Agree with rayzou for umbra. last night i was playing some BT and i was suprising by 2 lerk with regen, it's me or it's works on combat ? Because it's was like harassing them was useless.
So, are we really playing this balance test cup with the same implementation of Umbra that people have been complaining about for weeks now?
weeks? its been like years like this! but yes, as wiry wrote, i will give the lerk more attention this week and want to bring it in a state which produces better gameplay for everyone
weeks? its been like years like this! but yes, as wiry wrote, i will give the lerk more attention this week and want to bring it in a state which produces better gameplay for everyone
Umbra was available with 3 hives. In vanilla, we never could get umbra before the win. Moreover, we always wanted to save T-res for onos eggs than umbra, since it was more worth-it. But eh, umbra in balance mod is either too early in the game, either too strong. Maybe keep nerfing it, and make an upgrade available in 3rd hive to make it more powerful and useful in end game.
I forgot to talk about the SG : 6 shells isn't enough. Either make an upgrade in armory to unlock 8 shells, either get it back to 8 at start. I don't really agree with one more must-have upgrade as marine, since it's really hard to keep upgrading marines meanwhile supporting them, redropping rts that are dead, etc...
Moreover, reducing dmges to buildings !? What the heck ! First, shades seem to be bugged. Everytime i shoot at them, it's like i'm not hitting it. There's a lot of bugged structures like this, since 1 or 2 weeks. And above all, you're reducing DMGs to structures... It's so painful and not enjoyable to play as marine in its current shape.
So, bullets are useless now, because you have umbra and less dmgs to structures. Now, ARCs are useless aswell since the shade's ink cancells arcs' shots even if they started charging. Try to siege a hive (of course you have to get 3 or 4 marines here constantly, so the alien can expand whatever he wants to, so he gets more rts) with a single shade in it. Impossible. Try to take down the shade with 3 marines entering the hive, you can't even outdps the healing from 1 gorge and a crag lolol.
As marine, i always feel "stuck". Being stuck, without any move that would lead to victory. Aliens are strong in every situation (can counter bullets/arcs) however marines seem really weak (losing all fights with this medpack/no glancing bites/high speed skulks and losing sieges from a single shade).
We have played a couple of pcw's with going cele/adren first, then insta tech for umbra and it has been working pretty well. I can't really comment on exactly how I would like to tune umbra, but I think it's good that we have an alternative to the carapace-first we've had since the beta.
I was thinking that it could be scalable with hives, maybe. 10/20/30%? or maybe 15/20/25%.
So, are we really playing this balance test cup with the same implementation of Umbra that people have been complaining about for weeks now?
weeks? its been like years like this! but yes, as wiry wrote, i will give the lerk more attention this week and want to bring it in a state which produces better gameplay for everyone
Woo, finally, lerk needs love (hopefully in the movement mechanic department once again), and yes like poster above, umbra is currently an issue, and as much as I play and love lerk, umbra should not be an "opener", it should remain closer in timing similar to live.
As it stands, early game umbra plus the initial fade explosion is a ridiculously strong combination right now, and rather than suggestion to further nerf umbra, I'd rather see Umbra moved to a later stage in the game again and spores brought back to early/mid game. Potentially nerfing umbra to oblivion is an entirely wrong approach unless you want to see the ability never utilized again. (We've lost other abilities that way unfortunately.)
Umbra should come out about the same time as the first Onos would come out to support our big clunky friend and remain strong as a closer as marines gain weapon and armor upgrades.
Summation:
Spores = early/mid game again
Umbra = mid/late game.
Umbra should come out about the same time as the first Onos would come out to support our big clunky friend and remain strong as a closer as marines gain weapon and armor upgrades.
This. Lerks are a useful enough support unit in the early mid game as it stands. You can't give them something this ridiculously powerful that early on and expect it to work.
I do however also think umbra needs to be nerfed slightly. It's active for too long on aliens that just touch the cloud and too cheap to use right now, to a point where it can essentially be spammed endlessly. If you don't want to touch the damage absorption percentage or make it scale with biomass/hives, at least make it cost more adrenaline and/or change it to AoE, i.e. only working in the cloud itself.
Not a fan of the Drifter changes. There is no good synergy between them. It's just an annoyance for khammanders to require them to build stuff fast - I'd rather have a flatout permanent 10% reduction to the construction speed of everything (if you really want to nerf early game alien expansion) than needing Drifters for that.
