The lerk now costs the same as a single exo, is barely faster, has a fraction of its health, does a fraction of its damage, and doesn't have floodlights. It's way too expensive to be the shell of the vanilla lerk...
There's two problems here, and eliminating both is near impossible. Tres drops of any kind (weapons or lifeforms) only serve to make lifeform massing worse - your always going to buy shotguns or fades once there is nothing else beneficial to research/upgrade. For marines, this problem isn't as apparent because of a more developed tech tree, but for aliens it is. This is reduced in the BT mod but not eliminated - as long as tres drops remain it will always be a potential problem (I want them removed). As for lifeform explosions, the solution is not to remove the ability to pop 5 fades at 8-10 minutes. Any mechanic that separates pres timings through pres 'drains' will always be bad overall, and either further slow lifeform timings (which are already too slow), or force the aliens to learn to play without whatever the drain is (upgrades/whatever). As for a mechanic to separate them via a positive pres 'gain' mechanic, I'm all for suggestions in that regard. IMO the best solution here is to stagger the power of the lifeforms. While this is not super apparent, in the BT mod you generally will pop fades before you have heavy biomass/upgrades, so while you might have crag/shift upgrades when you first fade, you might not have shadowstep and/or higher biomass for extra HP. This softens the lifeform 'explosion', giving the marines more time to kill the fades before it becomes an unstoppable fadeball. Also, reinforcing the lerks role makes it a valuable compliment to a team mid/late game so you still want atleast a single lerk.
Lifeform explosions are tricky because of the methods on which NS2 is balanced currently, especially with regards to fade. The current fade is really a joke, but because of the tres fade spam and massing of fades, it has to be otherwise the game would instantly end between 10-12 minutes. This issue needs to be resolved by this mod, however resolving it by reducing the number of players that can fade at once isn't something that I have seen a good solution for.
Also, my comments about fade in the BT mod are more how you cannot play without carapace - not that a carapace fade's HP is too low. I have been exclusively playing regen fade in the mod to attempt to estimate its potential, and until I can see playing regen fade being a remote possibility, I will think that the fade needs some re-balancing on its HP/Armor values.
The lerk now costs the same as a single exo, is barely faster, has a fraction of its health, does a fraction of its damage, and doesn't have floodlights. It's way too expensive to be the shell of the vanilla lerk...
And yet I'm willing to bet you will still see more people willingly going Lerk when they have the option of getting something better.
One thing I've always hated is how carapace is so critical rather than just a different playstyle. Not sure that can be eliminated.
This is a really good point. The biomass system actually allows essentially an armour upgrade system without carapace as a separate upgrade: ie boost armour more with biomass, remove carapace and replace it with something else. Like a version of regen that is only a boost to the current tick regen (not the ability, the innate one that all lifeforms get, can't think of the word just now). That could work in combat as well, and provide an alternative to 'regen', which stays not working in combat as in vanilla but gives a bigger hp boost. Okay, that's lame and unimaginative as an alternative to carapace, but a bit of brainstorming would surely give some better ideas here...
The lerk now costs the same as a single exo, is barely faster, has a fraction of its health, does a fraction of its damage, and doesn't have floodlights. It's way too expensive to be the shell of the vanilla lerk...
The obvious solution is to give the lerk floodlights.
One thing I've always hated is how carapace is so critical rather than just a different playstyle. Not sure that can be eliminated.
What about removing the extra armor scaling, and just making it an overall damage reduction, then making regen heal faster out of combat, and only heal slowly during combat
or you can disagree with my post and slap me with a fish and tell me go to cry in the corner.. I don't know I'm just posting something to try and be constructive
the thing which bugs me about the lerk is that it plays so similar to fade... it's basically a poor-mans fade.
i hope it's not too late to change, but from the lerk abilities and accessibility it really seems like it was intended to be primarily a 'support' lifeform. however, it's just terrible for support without ranged spores (not roulette crop-dusting spores*) or umbra and really is like a weak fade.
