We may have to, but I want to wait and see this play out for a bit first. I've played a couple 6v6 games with the comp mod after the hitbox changes and aliens were doing pretty well. The difference is, many pub skulks have no idea what to do. When you get players that can get bites in, the new hitboxes also help skulks as it seems like my bites were regging really good. I also hope that UWE modifies the changes somewhat after the complaints.
What I've learned so far with the new hitboxes... If you don't ambush as a skulk, you're not going to do well. If you walker fade, you aren't going to do well. It actually makes you play smart to get kills. Which doesn't work for pubs.
I think just increasing hp would be better than changing hitboxes back if we have change it at all.
Firstly hitreg somehow feels better with them.
Secondly it should be (at least seems to me) easier to implement in a mod, also i think vanilla would go that route (if they ever fix anything that is), because remitard 100% won't change the hitboxes backafter putting work into them.
True. I was wondering why I was getting less kills as skulk., Usually im doing okay with dodging and Im able to take down some shotguns or lmg marines like that, but that doesnt work anymore. You literally cant win a 1v1 except you ambush perfectly..
Dont forget that widening the lmg spread angle could balance out the hitbox changes. Atleast for slight tweaks to the skulk-marine balance and some of the moments where lifeforms are leaving.
It is not only about balance. It is about being stupid and completely shit to have a hitbox not matching the model. The model should hitable. Not the air around it. This is probably the biggest shit change the PDT so far.
Really, how on earth can someone want to have hitboxes not matching models??? How is that a sign of quality when you hit something when you actually don't hit it? The good hitboxes have been one of the strengths of NS2. In my personal opinion there is no other Way to completely revert that change, it is just too shit.
Sorry for my rant, I just do not understand why PDT is still continuing killing t game.
I don't know, I sorta see the hitbox changes as a good opportunity to rebalance fade shotgun interaction. Give skulks more speed, give lerks something I can't think of, give fades more health, give marines more shells and higher fire rate.
There's things that can be done here to make the combat more enjoyable than it was. Of course I agree it's not balanced as is, but I think it COULD be a good first step. Of course I think it's retarted that PDT changed this without making other changes.
But this isn't a message board to complain about PDT or UWE. This is a message board to complain about comp mod and NSL admins. NS2 vanilla is what it is at any given time. Deal with that as your first assumption, you literally have to to make the balance mod work.
I'd like to know what people think about the hive type balance.
Shift hive seemed to be strongest first hive prior to the skulk hp buff, so I'm not sure if that is going to change, but I'd like to raise to question if the combination of silence/celerity and echo is/was too strong and if so, weather or not it would be beneficial for more interesting gameplay to remove the ability to echo harvesters.
At the latest with the second hive, the necessity to defend vulnerable harvesters is almost completely removed, while echo being a complete no brainer thing to do. I think it adds a lot to the mid / late alien PVE snow balling.
So you want to remove the ability to echo harvesters only? So where on the map are you thinking the ability to echo is op'd? Are you saying the ability to get a fully built res tower up immediately in another location mid game is too strong? You still need the area to have infestation. Yes, it saves the aliens a little mid game time not having to get a drifter over there or a gorge, but you still need the marines to be not cutting the cyst chain for it to work.
Or are you talking about using echo to take things out of an area about to be attacked?
Yes, I'm only talking about echoing harvestesters. I wouldn't necessarily say it's too strong in terms of marine / alien balance, but I think it makes it too easy for the aliens to expand. As marine you lose the chance to kill a freshly dropped harvesters and take down 8 tres immediately, if you were sneaky. You'll have to kill the whole harvester, which the aliens don't really care about. The aliens are happy that you're busy for a moment.
Saving RTs and PVE with echo would be fine with me, since it requires somewhat planning and awareness, but I think it doesn't happen all too often, that you can save a Harvester with echo, because you have lack another infested res node.
So, echo harvesters is mostly about safely building harvesters in base and echoing them out, and maybe the aliens depend too much on this. If the aliens should struggle without it, then other things need to be changed.
Ideally, shift hive as third hive should also be a somewhat valid option.
Good thoughts on how to make the hives more balanced, but no plans to change echo at this time. It's also too early to know what the new meta will be. With skulks having more hp and marines having an easier time hitting shots, crag hive might be a really good first hive option. Or what about throwing hallucinations at the marines early game and seeing if they can get enough bullets into the skulks.