It's easier for marines to ninja a PG in the Balance mod, but at the same time it got harder for aliens to ninja ANY structure (especially Hives behind the enemy lines) because you need to get a Drifter there first and then have it make an awful lot of noise. And having the AI unit acting autonomously always has the potential of ruining something you planned to do and has imho no place in this game until there is also a button to change it into a state where it doesn't do anything without explicit commands at all.
If Drifters become such a necessity for alien expansion, then their low HP just becomes an annoyance that requires you to constantly produce reinforcements and send them out again. Rewarding good micromanagement is one thing, but creating annoying busywork that just feels like it hampers the gameplay is another one.
The complete removal of Camo is another thing that massively hurts the survivability of a Drifter. The passive upgrades from tech paths were a perfect middle way, since they all would give Drifters a necessary survivability boost.
- If you went with sensory tech path, you would get a Drifter that is specialized on reconnaissance, in which case it is perfectly fine imho to make him a "sit & forget until needed in combat" kind of thing that you don't need to micro a lot, since your micromanagement focus as khammander shifted towards the hallucinations that the Drifter produced. And in the end is the Drifter still barely visible, so there is always a chance for marines to notice that they are watched. You can adjust the time that is needed to recloak as well for balancing it.
- If you went with the movement tech path, the Drifter gets the necessary speed that makes micromanaging it viable. With the reduced HP it's still easy to kill it in time, but now it actually becomes viable to move it away since the marine could easily catch up with it at it's normal movement speed.
- If you went with the defensive tech path, the Drifter can get more base HP or regeneration in order to survive longer even when it's spotted. Thus removing the frustration associated with it.
If the concern is that Drifters become super annoying and powerful with all those upgrades at once when the aliens have 3 Hives, you could always make the passive upgrades something that you need to purchase for 1-2 tres per Drifter, so having more powerful Drifters on the field makes them more costly and thus less spammable unless you have the map control to afford it.
As for upgrades tied to structures: It feels like an awkwardly shoved in addition. It's like tying the Shotgun upgrade to Sentries. Those chambers are not meant to be used in that way and it forces you to always build a set of them in your base, even though you might only want to have them at the front lines.
You want to provide marines with the possibility to attack the upgrades directly. But then it should just be a special upgrade structure that was placed automatically at the Hive when the upgrade is researched in it. You could make it a bigger, red glowing Cyst that gets automatically placed in the vicinity of the Hive (similar to an egg) as soon as the upgrade finished researching. (A more appropriate thing might be to have the Hive itself grow something on it that the marines can attack, but I can't come up with an art design that would work for many upgrades in one Hive location that wouldn't look awful or ruin the iconic design of the Hive itself. Hence the separate upgrade structures.)
The structure would be dropped near the Hive that researched it, so you can decide on your own where to research what stuff in order to protect it from marines. When such a structure gets taken out by marines, you could make it cost only a little amount and a little research time (both 30% of the full upgrade, perhaps?) to redrop it at the Hive that performs the re-researching.
Upgrades that are separated from the researching structure and can be attacked individually is a concept that was already utilized in Star Trek Armada II.
I just can't stand the "ice skates" feeling that skulks have now. Try explaining to someone that an alien creature that can walk, and even run, on the ceiling will skate across the floor as if he suddenly has socks on a hardwood floor
I really don't understand people who say this. The ground friction in NS2 is insanely high compared to most other FPS games, not to mention NS1. Yes, the friction is a bit lower in the BT mod but it's barely noticable on anything other than the Onos.
I actually disagree.
Its the only thing left in BT skulk movement that i feel needs a bit more polish.
Adept players /vets are not effected by it, and new players aren't entirely aware of it, but the in between player who is beginning to grasp the subtleties in what is required can be frustrated by this.
There are other ways to prevent unwanted quick changes in direction if that is indeed the goal and purpose behind skating.
Personally this is where I feel "fun" should over rule balance (or at least push the balance to another area) since any player who dislikes this skating finds it incredibly frustrating.. Almost akin to the unfair "but i was already 5 meters behind the corner!? " scenario that everyone finds frustrating.
It's frustrating because as a player I feel like I did the right thing (quick movement, Dodge, reacted etc) but the game not only negates my effort, *but as a result I often die from it.*
I'd rather whatever goal /issue it was meant to address would be done so in another means, other than some obscure invisible line that i fear crossing and causing my death.