*if you have to get into melee range to spore the enemy, then more often than not you might as well bite them... if you bite them then you might as well finish them quickly instead of dilly-dallying trying to chip them down with fart gas. the crop-dusting spores are wholly contradictory.
The lerk is very very different from a fade and very very strong. Tarquinbb you are acting like spikes aren't absolutely awesome, they're ranged, they blind, are extremely accurate. A lerk can hold back marineS with shotguns by himself in a relatively small room. Its almost impossible to die as a lerk vs a marine without a shotgun at the 30 p.res mark. And there is nothing wrong with how spores work in live. If you are dying too much while using spores, than either its late game and you're getting one shot, or you're choosing oppurtunites poorly and doing it very wrong. There isn't a single lifeform that can stay in a room with 8 marines in it for any amount of time, so why should a 30 p.res lerk?
If the lerk isn't in danger while sporing, than how are marines going to leave their base, when lerks just shoot spores from range at marine exits over and over again? Currently spores are best used on phase gates then infantry portals, armories, etc. You will be doing more dps with spores on phase gates than biting one marine and leaving yourself vulnerable at point blank.
the spore
range/damage/radius can always be adjusted, i still think it would be a
hundred times more viable if it was a ranged ability instead of a bite
trade-off. i don't think you can argue that it's viable against good players (spores), because it just isn't. how many competitive games do you see spores? how many good lerks do you see using spores on pub aside from versus noobs (where it's as effective as napalm)?
about your lerk vs fade point, i beg to differ. lerk is simply a marine killing machine which comes before fade. if lerk was so uniquely great, then why do competitive teams aim to get 4-5 fades for the bulk of the game instead of 4-5 lerks? the answer is that lerk is basically a 'weak shotgun' and the fade is the 'true shotgun'. if skulk is the base and other lifeforms are game-changers, onos and gorge certainly have their own niche.... but lerk and fade have the same role.
SewlekThe programmer previously known as SchimmelJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16247Members, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, Subnautica Developer
the main problem with carapace is not the fact that the upgrade exists (as stated by so many people) but that its too strong to be "just an alternative". in average you can take with all live forms ~45% more damage, so its pretty obvious that this is mandatory.
the main problem with carapace is not the fact that the upgrade exists (as stated by so many people) but that its too strong to be "just an alternative". in average you can take with all live forms ~45% more damage, so its pretty obvious that this is mandatory.
If it were any weaker I feel that the upgrade would simply be boring, as it already is on the Lerk. The rest of the upgrades do cool things that change your playstyle. Carapace alone is just an invisible health buff.
One thing I've always hated is how carapace is so critical rather than just a different playstyle. Not sure that can be eliminated.
What about removing the extra armor scaling, and just making it an overall damage reduction, then making regen heal faster out of combat, and only heal slowly during combat
or you can disagree with my post and slap me with a fish and tell me go to cry in the corner.. I don't know I'm just posting something to try and be constructive
Making it a damage reduction wouldn't make it less desireable. Why carapace is so good is that it increases time to kill, and that change would do the same thing. The challenge to keep the same idea of carapace, being tough, and make it so it does not equally apply to all cases. I've kind of been a fan of trying something like "anything over X damage is absorbed" so it only affects the TTK on certain weapons and not others. That would be exceedingly difficult to find the right balanced value however.
One thing I've always hated is how carapace is so critical rather than just a different playstyle. Not sure that can be eliminated.
What about removing the extra armor scaling, and just making it an overall damage reduction, then making regen heal faster out of combat, and only heal slowly during combat
or you can disagree with my post and slap me with a fish and tell me go to cry in the corner.. I don't know I'm just posting something to try and be constructive
Making it a damage reduction wouldn't make it less desireable. Why carapace is so good is that it increases time to kill, and that change would do the same thing. The challenge to keep the same idea of carapace, being tough, and make it so it does not equally apply to all cases. I've kind of been a fan of trying something like "anything over X damage is absorbed" so it only affects the TTK on certain weapons and not others. That would be exceedingly difficult to find the right balanced value however.