That is what I was thinking of, too. Hive balance might have changed with the latest updates. However, I think you still can not choose Shift hive as third hive, because of how celerity works. I think there is too much dependence on it. As a Fade, I feel completely naked without celerity, because the speed boost is too important to not take it. It is not only very good in combat, it also makes you traverse the map faster, which makes it the most important upgrade. You definitely want a shift hive, at the latest, as the second hive and I don't think that is good design.
I think it would be better if Celerity wouldn't boost top speed, but acceleration and/or speed retention.
With higher acceleration, you would reach top speed faster. It would boost your ability to do eratic movement, e.g. left(A) / right(D) strafe movement as skulk, sharper turns as Lerk/Fade and it would improve the responsiveness of the onos movement.
The lack of cele speed boost should partially be added to every life forms base speed and partially added as increase over time with biomass.
Currently Celerity adds 0.5 m/s per Spur, so it's 1.5 m/s with 3 Spurs.
Changed example values:
Base speed increase: +1 m/s (1.1 m/s w/ bio mass 1) for every life form.
Gradual increase : +0.1 m/s speed for every bio mass level (0.9 m/s max).
So, you'll reach current Celerity speed with biomass level 5, but start out with higher skulk speed in the early game. Late game aliens would be faster than in current vanilla, but I don't think that matters too much, as we all know that having biomass level 9 is gg anyway.
I'm not sure about the numbers for acceleration Celerity, since it is something that you need to test first to get a feeling on what works and what now, but I could imagine something like:
10%/20%/30% increased acceleration.
5%/10%/15% less speed loss when turning.
The benefit would be that shade/crag would be viable combination, because you do not lack the necessary speed to compete with strong marines, while Cele itself would still be helpful in combat. It would be something that changes your play style, but not be too good to not have it.
Bicsum, that would be a HUGE change. Nothing that could be changed right away, it would need a lot of testing. But personally I would like to try it, it sounds really interesting. But yea, I can imagine I could hate playing lerk at first with the new hitboxes and with the changed celerity.
Hitboxes is something that I still think is the most important thing right now that needs changing.
Yes, I understand why you want to change celerity, but that seems to be a long road to get the speed right. I also don't know if it wouldn't be similar, since it still buffs your ability to move, just in a different way. It's a lot easier to nerf things that are op'd that don't require getting the movement of the game right. That is probably why this won't be tried. The nerf to echo is easier and doesn't require a movement thing we have to get perfect, but I see no need to change it at this time.
The idea of this mod is to take the annoying/op'd stuff out of the game and make it play competively and fun. People have ideas to make the game better like taking out echo for harvesters, changing how speed works in the game, or making res for kills, but they aren't necessarily going after the overall goal of this mod.
I also don't want it to sound like we won't consider an idea if it's easy to implement, and we see how it clearly makes the game better.
Please let me know how the cool-down time is working with boneshield, that was just an initial cool-down time we picked so I don't know what the better value would be yet. How are the cysts actually working in 6v6 gameplay? I know some people might be against the idea of the same hp for all cysts, but I think it might be balanced with the faster maturation rate and infestation rate from before. Also, with the change to marine pres, does it seem like there's a good buffer time between shotgun waves compared to vanilla?
Yes, it would be huge, but I think it's a necessary step to make the alien tech more interesting.
I don't think it would be similar. Yes, both buff your movement, but with current celerity being mostly integrated into the life forms, you might not need another movement buff to play effectively.
Ideally the acceleration celerity would only help with dodging in combat. You could however play without it mostly the same as you would with current celerity. The current celerity on the other hand essentially helps with scouting, healing, fast engaging/disengaging and dodging. It does too much and the aliens heavily rely on it and I think it would be better to make this available to every hive type and therefore making it possible to not take shift hive.
The only problem I might see with tieing the life form speed to biomass would be, that it might feel strange that your movement keeps changing throughout the game. Like: you can't consistently do your moves, because you need to do more or less jumping or turning based on your bio mass.
Nerfing echo would be a good move, but I doubt it would be enough to make the other hives more interesting.
Alright, I will try to make a mod that does the things I suggested and I'll try to make the essential speed variables adjustable via a json config and present it here. No work or risk involved on your side.
Sorry, can't answer that based on expirience tbh. I did not have much time to play lately, especially not the competitive mod. Mainly because 8pm EST is too late for me on weekdays. We may need an EU pub server that runs the comp mod. Maybe I can talk with Hellrunner in this regard.