Quite honestly, I cannot really understand that complaint at all anymore. The stop speed in BT is high, higher than most other FPS games already - remember that you need to keep movement speed in mind when considering this. If you continue to increase it, you just make mashing a/d mindlessly way more effective than it should be, simply because there is no time to smoothly transition the animations.
People want smooth animations and transitions, but then want instant responsiveness and acceleration. You cant have both.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited June 2013
I do not think its the stop speed.
It doesn't happen every single time, and I think its a certain scenario that creates it, that is why i mentioned the "invisible line"
I just asked @sewlek and he is unaware of it, so i will try and capture the repro steps for it to show..
but there is definitely the occasional scenario where any keyboard input is ineffective for an entire second a period of time.. and typically leads to a frustrating death.
edit: may be this, idk, investigating:
function Skulk:GetGroundTransistionTime()
return 0.26
end
Quite honestly, I cannot really understand that complaint at all anymore. The stop speed in BT is high, higher than most other FPS games already - remember that you need to keep movement speed in mind when considering this. If you continue to increase it, you just make mashing a/d mindlessly way more effective than it should be, simply because there is no time to smoothly transition the animations.
People want smooth animations and transitions, but then want instant responsiveness and acceleration. You cant have both.
If it causes so many problems, it should just be reverted; preferably to b239 skulk movement. :P
I do not think its the stop speed.
It doesn't happen every single time, and I think its a certain scenario that creates it, that is why i mentioned the "invisible line"
I just asked @sewlek and he is unaware of it, so i will try and capture the repro steps for it to show..
but there is definitely the occasional scenario where any keyboard input is ineffective for an entire second a period of time.. and typically leads to a frustrating death.
edit: may be this, idk, investigating:
function Skulk:GetGroundTransistionTime()
return 0.26
end
By chance, is this you trying to run up walls after landing from a jump? Or wall to wall to wall jumping?
I don't know exactly how the transition time variable works either, but from speaking to sewlek about these same 'responsiveness' issues, it's exactly as dragon said. Skulk needs time to counter previous momentum and accelerate in the new direction. Didn't exactly like it at first either, but after playing more you realise its necessary to prevent abusive skulk movement in all situations in which the problem you describe crops up.
For example, you can no longer continuously jump from opposite wall to opposite wall really quickly like a crazy spastic. The current movement soft limits you to one wall to wall jump, then you need to pause a bit to 'fully attach' before you can properly do another one. This is a good thing as it solves the number 1 problem walljump as a movement mechanic has always tended to suffer from (predictability/speed).
Basically, it discourages certain 'bad habit' movement behaviours. Its certainly frustrating at first, but i think only really to regular ns2 vanilla players. New players don't have a previous paradigm to adjust from.
Ofcourse, I hope I havn't misunderstood what you're saying. If there are legit input lag problems then yea thats a different issue.
The skulk movement in BT is pretty annoying, if I want to jump on a thin ledge the "smoothing" of the landing tends to make me go over, instead of sticking to it like vanilla movement currently does.
Quite honestly, I cannot really understand that complaint at all anymore. The stop speed in BT is high, higher than most other FPS games already - remember that you need to keep movement speed in mind when considering this. If you continue to increase it, you just make mashing a/d mindlessly way more effective than it should be, simply because there is no time to smoothly transition the animations.
People want smooth animations and transitions, but then want instant responsiveness and acceleration. You cant have both.
might be that airdeceleration is very high, and airaccel is almost nonexistent?
FrozenNew York, NYJoin Date: 2010-07-02Member: 72228Members, Constellation
Also, consider increasing the momentum blink gives before bunnyhopping. This might balance the shotgun a bit with the increased rate of fire (which I love, though lvl 0 damage is a little too low)
Yeah a lot of people were running out of energy last night as a fade. Even when trying to take down a PG as a fades with enzyme, just didn't have the energy. Right now initial blink (14 energy?) and each swipe is 9 ( ?) energy that's a whole heck of a lot of energy being used.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
I'd be okay with a slight bit increase of spread.. but i feel this is too much.
Tested with same exact distance, the length of central in docking, a practical test of distance used in typical gameplay.
See, I have a weird attitude to this Ironhorse. If a Skulk is stationary at distance, it could be an issues. However, the larger spread could also make up for aiming inconsistency when they are moving?