Yeah I know, I just threw an idea out there. I'm going to honestly spend some time thinking and see if I can find anything worthwhile
It's like the new shade tree, phantom or aura? Both are viable and sometimes I use one or the other, it's a decision. Carapace is never a decision for me, it's mandatory, heck it's so mandatory I don't want any other upgrade before that
One thing I've always hated is how carapace is so critical rather than just a different playstyle. Not sure that can be eliminated.
What about removing the extra armor scaling, and just making it an overall damage reduction, then making regen heal faster out of combat, and only heal slowly during combat
or you can disagree with my post and slap me with a fish and tell me go to cry in the corner.. I don't know I'm just posting something to try and be constructive
Making it a damage reduction wouldn't make it less desireable. Why carapace is so good is that it increases time to kill, and that change would do the same thing. The challenge to keep the same idea of carapace, being tough, and make it so it does not equally apply to all cases. I've kind of been a fan of trying something like "anything over X damage is absorbed" so it only affects the TTK on certain weapons and not others. That would be exceedingly difficult to find the right balanced value however.
Yeah I know, I just threw an idea out there. I'm going to honestly spend some time thinking and see if I can find anything worthwhile
It's like the new shade tree, phantom or aura? Both are viable and sometimes I use one or the other, it's a decision. Carapace is never a decision for me, it's mandatory, heck it's so mandatory I don't want any other upgrade before that
Lerk is actually slightly faster IMO, unless you considered the takeoff speed in live constant, and most of the movement restrictions have been removed. You cant do the stupid 180 turns without a slight speed loss, and flying into things is actually bad now, all which are good changes.
The lower HP helps cement lerk into a support/harrass role, where before you could act as a flying tank. The HP was increased because of people complaining when they got killed by a shotgun, since for some reason people think they should be able to fly in and kill a shotgun marine with bite, not to fix the uselessness in comp play (hint, the complaints there were because of spores before the switch).
I know, i always have something to argue with you about something, right? But i really do feel passionately about the lerk more than anything else in this game..
Base speed is lowered to 11 from 12, this is a soft cap, where he constantly is dropping in speed but he can use "exploitive" means if he ducks and weaves up and down constantly and spams the spacebar , bringing him to a spastic 12.5 (i always felt 13 was the sweet spot personally)
And the free life form, the skulk can reach what speeds now exactly?.... without such an annoying movement mechanic
The only reason the 180 turns were an issue in the first place was because of the weapon implementation like i mentioned previously.. his primary weapon is a melee skulk like bite so of course 180 turns are OP with that setup.
If you relegate him to more of a harasser / support role (not suggesting it necessarily, but if you removed bite or put it to T3...) then his ability to escape /evade is what becomes more important because you can then drop his HP again because he isn't face rolling marines.
See, this is everything that i was mentioning in my previous post:
He's in this part combat, part harass, barely support role.. and everything about him from his model design, weapon designs and even vanilla movement were all based on the original concept of a simple harasser/support unit.. so there's this role confusion going on which makes people address the symptoms and not the cause.
In this half implemented setup, all lowering the HP does is create the frustrating/non viable lerk from the beta!
Because the cause - the weapons design - have not been addressed.. for instance, the HP is lowered now but you still have to melee bite so that frequency of losing your 30 pres lerk increases when just trying to utilize the lifeform and it's weapons properly - its a frustrating, binary scenario.
The uselessness in comp play was not just spores, there was a dearth of combat viability in 1 v 1 because it was before poison bite.
The fact it became a flying, tankier skulk is not too surprising to me with that change..
This can still be addressed in many many ways, like relying on spikes more (you can increase their energy cost if you make him into a purely harass/support role) and making spores available at T1 but with less opacity and damage and with some range... these are just examples though
Basically, my point is:
Instead of adjusting HP and movement mechanics for a Frankenstein of a lifeform design - redesign the lerk's weapon setup to have it's originally intended harass /support in mind (IF that is in fact what the goal is??) and THEN adjust it's flight model and HP. Else its half implemented in each area and nerfed in all.