Bicsum - I can't say that your celerity overhaul changes will make it into comp mod or not at this time, but it would be interesting to see what you're working on.
I've managed to replace celerity speed scaling with biomass speed scaling. However, I couldn't make a good replacement for celerity so far. Plainly increasing the acceleration value won't do, because you already accelerate really fast with the default values. It would be too meaningless to render it useful.
Changing air control doesn't work either, because it feels weird and it seems more like nerf, because you can't circle jump properly anymore.
So, I was thinking of making celerity so that it increases your acceleration AND grants you a small maxspeed boost, but only for a limited period of time, that depends on your current speed and movement directional change.
The goal with celerity is now to increase acceleration and speed while keeping the default non-celerity velocity, in order to have it useful in combat, but not in traversing the map faster.
You have a base speed of 7 m/s. Celerity would give you a threshhold (e.g.) of 1m/s, making it 7(8) m/s.
Maxspeed threshhold decreases by (e.g.) 0.1 m/s per 100 ms.
The lower your current speed is, the higher your maxspeed becomes. 0 current speed = 8 Maxspeed; 7 currentspeed = 7 maxspeed
The higher your movement directional change is, the higher your maxspeed becomes. 180° turn = 8 maxspeed
If you pass 0 speed, like when you're strafing left and right as a skulk, you'll stay at 8 m/s untill you keep moving in one direction. If you blink left and right as a fade, your maxspeed is also increased.
So if you do A-D movement as gorge / skulk / fade or zig zag mouse movement as fade / lerk, you're a bit faster.
The onos also does a lot of directional changes in combat, so it will also help them too when they're turning and accelerating.
I don't know if I can do it though. I'll have to meditate and listen to a lot of whale singing to gather enough brain power to put this into lua.
^Well if you're thinking of putting it into comp mod, not worth probably doing a ton of work on it as it probably won't make it in the mod. This is because it changes the feel of the game. You've already looked into a couple things and it didn't feel right. If you are planning to show it to UWE for vanilla or just doing it for test/fun - that's fine. Just didn't want you to go through effort when it probably won't be used. This is because it will feel potentially too different from the normal game and/or no need to change it.
I like the minimal changes we have so far. Additional things will be looked into, but again, changing the movement is tough thing to mess with as people have to totally get use to something different. Changing values for cysts is one thing, changing how you turn your mouse or move in a room is another thing.
I would be more likely to change marine sprint than alien movement (I know we changed gorges). I don't want to change how people move with their lifeform if I don't have to. Changing sprint doesn't really change aim. I could see it affecting aim if we changed how someone strafed or jumped. Not saying I would change sprint, just saying that would be more likely as it wouldn't affect combat that much.
^ I do not intend to change the alien movement. It is about increasing the speed, like celerity already does, but only if you stay in one spot.
You are faster when you dodge, circle strafe, or when you're starting to move, but not when you move from cargo to nano. The velocity will stay the same between all hive type upgrades, whereas the speed in combat is slighty increased.
This would make celerity a nice-to-have but not an essential 1st/2nd hive upgrade.
The celerity tooltip would read something like: "increases a lifeform's acceleration and dodging capabilities."
^You do say though that you don't intend to change alien movement, but then you go onto explain you're changing alien movement. It seems like you intend not to change alien top speed. However, the speed in a fight would be different/how an alien play moves would be different. So essentially this is changing alien movement, just not top speed going around the map. I still think everything I said in my post before this one still applies.
No, the point is to take some speed out of celerity and put it into the default life form speeds.
In effect, the movement of a celerity lifeform should feel the same as with the old celerity, but a non-celerity lifeform will feel better than the old non-celerity lifeform.
You could initiate engagements and traverse the map in the same speed as a celerity lifeform, which makes not going celerity an option.
OK so your point is celerity is the exact same across the board? The non celerity player has the same top speed though, but is worse in an engagement? How does that affect fades for example though? I guess you would have to give me an example of how it works, but the speed matters. I think instead of trying to find the perfect way to change how acceleration works, you would just have to give everyone celerity the whole game. Then there really wouldn't be a point to celerity though. Also, there wouldn't be any trade offs. I know you are trying to find a balance. You could raise the floor speed of all the life forms, but that could mess with early game balance.
Yes, but probably a little less during mid-late game. The problem is that, if you automatically gain speed through biomass, you would have 2 upgrades (e.g. regen+focus) AND 3/3 (old) celerity during mid game.
