Lets discuss NS2_Descent
Exoskelett
Join Date: 2012-12-18 Member: 175509Members, Reinforced - Supporter
So hey guys after a long long pcw on descent we felt a bit ... well ... slow all over the map (even as alien with celerity wich cost us the game at all) and after the match we started to check out whats the reason for this and what we've found is stuff like this:
Some Vents are pretty bad placed so meanwhile if you spawn in monorail those vents offer 0,000% useage for aliens - marines after they have jetpacks done could easily sneak into those and grab up your base - they are very small too so its a save escape for shotgunners also.
if you think that descent needs a rework and especially for competitive and if you found more useless stuff take a friend make a video of the situation and add it here.
some vents are also wrongly placed on the map, so you def. search a while to find it for the very first time.
anyways im a bit tired of playing descent in competitive too (even if we have voted against the map in the ENSL), because this map has no structure its unpredictable in any match - it does lack also a lot of restowers wich slows the entire gameplay wich is usually pretty fast down
anyways i think monorail is a new pipeline hivespawn but just my words
Some Vents are pretty bad placed so meanwhile if you spawn in monorail those vents offer 0,000% useage for aliens - marines after they have jetpacks done could easily sneak into those and grab up your base - they are very small too so its a save escape for shotgunners also.
if you think that descent needs a rework and especially for competitive and if you found more useless stuff take a friend make a video of the situation and add it here.
some vents are also wrongly placed on the map, so you def. search a while to find it for the very first time.
anyways im a bit tired of playing descent in competitive too (even if we have voted against the map in the ENSL), because this map has no structure its unpredictable in any match - it does lack also a lot of restowers wich slows the entire gameplay wich is usually pretty fast down
anyways i think monorail is a new pipeline hivespawn but just my words
Comments
Really the only vent that gets much usage that I see in Descent is the one in Hydro. However, I'm pretty sure with the nerfed range to bilebomb, you cannot reach the powernode from the vent like you suggest.
I agree that arcing hydro from that receiving area is way too easy.
Maybe hydro would be a more valueable hive location if the techpoint was centered in the room out of arc range. But by this all the fighting would be about hydro rendering large parts of the map .... irrelevant?
Initially I thought the map was bad, but players seem to be getting the hang of it making for better matches.
I always enjoyed sneaking through a random vent you could get into with some work and catching a sneaky skulk, but this map has 0 vents that you can traverse the full thing without a boost or jpack, and only two you can enter a partial section of the vent.
I also dislike how the vents are mostly ceilings. It's difficult to locate some vents cause they are straight above, and it's irritating getting killed by a skulk that just shows up on top of you from the ceiling vent you couldn't see without looking directly up.
I think it's to easy to arc almost every hive on descent. Fab, hydro, monorail and launch control are all very vulnerable to arcs, and drone bay to a lesser extent...
For example, i have never experienced fights over Club, Water Treatment or Shipping. Energy Flow and Gravity Control on the other hand are a magnet to constant encounters and ongoing trench warfare.
I haven't played alot on Descent and therefore might not yet see the strategical importance of aforementioned places, but overall I get the impression the map is not balanced as it is.
Just plop the Tech Point out of Hydro and put it in Water Treatment, then move the Resource Nozzle from Energy Flow and move it to Club.
Is this crazy? Absolutely! Is it stupid? Probably! Please voice your opinions here.
No, seriously, a tech point without a res node is not a good idea and I believe it has got more to do with the way the rooms connect than with the distribution of res nodes/tech points. I mean, a similar res/tech layout works like a charm on Summit...
It is already valuable enough to hold Energy Flow on it's own for the choke point that it is, so I don't think it should have that additional RT there. That one should maybe be moved more into the Silo area so Monorail feels also less like Pipeline. (Though that might cut Fabrication a bit off… there is not really a proper solution to the problem due to the long way from Drafting into Silo)
I also find the Power Node location in Hydro extremely annoying. It's extremely vulnerable and you have no LoS to it from the tech point due to the pillars. I kinda see what you were going for there, but it's almost as bad as the Power Node of the marine start in Turtle.