Mid game and large server egg problems
Marshall_Drummin
Join Date: 2012-12-04 Member: 174115Members
Join Date: 2012-12-04 Member: 174115Members
The movement at this very moment, this patch, is very balanced. I think the entire game is very balanced, except for a few issues that I will get to. Development team should keep experimenting with ideas in sewlek's mod, but to change up basic movement is unwarranted. Its been tweaked every patch since 239, (whether they said anything about it in the changelog or not), and its at a good point, fine and tuned. If I were the dev team, I would concentrate on a few little things and not huge things to shake up a very good foundation. Once that is done, add ons and features can be added, but shaking up foundations like movement mechanics is unwarranted, as it is pretty good atm.
Different build orders. Of course marines are going to have a pretty set pattern of what to do, but aliens have three choices to make. Crag is a pretty strong choice and standard on anything but 24 player servers. Forcing shift to make eggs on large servers is a game flaw not a player skill flaw. Egg spawning rate and egg start amount need to scale with player count.
-bigger egg count at map start for aliens according to how many alien players are on team, calculated at map start
-increase egg spawn rate for every player on aliens. A check can be made every spawn wave; decrease egg spawning time for every additional player on aliens.
-celerity not working in combat was unwarranted, but its ok (comp play adrenaline is the go to 2nd hive trait)
Camouflage needs to be reworked in two ways. The first player model of deactivation is opaque and green, when it could just be a normal skulk model. The threshold for deactivation is too sensitive, in instances like when you fall off a very small ledge.
Lerk tracers cause too much visual clutter and should be taken out. This might be THE most important issue of all, and here are the reasons why.
1. Tracers prevent tracking
-tracers were implemented to give away their position, but ironically if the lerk is moving tracers reveal their general position and obscure their true position
2. Tracers force visual clutter and negates a marine's aiming
-Why not let the players use aim against aim? not allowing an even playing field needs to be warranted
3. Not being able track a lerk effectively causes more team resource damage than before tracers from increased med pack drops
4. Lerks come out before the MOST important hive, the 2nd hive, and decreasing marine's effectiveness vs lerks at the MOST pivotal stage in the game isn't good
*the 2nd hive is the most important because you can get leap and blink. A fade without blink is a lot easier to kill and blink increases fade effectiveness exponentially, same for skulk.
5. It negates the use of perching, the lerk's shift key ability. Every class uses their shift key except lerk
-I CANNOT imagine the devs envisioning lerks not perching and shooting and being awesome. They made perching a shift key ability! This was a change probably implemented to appease a lot of rookie complaints.
Adding tracers on to rookie mode server could be a route to go. Tracers might seem like a small factor, but it adds up to a very big factor when you consider everything stated. Once the earlier stages are balanced, you will have a very strong base to which you can add on any change you want in the late game, with very minimal consequence.
Different build orders. Of course marines are going to have a pretty set pattern of what to do, but aliens have three choices to make. Crag is a pretty strong choice and standard on anything but 24 player servers. Forcing shift to make eggs on large servers is a game flaw not a player skill flaw. Egg spawning rate and egg start amount need to scale with player count.
-bigger egg count at map start for aliens according to how many alien players are on team, calculated at map start
-increase egg spawn rate for every player on aliens. A check can be made every spawn wave; decrease egg spawning time for every additional player on aliens.
-celerity not working in combat was unwarranted, but its ok (comp play adrenaline is the go to 2nd hive trait)
Camouflage needs to be reworked in two ways. The first player model of deactivation is opaque and green, when it could just be a normal skulk model. The threshold for deactivation is too sensitive, in instances like when you fall off a very small ledge.
Lerk tracers cause too much visual clutter and should be taken out. This might be THE most important issue of all, and here are the reasons why.
