Suggestions for lategame alien abilities (and FT)
Laggy
Join Date: 2012-11-19 Member: 172521Members
Join Date: 2012-11-19 Member: 172521Members
So I'm an old NS1 player (lost four digit number of hours playing it in my childhood) and I've been stewing around, watching NS2 limp to completion, and I want to take a moment to preface with my first post on the forums here that UWE is awesome for finally getting this thing out of the gate. It's been fun, it's been a ride, and I had enough pokes in during the alpha/beta phase to sympathize with the difficulties of developing a game from scratch. Kudos to them.
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Moving on, I've been mulling on a lot of random ideas in my head about the game's current alien abilities thus far, and wanted to ping them off for some kneejerk feedback.
The point of these suggestions is <i>not</i> strictly to address balance concerns, nor am I interested in starting more arguments about it. Metrics and judicious amounts of playing are the only real ways to handle those. In addition, numbers can always be tweaked. The thrust of these ideas is to alter gameplay in a way that makes it more interactive (read: player feels like what he's doing has an impact on the outcome, for good or ill) and interesting.
So before anyone comes out and just goes "this is like all alien buffs, wtf!" bear that in mind. Ultimately nothing goes in without the devs' say-so on it in terms of balance, so I do not feel like I need to present an entire agenda of balanced ideas here (for instance, you could toss in the changes here and move onos eggs to 3-hive as has been suggested in many other threads. I dunno. It's not great to speculate on a set of changes like they'll all come in one desired package, because they won't.) Plus, marines feel like they're in in a really good place in terms of their options and how distinct and awesome it feels to utilize them, IMO. (JP, exos, shotties, grenades, etc.)
1. <b>Umbra.</b> Change so that any grenades fired within its area of effect do not go off except on direct impacts.
Reasons: The first of the 3-hive abilities I'd like to address. This helps mitigate the relentless marine turtling when a game is already over with GL spam while not making umbra completely neuter the weapon. This retains Onos being large tempting targets for direct hits, which means other aliens should scatter away from them (though they should already <i>anyway</i>, other than gorges).
2. <b>Xenocide.</b> Change so that you can continue biting/parasiting/leaping during the activation period.
Reasons: This was in NS1, and lets skulks make those last handful of seconds still matter and naturally scales the damage upward, which I think is reasonable for a 3-hive ability. It also makes well timed leap into xenocides viable, which feels awesome if you can pull it off well and stylish.
3. <b>Blink.</b> Change so that you reduce damage while in blink.
Reasons: This was in previous forms of the beta in some way, I think... back when it was a true teleport and you were invincible during movement. I don't think total invincibility is a good idea, but <i>reduced</i> damage allows you to strategically time your blinks in combat (such as in sync to the firing rate of shotguns, etc.) and gives it another dynamic beyond travel, further distinguishing it from shadowstep (it's the 2-hive ability as well, so this doesn't make 1-hive fades obnoxious or anything). Also gives more weight to fades favoring Adrenaline over Celerity, the former of which I personally feel is underused. There is also a strong sentiment right now that the 50 res Fade is a bit of a risky option compared to the only-25-more onos, and this adds considerably to its survivability option <i>while making it skill-based</i> as opposed to just piling on more HP/armor.
4. <b>Flamethrowers.</b> Change so that they disable structures' abilities while they're on fire.
Reasons: I totally stole this one from reading another thread that mentioned whips can't knock back grenades while on fire. Why not take it another level entirely and just have abilities cease to work? (e.g. crags don't heal, shades don't cloak, the active abilities on those buildings are disabled while on fire). Shouldn't work on hives and egg spawning, though. Anyway, FTs are pretty underutilized, this feels like a more intuitive property than the current ones they have. It's also entirely possible they already work like this, I'm not actually sure.
-
Moving on, I've been mulling on a lot of random ideas in my head about the game's current alien abilities thus far, and wanted to ping them off for some kneejerk feedback.
The point of these suggestions is <i>not</i> strictly to address balance concerns, nor am I interested in starting more arguments about it. Metrics and judicious amounts of playing are the only real ways to handle those. In addition, numbers can always be tweaked. The thrust of these ideas is to alter gameplay in a way that makes it more interactive (read: player feels like what he's doing has an impact on the outcome, for good or ill) and interesting.
So before anyone comes out and just goes "this is like all alien buffs, wtf!" bear that in mind. Ultimately nothing goes in without the devs' say-so on it in terms of balance, so I do not feel like I need to present an entire agenda of balanced ideas here (for instance, you could toss in the changes here and move onos eggs to 3-hive as has been suggested in many other threads. I dunno. It's not great to speculate on a set of changes like they'll all come in one desired package, because they won't.) Plus, marines feel like they're in in a really good place in terms of their options and how distinct and awesome it feels to utilize them, IMO. (JP, exos, shotties, grenades, etc.)
1. <b>Umbra.</b> Change so that any grenades fired within its area of effect do not go off except on direct impacts.
Reasons: The first of the 3-hive abilities I'd like to address. This helps mitigate the relentless marine turtling when a game is already over with GL spam while not making umbra completely neuter the weapon. This retains Onos being large tempting targets for direct hits, which means other aliens should scatter away from them (though they should already <i>anyway</i>, other than gorges).
2. <b>Xenocide.</b> Change so that you can continue biting/parasiting/leaping during the activation period.
Reasons: This was in NS1, and lets skulks make those last handful of seconds still matter and naturally scales the damage upward, which I think is reasonable for a 3-hive ability. It also makes well timed leap into xenocides viable, which feels awesome if you can pull it off well and stylish.
3. <b>Blink.</b> Change so that you reduce damage while in blink.
Reasons: This was in previous forms of the beta in some way, I think... back when it was a true teleport and you were invincible during movement. I don't think total invincibility is a good idea, but <i>reduced</i> damage allows you to strategically time your blinks in combat (such as in sync to the firing rate of shotguns, etc.) and gives it another dynamic beyond travel, further distinguishing it from shadowstep (it's the 2-hive ability as well, so this doesn't make 1-hive fades obnoxious or anything). Also gives more weight to fades favoring Adrenaline over Celerity, the former of which I personally feel is underused. There is also a strong sentiment right now that the 50 res Fade is a bit of a risky option compared to the only-25-more onos, and this adds considerably to its survivability option <i>while making it skill-based</i> as opposed to just piling on more HP/armor.
4. <b>Flamethrowers.</b> Change so that they disable structures' abilities while they're on fire.
Reasons: I totally stole this one from reading another thread that mentioned whips can't knock back grenades while on fire. Why not take it another level entirely and just have abilities cease to work? (e.g. crags don't heal, shades don't cloak, the active abilities on those buildings are disabled while on fire). Shouldn't work on hives and egg spawning, though. Anyway, FTs are pretty underutilized, this feels like a more intuitive property than the current ones they have. It's also entirely possible they already work like this, I'm not actually sure.
Comments
ignoring exosuits and jetpacks...
1. your HP does not change with your weapon choice
2. your speed and mobility never change
3. Even if you do decide to try to slot yourself into a different role (like, you want to be a healer so you grab a welder) you still have mostly the same weapons (LMG and pistol).
1 and 3 are not necessary.
Xenocide is severely under powered right now. You have a better chance killing an armor and weapons level 3 marine with bite, than with xenocide. Biting while charging xenocide is necessary for NS2, OR xenocide needs to change in some way to make it a decent ability.
Flamethrowers are great at killing cysts and can stop an alien from regenning adrenaline...... but its not much good for anything else.
I agree with this idea 100%, let flamethrower disable crag heals, shade cloak and shift adren regen.