Uhh i would check those speeds again, vanilla lerk is IIRC ~12.5 right after takeoff, which ticks down to 11 sustained. With cel its ~14.8 or something and then ticks down to 13.2. The BT lerk can maintain ~12 speed without any spastic movements (just tapping space), and even higher with cel (i forget high end number). The speed has been changed very recently, and the ticking down when gliding was also made much less drastic.
The point of bite is a high risk/reward attack, spikes are generally what a lerk should be using to harrass (i have always said they should be switched, spikes on M1 and bite on M2). You could bite lerk in NS1 but it carried significant risk, but used correctly with teamwork and it was very powerful. Having a tanky lerk with earlier umbra is a bad combination.
I'd rather see multiple hives give a noticeable boost to HP/Armor for all lifeforms, hence making Carapace an option more than a mandate, and allowing aliens to "scale". In the biomass ideal,I guess a buff with each biomass researched.
It doesn't really make it an option instead of mandatory. Sure you get some more hp, but you could get even more, and that is without a doubt better than a bit of speed, or.. idk, silence.
Uhh i would check those speeds again, vanilla lerk is IIRC ~12.5 right after takeoff, which ticks down to 11 sustained. With cel its ~14.8 or something and then ticks down to 13.2. The BT lerk can maintain ~12 speed without any spastic movements (just tapping space), and even higher with cel (i forget high end number). The speed has been changed very recently, and the ticking down when gliding was also made much less drastic.<br />
<br />
The point of bite is a high risk/reward attack, spikes are generally what a lerk should be using to harrass (i have always said they should be switched, spikes on M1 and bite on M2). You could bite lerk in NS1 but it carried significant risk, but used correctly with teamwork and it was very powerful. Having a tanky lerk with earlier umbra is a bad combination.
Didn't know about the very recent changes (sounds good)
So I... I think we're in agreement then...
Whoa.. Weird.
Here is an idea to make Carapace an option and not an obvious choice (of course without making it useless).
The armour from Carapace becomes an individual entity. Works in the exact the same way as normal Carapace until you receive damage. See image below :
(Ignore the colour/numbers, it's just an example)
After taking damage, the Carapace portion of the armour would not be restored by healing (crag/hive/gorge) and would restore after a set period of time (I was thinking somewhere from 10-15 seconds. Exact timing would need tweaking).
What this does is make Carapace a gameplay choice. If you want to do a big push and need some extra defense, go for Carapace. If you want to hit and run, Regen now actually seems like a really good choice.
matsoMaster of PatchesJoin Date: 2002-11-05Member: 7000Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Shadow, NS2 Community Developer
the main problem with carapace is not the fact that the upgrade exists (as stated by so many people) but that its too strong to be "just an alternative". in average you can take with all live forms ~45% more damage, so its pretty obvious that this is mandatory.
If carapace is a forced choice, then perhaps it should be removed as an upgrade, and something like it should be available as an upgrade outside of the tech tree.
Personally, I'm fond of the personal tech idea; you can pay pres to upgrade all the lifeforms you will play from that point on with some extra armor. Sort of a carapace light. Maybe 10 pres for 10 skulk armor. Allowing one upgrade per completed hive?
That would also help with lifeform explosions as aliens would have a pres sink - you would have to choose between going early higher lifeform and play with less armor all the way.
The carapace upgrade could then be turned into something else; perhaps something that made you less vulnerable to shotguns?
the main problem with carapace is not the fact that the upgrade exists (as stated by so many people) but that its too strong to be "just an alternative". in average you can take with all live forms ~45% more damage, so its pretty obvious that this is mandatory.
If carapace is a forced choice, then perhaps it should be removed as an upgrade, and something like it should be available as an upgrade outside of the tech tree.
