Buff Shade Ideas to make it more viable first hive
Kilo
Join Date: 2013-09-01 Member: 187529Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2013-09-01 Member: 187529Members, Reinforced - Shadow
I think shade needs a slight buff to be a viable first choice hive, that could come in a variety of ways, either a buff to the shade structure, the drifters ability, or the spur upgrades.
Either way I think we can all agree shade is currently not on par with the other two hives. Heres some of my ideas to buff it:
The shade structure could make things silent if in it's range. This would not just give the aliens an advantage to be near it but also other loud structres, also this would enable a drifter to build a new hive next to a shade without giving it away.
Make aura a more accurate reading rather than just a shade of colour so you know exactly how many bites/swipes a marine will take to kill.
Make aura see structures/power nodes and their health through walls.
Make camoflague or aura give lifeforms a walking/crouching speed bonus (unlike celerity it would not make you run faster, just walk faster).
Drifters could fire invisibility/silence clouds, maybe also intergrated with ink.
Drifters are invisible when not moving if you have shade hive.
Either way I think we can all agree shade is currently not on par with the other two hives. Heres some of my ideas to buff it:
The shade structure could make things silent if in it's range. This would not just give the aliens an advantage to be near it but also other loud structres, also this would enable a drifter to build a new hive next to a shade without giving it away.
Make aura a more accurate reading rather than just a shade of colour so you know exactly how many bites/swipes a marine will take to kill.
Make aura see structures/power nodes and their health through walls.
Make camoflague or aura give lifeforms a walking/crouching speed bonus (unlike celerity it would not make you run faster, just walk faster).
Drifters could fire invisibility/silence clouds, maybe also intergrated with ink.
Drifters are invisible when not moving if you have shade hive.
Comments
It's just that as I understand it, shade isnt underused because it's particularly bad, it's just that a couple of individual perks of shift/crag are pretty much essential to higher life forms while there's nothing with the equivalent utility to be gained from researching shade.
You can already do this if you can read the colours well. It's just a matter of practice and observation.
Much too powerful in my opinion, if such a feature was added. There's also the issues of HUD clutter, which I cannot imagine solving with this kind of ability. It'd be more of a hindrance and confusing when you entered a marine base than helpful.
Perhaps differently coloured or shaded structures in alien vision, however I don't know how well that'd fit in with the game, the lore, and I don't think many people use alien vision anymore due to eyesight issues with it.
This however is a good suggestion.
There are hallucinations which are underused, mainly due to the cost of creating hallucinations and how little health they have. I'd prefer if hallucinations were more viable. However giving the drifter an inking ability to obscure marine vision would be pretty interesting, it'd help the alien commanders take a more active role in combat with drifters to help higher lifeforms escape.
Nope. Too powerful. If you want invisible drifters then their scouting ability would need to be removed to balance it out, which I don't want to happen. Drifters give an incredible amount of information out and if you had invisible ones, well I'd think there'd be a lot more base rushes. "Welp, 5 marines left their base. Let's sneak by these two, hit the base and get out of there when they beacon." It'd basically be that. Over and over again. It's already tough for a marine to sneak around, having invisible drifters would just remove that kind of gameplay entirely.
Aura is a great upgrade, until marines get a3 and then it turns red way before that last bite. Red should always be a skulk bite of health ideally, that would make it much easier for picking off weak marines. It works well now until that higher armour and then I end up hitting "red health" marines multiple times.
I would be all for a shade buff
A lot of 3 hive strength comes from biomass 7-9 and the lifeform upgrades. Plus the ability to contaminate.
jesus christ i hate that shite.
ive won as many games going shade first as ive lost.
its all about the players. commanders just need to grow balls and go shade on darker maps.
All general balancing does is put more content into the game. For instance, buffing sub machine guns would make more content to enjoy in pubs because there is another gun.
IMO if you want to justify shade hive buffing, give it some sort of skill or strategy aspect that isn't cheesing. Crag hive has three rolling with mucas for example, to use crag hive to it's best you have to skillfully move around the map with a drifter. Shade hive is just counter arcing from one active that you only have to click every 6 seconds.
The walking speed boost is an interesting one, though.
Lmao, aura/phantom are trash. For 60 res, you get: nothing because the other team got a 10 res obs and ran a 5 res scan. No reason to change it either, as I said earlier phantom doesn't take as much skill as working with a shift hive or as much team synergy as a crag hive, and aura just takes away the skill pof scouting and parasiting, so there isn't a point in buffing it until it get's reworked.
Also, Ink is arguably much better than heal wave or echo, and sometimes hallucination can save more hitpionts than muas membrane if the enemy plants a few bullets into the hallucination, regarding they are taking their crosshair to and away from the lifeform for maybe half a second, which could be 80-120 damage worth of ammunition sunk into the air and not the lifeform.