In NS1, I never really had a problem with LMG spread as both LMG & pistol were normal damage (1/2 damage against armour). However, in NS2 pistol does light damage (1/4 damage against armour).
In saying that, I havent played BT recently so I cannot really comment on LMG spread.
In NS1, I never really had a problem with LMG spread as both LMG & pistol were normal damage (1/2 damage against armour). However, in NS2 pistol does light damage (1/4 damage against armour).
In saying that, I havent played BT recently so I cannot really comment on LMG spread.
I don't disagree with that, I guess I just see an argument for recoil or dynamic spread over time.
So how many meters away do you think you should be able to 9 bullet a skulk?
Also, including a picture with no showing of scale or distance is pretty dumb. I tested rifle spread and was able to 15 bullet skulks at 20 meters, im not sure what people are using to judge in comparison however.
So how many meters away do you think you should be able to 9 bullet a skulk?
Close to the distance that a 14 speed leaping skulk can achieve - since marines are supposed to have the chance to kill before the mobile team closes the distance gap, being the Ranged team and all.
But that's equally as vague as your question, right?
I think a better question is: why does the shotgun have a center grouping in it's spread but the ranged weapon does not? In other words: Do we want a wide even spread for the LMG?
Comments
weeks? its been like years like this! but yes, as wiry wrote, i will give the lerk more attention this week and want to bring it in a state which produces better gameplay for everyone
Umbra was available with 3 hives. In vanilla, we never could get umbra before the win. Moreover, we always wanted to save T-res for onos eggs than umbra, since it was more worth-it. But eh, umbra in balance mod is either too early in the game, either too strong. Maybe keep nerfing it, and make an upgrade available in 3rd hive to make it more powerful and useful in end game.
I forgot to talk about the SG : 6 shells isn't enough. Either make an upgrade in armory to unlock 8 shells, either get it back to 8 at start. I don't really agree with one more must-have upgrade as marine, since it's really hard to keep upgrading marines meanwhile supporting them, redropping rts that are dead, etc...
Moreover, reducing dmges to buildings !? What the heck ! First, shades seem to be bugged. Everytime i shoot at them, it's like i'm not hitting it. There's a lot of bugged structures like this, since 1 or 2 weeks. And above all, you're reducing DMGs to structures... It's so painful and not enjoyable to play as marine in its current shape.
So, bullets are useless now, because you have umbra and less dmgs to structures. Now, ARCs are useless aswell since the shade's ink cancells arcs' shots even if they started charging. Try to siege a hive (of course you have to get 3 or 4 marines here constantly, so the alien can expand whatever he wants to, so he gets more rts) with a single shade in it. Impossible. Try to take down the shade with 3 marines entering the hive, you can't even outdps the healing from 1 gorge and a crag lolol.
As marine, i always feel "stuck". Being stuck, without any move that would lead to victory. Aliens are strong in every situation (can counter bullets/arcs) however marines seem really weak (losing all fights with this medpack/no glancing bites/high speed skulks and losing sieges from a single shade).
I was thinking that it could be scalable with hives, maybe. 10/20/30%? or maybe 15/20/25%.
I do however also think umbra needs to be nerfed slightly. It's active for too long on aliens that just touch the cloud and too cheap to use right now, to a point where it can essentially be spammed endlessly. If you don't want to touch the damage absorption percentage or make it scale with biomass/hives, at least make it cost more adrenaline and/or change it to AoE, i.e. only working in the cloud itself.
It's easier for marines to ninja a PG in the Balance mod, but at the same time it got harder for aliens to ninja ANY structure (especially Hives behind the enemy lines) because you need to get a Drifter there first and then have it make an awful lot of noise. And having the AI unit acting autonomously always has the potential of ruining something you planned to do and has imho no place in this game until there is also a button to change it into a state where it doesn't do anything without explicit commands at all.
If Drifters become such a necessity for alien expansion, then their low HP just becomes an annoyance that requires you to constantly produce reinforcements and send them out again. Rewarding good micromanagement is one thing, but creating annoying busywork that just feels like it hampers the gameplay is another one.
The complete removal of Camo is another thing that massively hurts the survivability of a Drifter. The passive upgrades from tech paths were a perfect middle way, since they all would give Drifters a necessary survivability boost.