That's why I think it would be better to keep it slightly below 3/3 (old) celerity during mid game (through biomass scaling), but have it higher during early game and low biomass levels (through base movement speed increase).
I've made a chart of the skulks floor walking speed to compare the old and new speeds, so you can see how I intend to do it.
(dunno why the table was flipped when I added it to the chart)
I've put the green (new) celerity part into parenthesis, because it's not part of your normal base speed. Read below.
Depending on your biomass, you will perform the same as now. For example, on biomass 3 you will have 2/3 old spur celerity. On biomass 5, you will have 5/9 (old) spur celerity. You'll max out 3/3 (old) spur celerity on 8/9 biomass.
So you won't perform worse in an engagement. It will depend on the engagement. As initiating alien with (new) celerity you will cover more distance while dodging. So, for example, when a lerk initiates an engagement and he flies up and down or left and right, he'll be slightly faster while doing so. The skulk who follows, and straight lines into the direction of the marine in order to cover the most distance in the shortest time, will have 2/3 (old) spur celerity, but no (new) celerity speed boost. Should the marines switch fire to that skulk and he starts strafing left and right, he will gain the full speed boost of (new) celerity.
a) When you land behind a marnine after blinking to swipe, you will get a small speed boost when you start moving again, E.g. A-D tapping / or next initial blink.
b) When you do zig zags left and right with blink, you will get a small speed boost. If you're zig zagging in 90°, you will get 50% of the potential (new) celerity speed boost (=0.5 m/s using the skulk floor movement as scaling reference).
c) when you're circle jumping around marines, you will also be faster.
You gain this additional maxspeed only when you're doing changes in direction, which means you'll do eratic movement faster.
Yes, I think plainly taking out celerity or nerfing celerity, while buffing base speed is not ideal. The former will break alien progression balance (early game life forms being too fast), while the latter will break upgrade balcance again. It would be must have or useless and it is boring.
The biomass speed scaling will make balancing easier in general, because biomass is a good indicator for alien progression.
I could imagine that this change would even make rushing biomass / dropping a fast hive, instead of getting upgrades, a bit more viable.
edit: The speed is measured in miles per hour and not in meters per second.
It's a good breakdown by you, but isn't it too early to tell if celerity is a must have in all comp situations right now? Cara could be the new go to early game. Celerity has worked as an upgrade and people are use to how it works.
I understand that you want to take it down from being the one must have upgrade early game. Again, too early to tell if it's the go to in every situation early game, and I do think even if your idea works - it's a lot to get use to as your movement keeps changing mid game. We want an easy transition from pub play to comp play for the field players. I think it's good to know that you can do certain things with celerity and certain things without. If you show up for a comp match and celerity is totally different, you could have a hard time as a life form and not be happy.
Update on comp mod:
Seems to be working pretty well except for lifeforms are still having difficulty against sgs. We will have to see how alien teams play when they are working as a team in 6v6 play to know if there really needs to be changes in this regard. I've also noticed carapace seems like a really good upgrade to have now and might be more important than in recent seasons which might be key for balance.
Possible balance idea: EDIT - Increase the spread of the shotgun to reduce sniper shotgun moments. Thoughts? We will probably try increasing the spread of the shotgun from vanilla to hopefully help lerks at mid range and help fades going in and leaving a room. If we need to make additional changes we will.
I havent tried the shotgun for a very long time, now when i did it, it was hilarious.. Who would even want to play as a fade now when even your average pubstar can 2 shot down your fade without actually focusing 100%?
Nah, the spread needs to be adjusted. Or nerf the dmg. 1st option would be best though
Increasing the spread seems like the best way to weaken marines without removing their ability to get kills. I do think an adjustment needs to be made because of the new hitboxes. I would rather not change the max damage the weapon can do or the hp of lifeforms which could offset balance and change the way upgrades like cara work. The spread of a shotgun is a good thing to look into. I'll try to provide any updates on it.
If I may ask: When the problem only occured because the shit hitboxes, why not use the old and better hitboxes? Instead of trying to balance it on another end. LMG would also become less of a sniper with the old ones.
I understand that you want the comp mod as consistent with the vanilla as possible. But I believe it is way better for new people to know that they have just to improve in aim than to alter the behaviour of weapons which truly makes you play different.
Also I believe it is not very fun to hit the enemy when in reality you miss it, but maybe this is just me.
This is the only game that REDUCES the quality of their hitboxes. This change is really the worst of all time, worse than HP bars or pres change.