While it requires additional testing, perhaps the possibility for ink around the hive when it is attacked, or another vision obscuring effect that does not disrupt ARC's? Perhaps the hive could only ink in the area if it's eggs are attacked?
With this method, we keep consistency, we may have the option to include additional model-work for Hives, and we buff Shade Hives. The defensive bonus this would provide is, well... Significant.
In my experiences like 98% of all commanders will save Shade for the last hive, and for me it's hardest to capture that third tech point without the benefits of Shade.
My biggest gripe is the lack of silence for Skulks and Gorges...
Skulk - Without silence it becomes stupidly hard to take out well positioned "skilled" Marines - Speed and Health do nothing when they have precision aim and can hear you coming from 2 rooms away. (and crouch walking isn't a solution as it is way too slow)
Gorge - Without silence it becomes stupidly hard to sneak a tunnel up (especially when pushed back and on the defensive) as Marines can hear you building it from 2 rooms away.
I've actually reached the point where I don't even try for a ninja tunnel anymore without Shade due to how far away and easily Marines can hear you building it.
As for higher life forms, people say they simply can't do without Spurs (Fade) or Shells (Lerk, Onos) - I say they need to stop relying on their crutch, neither spur or shell is required to do well with any life form.
Unfortunately I can't really think of how to buff it, I just know that we need more love for the Shade hive! It really is by far the most useful of the three.
i don't think the problem is necessarily the upgrades themselves (although they are great), but things like echo/healing wave/enzyme and mucous membrane. silence and aura are good, it's pretty damn hard to die as lerk or fade with aura, but the problem is that's the only thing shade has going for it until next patch.
edit: I was a fan of when the veils were cheaper than the spur/shells. I would like if they did that again, maybe make them cost 5 less res each.
However, I would like to see the "anti-obs" buff (scan wears off faster).
You'd be amazed how much higher-skilled players rely on sounds for their tracking.
Getting your skulks silence is like cutting the marine teams ears off. (might aswell be, infact)
However, the reason why it isn't used as 1st very often is because much of the time your team cannot utilize it as well as the other starts. Not everyone can work with a shade start, but if you are sure your team can, shade starts can be very powerful in my experience.
Think of the possibilities for sneaky ninja hive drops... Plus it would make it so Marines can't instantly tell a real hive drop from a fake one.
What I think should also be done is make obs take a small amount of supply, like arcs, macs, armories, and sentries. Not too much, but enough to keep the commander from spamming them all over the map, or else having to cut down on the size of his arc train.
we all know shade hive sucks, even after the hallu buff
and even still hallu is nowhere near as good as enzyme or muc
shade is about hiding, and eventually every alien will have to break cover and engage, and unlike the other 2 hives, there is nothing to extend lifespan while in combat
i find myself laughing at the idiot commanders that start shade hives on populated servers, because they lose every time
0) make echo not a part of shift hive and available to all hives
echo can make or break a game, and as a result most competent alien commanders are basically locked to shift hive being first hive
the echo+speed+enzyme combo is basically unstoppable and makes the other hives laughable
1) make parasite show hp like in aura, weapon equipped, and then armor amount based on veil level
2) make aura do the above as in #1
perhaps by a colored ring around it, matching color used in command view
3) yes
4) yes, and based on veil level
5) yes, but only at 75% cloak OR only while afk on infestation
lots of newb commanders dont move them
sometimes a good team can carry a shitty commander to a win, but having an idiot lose a drifter every 3 minutes makes things that much more difficult
some servers have mods that make them cloaked while not moving anywhere on the map
in unlikely event of drifter scouting, know that it buffs an unused sneaky tactic, which the shade hive is all about
and if thats too op, can just restrict to already owned territory
6) make phantom able to walk closer to obs without circle or red dot, based on veil level, something like 10 20 30%
this is especially required because entire server knows its a shade hive start within 3 minutes and entire map gets blanketed with obs by 5 minutes
7) make shade hive abilities dependent on server player count
on the more populated servers, there is basically a marine in every room and every hallway is blanketed in bullets, so for balance reasons a server with 40 players would need shade hive abilities boosted by 10-20% to compensate without shade hive being a complete joke
8) maybe a drifter ability similar to enzyme cast near marines that activates a shader that distorts their vision, or maybe just a bonus to hallu cast on marines
and i remember hearing talks about hallus getting ai to make them more real, so that too
Plus I'm pretty sure there was another thread recently where lots of decent players agreed that shade hive can be a very strong start these days, and the balance between the different hive types is pretty damn good at the moment.
Since this thread was created there have been chances to the balance (enzyme and mucous nerf, good hallucination AI). The general public meta I've noticed lately is still stuck in the year 2013 thinking shift is the only truly viable 1st hive; this is wrong. Shade-crag all day baby.