Personally, I'm fond of the personal tech idea; you can pay pres to upgrade all the lifeforms you will play from that point on with some extra armor. Sort of a carapace light. Maybe 10 pres for 10 skulk armor. Allowing one upgrade per completed hive?
That would also help with lifeform explosions as aliens would have a pres sink - you would have to choose between going early higher lifeform and play with less armor all the way.
The carapace upgrade could then be turned into something else; perhaps something that made you less vulnerable to shotguns?
At the risk of getting shunned for suggesting an offensive trait to a "defensive" hive type but what about replace carapace with focus. Then with crag hive you have to personally decide between whether you want aid in the defensive or offensive area.
Obviously tweaks would be needed to adjust for lifeforms HP but it may be easier to balance between all the lifeforms when you don't have to worry about whether they use carapace or not. You could allow armor to increase as biomass does (it does this now right?).
ScatterJoin Date: 2012-09-02Member: 157341Members, Squad Five Blue
Glad there's some discussion on carapace. Here are some options:
-Make it an ablative armor that doesn't regen at a hive or crag but instead does so at it's own pace. Maybe only a gorge healspray or babblers would regen it faster.
-Nerf carapace to the point where the choice between it and regen isn't that clear.
-Balance game around non-carapace HP and then boost the armor gained from cara but give it a major penalty to force a different play style.
Im fine with the decreased HP of the lerk but in my opinion its maneuverability suffered a lot. I cant pull off any effective evasive move except flapping up and down like a retard. I use a lot of "crouch" with the vanilla lerk to descend fast from a high position which gives me the extra speed to survive but it is too fucking slow in the balance mod. Also I'd like the idea of achieving max speed by doing something more elegant than spastic flapping.
As far as carapace goes, I've felt for a long time that a "clog armor" type upgrade would work better.
Basically, it would give the alien the same abosrbant quality as clogs in that they can only take a certain ammount of damager per shot(i.e. can only recieve 100 dmg at once, there for cannot be 1shot by nades, shotguns, or railguns late game)
This would still work to increase survivability against insta-gib weapons but leaves the alien just as vulnerable to the LMG and FT, and without the bonus of regen
Why does cara have to be nerfed? Why can't regen just get buffed into a proper position? Seems like UWE fucked the cat once on regen and now it's left untouched in case they do it again. I would have thought since regen went from useless to OP to useless they'd already know the sweet spot for it. Worst case scenario for cara just make the upgrade cost 5-10 tres more and regen slightly cheaper, I don't think it's that cara is strong in that all the alternatives to cara are just shit. Do not understand this obsession with making everything as painful and horrible to play as possible.
i think the best option would be to nerf carapace a bit, and buff celerity so that it doesnt deactivate when you get hit.
i think 70/20 for skulk, 125/75 for lerk as it is now is fine, and 250/75 for fade is ok aswell (though i bet we will see fades dying more/having to be more careful). onos with 1300/800?. this is a consistent +50% armor across all lifeforms and i think it could work. it opens up regen as an alternative and the celerity buff would make that quite a good upgrade aswell. it would take some adaptation, but imo this is one of the simplest ways to address the issue without completely changing everything around.
There's two problems here, and eliminating both is near impossible. Tres drops of any kind (weapons or lifeforms) only serve to make lifeform massing worse - your always going to buy shotguns or fades once there is nothing else beneficial to research/upgrade. For marines, this problem isn't as apparent because of a more developed tech tree, but for aliens it is. This is reduced in the BT mod but not eliminated - as long as tres drops remain it will always be a potential problem (I want them removed). As for lifeform explosions, the solution is not to remove the ability to pop 5 fades at 8-10 minutes. Any mechanic that separates pres timings through pres 'drains' will always be bad overall, and either further slow lifeform timings (which are already too slow), or force the aliens to learn to play without whatever the drain is (upgrades/whatever). As for a mechanic to separate them via a positive pres 'gain' mechanic, I'm all for suggestions in that regard. IMO the best solution here is to stagger the power of the lifeforms. While this is not super apparent, in the BT mod you generally will pop fades before you have heavy biomass/upgrades, so while you might have crag/shift upgrades when you first fade, you might not have shadowstep and/or higher biomass for extra HP. This softens the lifeform 'explosion', giving the marines more time to kill the fades before it becomes an unstoppable fadeball. Also, reinforcing the lerks role makes it a valuable compliment to a team mid/late game so you still want atleast a single lerk.