1. Tracers prevent tracking
-tracers were implemented to give away their position, but ironically if the lerk is moving tracers reveal their general position and obscure their true position
2. Tracers force visual clutter and negates a marine's aiming
-Why not let the players use aim against aim? not allowing an even playing field needs to be warranted
3. Not being able track a lerk effectively causes more team resource damage than before tracers from increased med pack drops
4. Lerks come out before the MOST important hive, the 2nd hive, and decreasing marine's effectiveness vs lerks at the MOST pivotal stage in the game isn't good
*the 2nd hive is the most important because you can get leap and blink. A fade without blink is a lot easier to kill and blink increases fade effectiveness exponentially, same for skulk.
5. It negates the use of perching, the lerk's shift key ability. Every class uses their shift key except lerk
-I CANNOT imagine the devs envisioning lerks not perching and shooting and being awesome. They made perching a shift key ability! This was a change probably implemented to appease a lot of rookie complaints.
Adding tracers on to rookie mode server could be a route to go. Tracers might seem like a small factor, but it adds up to a very big factor when you consider everything stated. Once the earlier stages are balanced, you will have a very strong base to which you can add on any change you want in the late game, with very minimal consequence.
Comments
I think the problem with alien tech lacking complexity that you are noticing is a result of the fact that alien tech was never meant to be as complex as the marine tech. Aliens had a much more basic, decentralized system of teching up in NS1 to contrast the more complicated and diverse marine tech.
Personally I think going either movement or defense works just fine as a first hive in this game. Using shifts to hatch eggs is viable in situations other than egglock - on big maps it is great for locking down areas you want to control. And if you're on a pub chances are 50% of players won't listen to where you tell them to go, so corralling them with the egg hatch is a great tactic.
Egglocking on 24 man servers is a problem though. It makes them nearly unplayable. It's been known for quite some time but so far no adjustments have been made. Hopefully soon they will, but they seem to be focused on other things, especially considering that this game wasn't developed with more than 8v8 or 9v9 in mind.
If they fixed the lerk spike to send a trace out every 3rd or 5th spike would be nice I guess, dunno if it should be turned off completely so much as toned down heavily.
Tracers are a nerf and a buff, I don't see why that would be confusing. They eliminate the use of perching during combat, and they heavily obscure marine vision/aim. Weakening marine's ability to aim at a lerk, needs to be warranted. For example if the lerk was too weak, give them a handicap, but they have NEVER been weak.
When fighting a lerk I get frustrated with the game, it won't let me go aim for aim cause of stupid stupid tracers.
Spikes are pretty fantastic at taking down marines if you can learn to compensite for the up and down lerk hovering movement.
There are a lot of us out there that are at best suboptimal lerks so it was a nerf for those people.
Its like saying that reducing splash damage on grenades was only a nerf for suboptimal GL spammers.
But back on topic...
Larger servers do perform better with egg numbers than they used to, though they still have a way to go before you would think about something other than shift first on 24 players servers.
The lerk comes into the game without any real weapons that can be used to do anything other than annoy.
Early game lerks can be devestating...but so can early game marines.
Spores need to be 1st hive ability along with spikes and umbra 2nd hive.
Spikes are a nuisance at best...now even more so as you have a clear indicator for even the most unitiated in NS2 to follow...no more franticaly looking around for a lerk.
It's like a bunch of ground walking lerks complaining about a reduction in the ground walking speed and then me coming along and saying "yeah walking on the ground is a suboptimal use of the lerk" to which you would respond "but being a ground lerk is all I can ever be !".
There are instances in which perch spiking is the best thing to do. Such as when a large group of marines are all going through 1 entrance to hit a hive and they are preoccupied with the other aliens in front of them, so none bother to hit the lerk sitting on top of the hive spiking them. Assuming you don't have spores yet of course.
Sorry but for lerks who cant shoot and fly its optimal to perch and shoot, and in most situaitons is safer to shoot down power from a distance...now the marines entering the room know exactly where you shooting from even if you have silence.
To say perching and shooting is suboptimal is both elitist and incorrect depending on the actual situation it can well be the better choice for even a good lerker.
