Hallucination
Kaneh
Join Date: 2012-12-11 Member: 174783Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2012-12-11 Member: 174783Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Is bullshit.
the combination of:
- 'realistic' movement
- more hp
- counters removed
means that every early game fight is now in favor of aliens. Same shit as super mucous spam.
every 2v2 is now 4v2 and even if you guess right you have to guess again every time they re-hallucinate.
in addition, its going back down the slope of fighting pve instead of pvp. its actually even more frustrating because its just random guessing.
the combination of:
- 'realistic' movement
- more hp
- counters removed
means that every early game fight is now in favor of aliens. Same shit as super mucous spam.
every 2v2 is now 4v2 and even if you guess right you have to guess again every time they re-hallucinate.
in addition, its going back down the slope of fighting pve instead of pvp. its actually even more frustrating because its just random guessing.
Comments
Needs a global cooldown or reduction in health or maybe both to be balanced.
Its still frustrating as heck to fight against and i feel it makes engagements less about the skill of the players and more plain guessing.
Not really, the pre exisiting bot code was lifted and applied to hallucinations so that they actually do something when spawned. It was part of the changes made in an attempt to make shade hive a viable option.
Feedback on how the new hallucinations play out in both pub and competitive play is extremely valuable. If you have any ideas on how to better balance hallucinations please make a post in either the suggestions section or maybe the 264 thread in general discussion.
I also feel drifter HP is too much and should be reduced by like 66%.
I still think scan should be a soft counter though. Maybe killing one of the two hallucinations instead of both?
So during fight, marines have to look on the map during the fight to counter it, which is quite hard to achieve. This makes the hallucinations still good enough to use for aliens, but marines have at least a chance to see the real Players.
Fighting with hallucinations is extremely rewarding.
Fighting against hallucinations, especially with the fake names and fake deathcalls), is extremely annoying.
If your enemies commander is prone to rage fits Id say going shade is a absolute great way to start.
You still however need your crag and shift hive for mid to late game. Yes, halu makes early game very strong. But get to mid and you start losing momentum.
the deciding factor of whether you win a fight becomes essentially if you guessed correctly. not if you shot well. that is the biggest issue i have with hallucinations. It's extremely frustrating to play against. If the standard play becomes hallucination whack-a-mole is that really a fun game? scans or obs need to soft counter them. make them purple after being scanned or whatever.
also it is a massive benefit on first hive. It makes a 2v2 into essentially a 4v2 guessing game. you can 'crush' a 2 push with 2 skulks. god forbid you use it on lerks and have 4 lerks flying around. Killing them isn't really an option because its spammable. Beyond the pure strength in engagements, it screws with number counts. you can't punish aliens for bringing their whole team to a fight because you just can't be sure if it was the whole team or 3+2 hallucinations. Was that really 2 lerks on the south side? or was it 1 and a hallucination? or 2 hallucinations?
In its place I think drifters should be able to drop ink with a substantial cool down applied. The presence of shades should act as a passive defense to scans / arc play - perhaps it halves the amount of time a scan is effective.
Finally to make a shade hive more viable I think the individual traits should be buffed slightly. So camouflage activates quicker and provides a slight improvement to the invisibility / inaudibility state, and perhaps level 1 / 2 aura show the enemy presence slightly closer than they do now.
What makes it even worse is that on the other side, it's a one button wonder with no skill required to perform. Micro is literally done for you, and it even goes out of it's way to actually restrict you from basic functionality like proper box select, select all, move/attack order etc. That really gets to me. This joke ability is really showing just how far (not very) it was thought out. No control, no skill.
Why it was thought invulnerability to scan was even remotely acceptable to push out in a live build is so ridiculously laughable.
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As for longer cd, I think we need to stop fooling ourselves with bandaid hard limits. It's a disgusting way that shows up in ns2 design over and over and over again when dealing with problems that are stemming from elsewhere. Tres cost to ability power is how this should be approached. Soft limits > hard limits. I like to think i'm playing an rts/fps, not world of warcraft.
