you the feeling of success or failure even when the large scale gameplay isn't a proper contest. Without any kind of micro mechanics you're damn sure going to run out of good commanders because majority of them quit once they've seen similar rounds unfold enough of times and feel powerless to influence the round outcome in any concrete way.
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I think one of the nifty NS1 features that I loved as a commander was the sound scouting. You could hear all the ingame sounds like alien footsteps and building sounds by hovering over the locations on the map. A good commander with game sense could hear an incoming baserush or upcoming alien expansion without having to rely on marines and scan for all the scouting. It was challenging to find the right moments between listening and medpacking/other support in a hectic round.
I'm not even sure how the NS2 mechanics go with the commander sound, but could the sound scouting be ephasized more to allow good commander shine even when the medpacking is limited? You could for example give the commander ability to tag map points with stuff like "Skulk sound here" or "Gorge building here" to share the information more effectively.
And for the rest i agree, rewarding accurate medpack would be a great way to separate 2 coms on a mechanical standpoint. But I think you will get some hate about the "no deep strategy", some people thinks this game has more meta than SC2
They also reduced the pickup time almost by half.
So as a com you need to land twice as many meds in the same time and also chose more strategically who to med.
No they didn't. It's roughly 20% less.
http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/update-294-released-on-steam/
I'll explain... the perceived skill of a commander in this post is to assume that the better he can med, the better a comm he is... this is wrong, a commanders skill is directly linked to his ability to control his res. To understand when an engagement is WORTH medding and when it isn't is FAR more important than your accuracy/frequency with medpacks... the fact that medpacks have been made less effective now makes this ability to judge engagements much more important for a commander to learn how to do.
Put simply, a bad comm just medspams and relies on the ability of his hero marines to win the game. a good comm plans his res and gets the upgrades while also medding important engagements.
The new med setup punishes a bad commander far more than the old meds used to... thus making KNOWING when to med more important than it already was... thus increasing the skill ceiling of the marine comm.
The thing is a good commander already knows if an engagement is potentially worth medding or just simply letting a marine die is better. This update doesn't do anything but nerf how much the commander can actually help the field player. A commander who just spams meds and is horrible with his res will be noticed fast as its 10 mins in and the marines only have 1/1 yet have been holding 6 rts all game.
Also weakening the marine commander =/= raising the ceiling, Ns2 is aliens vs marines not marines vs marines. By the commander having less of an impact on the field he can't nearly do as much. A skill ceiling is how good you can get at specific thing as well as how effective it is. If a marine commander is very good with when he meds and his tech, it doesn't matter if his marines are dieing left and right because he cant keep them alive. The new med setup doesn't just punish bad commanders, it punishes any commander who actually meds in engagements. This update doesn't do anything except make weaker commanders more viable as good commanders can no longer do as much as they could in the past.
I understand your thought process on the subject. but it doesn't change the fact that you are wrong... the medpack nerf doesn't lower the skill ceiling of a commander, it makes getting to be a GOOD commander harder because now every med you land is vital instead of being able to just throw them around like they are nothing, which a lot of comms currently do... if you throw them around willy nilly, you waste a LOT of res and the meds are not worth it... but a comm with damn good accuracy effectively medding a good field player can still have an impact.. the commander just can't outmed 2 fades and a lerk anymore... I think the nerf went a little too far and it the impact should be lessened, but the arguement that its because the skill ceiling is now lower is just plain wrong.
As I said before, its not that you CAN'T med engagements now, its just that the engagements that you CAN outmed are more specific... which makes judging based off of your own accuracy and the engagement itself more difficult, thus increasing the skill ceiling.
The medpacks imo should be altered to be 35 - 40hp insta-heal and 10 - 15hp HoT (stackable).
So far the feedback I'm looking at is:
-Increase the med "sticky targeting" to make them a tad easier to land consecutively
-Allow the HoT to be retained after reaching max HP (up to 1 meds worth of HoT)
-Take another look at the instant heal value and the pickup delay - The goal here would be to keep the 2 tres "combat meds" but also make it closer to how it felt before to med a marine in combat. The hard part is retaining the ability to 2-hit a no-armor marine with the skulk (.45 swing timer) and the fade (.52 swing timer)