Perching was only ever limited to a few practical situations, to say it was suboptimal is wrong if I am trying to take out the power at the warehouse hive on tram then sitting at the node munching is far from optimal (your both blind and weak), floating around trying to spike similarly so (as movement is easier to see)...the optimal approach was to hide up in the rafter as it would buy you the time to scoot out the door whilst they tried to work out exactly where you were.
1. Cannot use perching in combat
2. Obscures marine vision and aim, creating an unwarranted, uneven playing field marine vs lerk
Sincerely,
thebusfromspeed
Perch spiking is only sub-optimal if you do it in a situation where it isn't optimal. Obviously the same goes for ground lerking, sometimes it IS optimal.
The straw man here is that the people who want to perch-spike without giving away their position, will ONLY perch spike if able to do so stealthily.
That is simply untrue, before tracers it was just another tactic you could choose to employ, making the lerk as a whole more dynamic.
Optimal or not isn't the issue here, the issue is that knowing when to perch-spike and when not to was itself a skill and removing the option lowers the lerk skill ceiling by limiting possible tactics.
If tracers are here to stay, I suggest removing them when evolving camo, silence or both.
EDIT
Do whatever you think is best as a lerk. I literally don't give a crap to be quite frank.
If I happen to be the other side of the map to most of my team and the tech points undefended I can provide great assistance to my team by tacking out the power or atleast diverting enemy forces.
Whilst you may say spiking was more of a nuisance....it does work and can help turn the tide on battles the other side of the map. Marines dont know who or how many are attacking an area (unless pinging) so have to send 1 or 2 to clear any problem.
The slower mobility of a marine compared to a lerk means that lerk can more quickly move to another battle front than th emarine.
If you're talking about pub play sure. However, in comp play, the comm will notice how quickly (or not quickly) the health of the structure is going down and can tell if its a lerk spiking and will relay that to the team to just ignore it because it takes forever to lerk spike kill a structure.
Whenever I see a lerk spiking down a power node in whatever room I just tell the team to ignore it, they're just wasting a lerk there and it's now easier to push elsewhere. Spiking power nodes is literally the stupidest thing you can do with a lerk, unless the marines a dumb enough to send people to investigate it.
As comp play is 6v6 (or at most 8v8 for gathers) and pub play does predominantly occur on 18+ servers (safety in numbers for us "noobs") the strats are all together different and the lerk becomes more powerful in comp play due to lower player count.
In pubs a lerk struggles if they run into 2+ ppl with lmg's that can shoot, which is more common so "optimal" lerking is highly dynamic/situationaly dependant and why I called bs on the phrase.
I have seen clever lerks cause 3 + marines to waste time trying to kill him instead of going on to where the real fight is.
They are not good for building, killing healthy marines.
I swear the number of times I've seen lerks spend multiple minutes spiking down some building just to have a marine warp in and heal it up in 15 seconds. Just stay skulk if you don't want to learn how to use a lerk, but don't come crying when they implement a system into play to both punish you for doing something stupid and bring a class more in line with it's intended function.
Tracers don't affect me one bit, except during pre-spores hive defenses.
what makes you think that the sole purpose of perch is to use spikes?
i use perch all the time, and i even use it with spikes in some group fights when the marines are shooting at skulks and/or i want to stay at a safe distance where i can retreat if needed. (i'm attuned to the interp delay and unperch instantly when the marine turns towards me)
also, what blinding handicap are you talking about? the tracer is subtle and doesn't effect my vision in the slightest.
It would kinda suck for lerks not be able to cloak anywhere except when standing on flat surfaces
Of course, there is an element of suckage in camo itself, but at least you can enjoy it from a high vantage point.
Take the training wheels off? Not having tracers was training wheels for lerks and it led to terrible play.
i agree in principle, although wouldn't say spikes do minor damage - the dps is insane with good aim (i think almost as high as LMG on average due to the reload time).