Many playtesters argued there should be a cool down, there were 2 other ideas though. 1) making it more expensive and 2) making hallucinations easier to kill. The idea making them more expensive limits their functionality early game and would make shade all but useless as a starting hive. The idea of making hallucinations have less hp doesn't solve anything as it still takes time to acquire the target, fire, kill the target and then reacquire.
Personally speaking a cool down was the only solution I could come up with to fix their spamability without costing early game benefits. If you think of anything post it up because we didn't know what to suggest.
In regards to that, I do not believe having scans remove the illusions or only having one illusion would be the favored change, as those requires less tactics or skill to deal with. Giving the illusions one hp (which would mean marine snap aiming would almost entirely make illusions worse than mucus) or as mentioned by crazy above, make them appear on the minimap (requiring fast minimap checking) would be better changes in that regard.
Make scanned illusions distinguishable and/or consider lowering HP.
Also the lerk hallucination AI is pretty terrible.
- Increased soft cd on repeated player hallucinations from the current 2 seconds to something like 5
- Scan removes hallucinations and prevents new ones from spawning. Same with obs radius.
- Bullets go through hallucinations, just like they should (but don't) with drifters and macs. You can reduce to 1hp and lower, but against a shotgun it'll always be ~180. The meat tanking ability is ridiculous. Right now, hallucination should be a crag ability. Mucous 2.0
- 3 tres, along with enzyme. I get the arguement of not wanting something prohibitively expensive, but right now it is no where even near that point. You can spam things so much at 2 tres it's not even funny. When (and if) alien tech tree gets properly overhauled with opportunity costs and progression actually reaching a healthy state, then we can look at low/er tres costs for abilities.
- Harvesters to 10 tres
- No more hallucination LOS on things they are not attacking.
- Fixed box select priority (likely to persist for the next 100 builds but meh). If this doesn't get done, atleast should have cntrl click and double click select all back like older builds so we can work around it.
And yea, the usual drifter speed decrease by like 10-15%, and drifter hp nerfed. I think i called this one like 30 builds ago.I agree, and I believe that introducing a cooldown could really help reduce the overwhelming feeling. By adding a cooldown, you are forcing the Alien commander to time when he uses the hallucination ability, rather than allowing him to just repeatedly use (spam) it throughout an engagement (like mucous). I believe that the problem with it does not reside in the fact that it makes the Aliens appear to have more players, but the fact that the Aliens are able to maintain that illusion throughout the entirety of an engagement, for a measly 4-8 res.
FYI there is no CD whatsoever currently.. and this is what makes hallucinations really really powerful during engagements... but Sewlek does not want cooldowns at all (I am not entirely sure why, however) If one were to be implemented i'd suggest something closer to 8 or 10 seconds, given the typical lifespan of a hallucination in combat and as well as factoring in reacquiring an actual target etc.
I would do that.. and then I would also increase costs to 3 for all casted drifter abilities, as you recommended.
I get that hallu are too powerful for their cost, but why recommend this change other than advocating for it due to tradition?
Scanning, nor any other Tres casted rine commander ability hard counters mucous or enzyme... so why should there be one for hallu? Because its already part of the macro game for a shade hive? That hardly seems like a justification imo, being based on theme instead of gameplay impacts.
I do think scan could highlight / show the motion tracking circles for actual players only, as intended... it would be a subtle enough change that still requires proper target acquisition from the player in order to utilize fully.
I really don't know why its spammable. The zero CD spam on skulks already makes them tank better than mucous - let alone spammed on fades/onos.
Oh ok, i didn't notice that was already happening!
@IronHorse
Intentional or not, there is a cd on creating hallucinations of the same player. Try spamming hallucination on someone and you'll find it only wants to create a hallu every 2 seconds.
As for scan, that logic doesn't really work. It's like saying cloak shouldn't be countered by scan because celerity isn't. Scan at 3 tres is quite an investment to be doing it constantly.