Combining Cloaking with Aura?!
Frozen
New York, NY Join Date: 2010-07-02 Member: 72228Members, Constellation
New York, NY Join Date: 2010-07-02 Member: 72228Members, Constellation
Comments
On topic, I think its best to keep them separate as three abilities and think of another for crag and shift hives. A third layer of armour that works like mucous for crag? Focus for shift?
For devel.
Merging Aura and Cloak was the best short term solution we came up with for this. You still get cloak, it's still a powerful upgrade because it also comes with Aura, but it has a little bit less of an impact as an ambushing tool because you cannot be completely silent with it.
It's an experimental change we want to try first before splitting the upgrades. Ideally, we can rework shade hive a little bit and improve it's overall viability as an opener. Any ideas for shade hive are welcome!
Who uses shade hive anyways? Shade hive is broken currently; you just can't make it much worse.
About this specific issue: cloak is too slow for biting res. But it may be cost-efficient for making rush tunnels in difficult conditions.
Can't tell, the ultimate test is how the shade hive will look as first or second one.
You're combining the other 2 upgrades into something that's too powerful of an economy tool. I'm not concerned about this to the extent I was about power surge, since shade is terrible as first upgrade and will cause a slow painful marine victory for aliens 86.5% of the time anyways and nothing will change that.
But too powerful ambushing becomes too powerful hiding and dodging.
There's NOTHING wrong with having a virtually useless upgrade. It will have it's time and place, such as a gorge is terrified so he takes cloaking for 1res to try to save his life. Not a big deal. You're considering redemption, no?
I would scratch cloak as an upgrade all together.
It is unfun to play against, because even if you check every corner properly, you still may get ambushed, and therefor heavily rely on your commander. There could still be shades and the shades cloak could even be buffed, e.g. that it cloaks 100% and even removes sounds emitted from cloaked entities. Shades are somewhat predictable. You can anticipate shades and counter cloak, which doesn't make it as cheap as cloaking everywhere.
I don't really understand what the problem with 3 seperate upgrades is though.
I mean I'll always go silence over phantom since the majority of high skill players can spot a level 3 cloaked skulk that isn't moving (in a dark corner even) as if they had bright flashing neon lights... This just seems like it will push shade hive even further out.. There are too many games played now where alien comm won't get shade until they have EVERY other upgrade because "shade sucks"
There is no reason to not have 3 possible upgrades. I am pretty sure if rookies can handle 2 upgrade options, they can also handle 3.
3 upgrades for every tech path would be nice indeed.
Need to add more lifeforms and allow changing them faster, so there'll be counters by tech-switching like in StarCraft.
There's a server out there that has shade split like that... If i remember correctly shift hive had celerity adrenaline and feral? (not sure on the name but it was higher damage with slower attack speed.) while shade had phantom silence and aura.. Something like that it's been months since I've played there..
It was great fun though.
I'd really love to see feral (?) upgrade added to the main game..
I guess it's to counteract cloaked, sneaky skulks getting aura, cloak AND silent movement; however, there has to be something better than this bandaid fix.
Sadly I'm noticing a trend lately :I
So basically cloaking will be 100% useless..
Stop removing shit! Just add things damn
If you want to add upgrades and splite shade into three, I suggest focus for shift and hunger for crag. (They way the were in Combat, which is my only frame of reference here.) This would probably screw with balance and require extensive finetuning, though. Also shade would pale even more compared to these other upgrades.
I consider myself a shade fan, but even then I realize that late game, fades and skulks without celerity/onos and everything else without carapace are just crippled. You can only really go shade for the fun of it if your team is good enough to win before the late game - exactly where aliens shine.
Cloaking has always been useless. It only felt strong previously because of the silence.
As @IronHorse states, cloaking is pretty bad because you can see the player at all times, regardless of movement. Perhaps a player should be completely invisible when not moving, and still "cloaked" or partially cloaked while moving?
If aura is considered not good enough and an issue, then increase the distance for it. It's really, really good.
I don't find that merging two dissimilar abilities together makes much sense, especially considering that aura is already intensely powerful, and especially when coming from the (yes, overpowered) phantom hybrid.
The problem with making cloak 100% effective is that it would be impossible to detect without a scan. I think the current implementation works quite well... it's just not as useful/powerful as the alternatives, or rather, you will miss the alternatives more late game.
Silence is 100% effective, though, whereas cloak is never really all that effective, given that you can always been seen. You show up visually, you show up on the map, etc. You're never actually all that cloaked.
But on the flip side they have to remain stationary in order to remain impossible to detect. Once they start moving they have the shimmer, and if they run they're not cloaked at all.
Completely 100% invisible aliens while stationary would make phantom actually useful in certain situations. (especially for Gorges) Although having a "sound effect" to scream out "HEY I'M HERE TURN AROUND" to any Marine you may ambush kind of defeats the purpose of it entirely.
If cloak and silence are being split then the very act of moving towards your prey will make enough noise to alert them. Adding in another sound effect on top of that is just a horrible idea.
Also, this graph was made by Remi not me. Credit where credit is due.
Making shade hive useful throughout would involve adding an upgrade that is useful in combat. Silence helps you GET to the combat, and aura *can* help you during, but as the game draws on shade really loses its potential. In Classic I tried a 'ghost' ability which let you 'dodge' up to a certain % of your HP of damage from a single attack (mainly a sorta soft SG counter). It was kinda crap and probably felt more like a hitreg issue because of bad feedback, but I think its best to try to come up with a 'combat oriented' ability for shade to replace cloaking... Cloaking should just be a passive on shades IMO.
a) Remove the cloaking upgrade (you can still be cloaked from shades)
b) Split cloaking and silence. Move silence to shift hive, add focus to shade hive, add redemption to crag hive. Voila, every hive has 3 upgrades.