- If you went with sensory tech path, you would get a Drifter that is specialized on reconnaissance, in which case it is perfectly fine imho to make him a "sit & forget until needed in combat" kind of thing that you don't need to micro a lot, since your micromanagement focus as khammander shifted towards the hallucinations that the Drifter produced. And in the end is the Drifter still barely visible, so there is always a chance for marines to notice that they are watched. You can adjust the time that is needed to recloak as well for balancing it.
- If you went with the movement tech path, the Drifter gets the necessary speed that makes micromanaging it viable. With the reduced HP it's still easy to kill it in time, but now it actually becomes viable to move it away since the marine could easily catch up with it at it's normal movement speed.
- If you went with the defensive tech path, the Drifter can get more base HP or regeneration in order to survive longer even when it's spotted. Thus removing the frustration associated with it.
If the concern is that Drifters become super annoying and powerful with all those upgrades at once when the aliens have 3 Hives, you could always make the passive upgrades something that you need to purchase for 1-2 tres per Drifter, so having more powerful Drifters on the field makes them more costly and thus less spammable unless you have the map control to afford it.
As for upgrades tied to structures: It feels like an awkwardly shoved in addition. It's like tying the Shotgun upgrade to Sentries. Those chambers are not meant to be used in that way and it forces you to always build a set of them in your base, even though you might only want to have them at the front lines.
You want to provide marines with the possibility to attack the upgrades directly. But then it should just be a special upgrade structure that was placed automatically at the Hive when the upgrade is researched in it. You could make it a bigger, red glowing Cyst that gets automatically placed in the vicinity of the Hive (similar to an egg) as soon as the upgrade finished researching. (A more appropriate thing might be to have the Hive itself grow something on it that the marines can attack, but I can't come up with an art design that would work for many upgrades in one Hive location that wouldn't look awful or ruin the iconic design of the Hive itself. Hence the separate upgrade structures.)
The structure would be dropped near the Hive that researched it, so you can decide on your own where to research what stuff in order to protect it from marines. When such a structure gets taken out by marines, you could make it cost only a little amount and a little research time (both 30% of the full upgrade, perhaps?) to redrop it at the Hive that performs the re-researching.
Upgrades that are separated from the researching structure and can be attacked individually is a concept that was already utilized in Star Trek Armada II.
On the topic of skulk movement / skating
People want smooth animations and transitions, but then want instant responsiveness and acceleration. You cant have both.
It doesn't happen every single time, and I think its a certain scenario that creates it, that is why i mentioned the "invisible line"
I just asked @sewlek and he is unaware of it, so i will try and capture the repro steps for it to show..
but there is definitely the occasional scenario where any keyboard input is ineffective for an entire second a period of time.. and typically leads to a frustrating death.
edit: may be this, idk, investigating:
If it causes so many problems, it should just be reverted; preferably to b239 skulk movement. :P
I don't know exactly how the transition time variable works either, but from speaking to sewlek about these same 'responsiveness' issues, it's exactly as dragon said. Skulk needs time to counter previous momentum and accelerate in the new direction. Didn't exactly like it at first either, but after playing more you realise its necessary to prevent abusive skulk movement in all situations in which the problem you describe crops up.
For example, you can no longer continuously jump from opposite wall to opposite wall really quickly like a crazy spastic. The current movement soft limits you to one wall to wall jump, then you need to pause a bit to 'fully attach' before you can properly do another one. This is a good thing as it solves the number 1 problem walljump as a movement mechanic has always tended to suffer from (predictability/speed).
Basically, it discourages certain 'bad habit' movement behaviours. Its certainly frustrating at first, but i think only really to regular ns2 vanilla players. New players don't have a previous paradigm to adjust from.
Ofcourse, I hope I havn't misunderstood what you're saying. If there are legit input lag problems then yea thats a different issue.
might be that airdeceleration is very high, and airaccel is almost nonexistent?
Tested with same exact distance, the length of central in docking, a practical test of distance used in typical gameplay.
In saying that, I havent played BT recently so I cannot really comment on LMG spread.
I don't disagree with that, I guess I just see an argument for recoil or dynamic spread over time.
Also, including a picture with no showing of scale or distance is pretty dumb. I tested rifle spread and was able to 15 bullet skulks at 20 meters, im not sure what people are using to judge in comparison however.
But that's equally as vague as your question, right?
I think a better question is: why does the shotgun have a center grouping in it's spread but the ranged weapon does not? In other words: Do we want a wide even spread for the LMG?