Lifeform explosions are tricky because of the methods on which NS2 is balanced currently, especially with regards to fade. The current fade is really a joke, but because of the tres fade spam and massing of fades, it has to be otherwise the game would instantly end between 10-12 minutes. This issue needs to be resolved by this mod, however resolving it by reducing the number of players that can fade at once isn't something that I have seen a good solution for.
Also, my comments about fade in the BT mod are more how you cannot play without carapace - not that a carapace fade's HP is too low. I have been exclusively playing regen fade in the mod to attempt to estimate its potential, and until I can see playing regen fade being a remote possibility, I will think that the fade needs some re-balancing on its HP/Armor values.
Its a bit crude, but you could deal with the lifeform explosion by just capping the number of lifeforms (the combat mod does this and it works out pretty well imo). If you wanted to do something more sophisticated than a straight numbers cap, you could incorporate an overall unit cap and adjust the unit cap value of each lifeform (e.g. skulk = 1, gorge = 5, lerk = 10, fade = 25, onos = 50 with a 100 overall cap or whatever values you want).
Comments
or you can disagree with my post and slap me with a fish and tell me go to cry in the corner.. I don't know I'm just posting something to try and be constructive
about your lerk vs fade point, i beg to differ. lerk is simply a marine killing machine which comes before fade. if lerk was so uniquely great, then why do competitive teams aim to get 4-5 fades for the bulk of the game instead of 4-5 lerks? the answer is that lerk is basically a 'weak shotgun' and the fade is the 'true shotgun'. if skulk is the base and other lifeforms are game-changers, onos and gorge certainly have their own niche.... but lerk and fade have the same role.
If it were any weaker I feel that the upgrade would simply be boring, as it already is on the Lerk. The rest of the upgrades do cool things that change your playstyle. Carapace alone is just an invisible health buff.
It's like the new shade tree, phantom or aura? Both are viable and sometimes I use one or the other, it's a decision. Carapace is never a decision for me, it's mandatory, heck it's so mandatory I don't want any other upgrade before that
It's like the new shade tree, phantom or aura? Both are viable and sometimes I use one or the other, it's a decision. Carapace is never a decision for me, it's mandatory, heck it's so mandatory I don't want any other upgrade before that
Uhh i would check those speeds again, vanilla lerk is IIRC ~12.5 right after takeoff, which ticks down to 11 sustained. With cel its ~14.8 or something and then ticks down to 13.2. The BT lerk can maintain ~12 speed without any spastic movements (just tapping space), and even higher with cel (i forget high end number). The speed has been changed very recently, and the ticking down when gliding was also made much less drastic.
The point of bite is a high risk/reward attack, spikes are generally what a lerk should be using to harrass (i have always said they should be switched, spikes on M1 and bite on M2). You could bite lerk in NS1 but it carried significant risk, but used correctly with teamwork and it was very powerful. Having a tanky lerk with earlier umbra is a bad combination.
So I... I think we're in agreement then...
Whoa.. Weird.
Personally, I'm fond of the personal tech idea; you can pay pres to upgrade all the lifeforms you will play from that point on with some extra armor. Sort of a carapace light. Maybe 10 pres for 10 skulk armor. Allowing one upgrade per completed hive?
That would also help with lifeform explosions as aliens would have a pres sink - you would have to choose between going early higher lifeform and play with less armor all the way.
The carapace upgrade could then be turned into something else; perhaps something that made you less vulnerable to shotguns?