Crags allowing turtling
Shrike3O
Join Date: 2002-11-03 Member: 6678Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2002-11-03 Member: 6678Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">Possible explanation for the major balance shift?</div>It seems as if the changes to healing rates for crags to a percentage base in 229 has made mature hives nearly invincible except to concentrated heavy fire. I've spent a decent amount of the last few days Khamming, and having ~3 crags dropped next to a hive seems to heal it for hundreds of points of damage per tick, rendering that hive effectively invulnerable to anything besides a concentrated assault involving either grenade launchers or ARCs (both of which force the crags to spread their healing love around). While I appreciate hives not being vulnerable to a couple of sneaky marines with switchaxes, there's an issue here when the majority of the marine team can be standing in place pouring LMG fire into my hive, and it costs me (at most) a few res for healing waves from those crags. If my hive layout is such that there aren't many buildings near the crags (basically, I've built a hive room that lets my crags focus on healing the hive) it's incredibly hard for marines to wipe out the hive, and if they target the crags, Heal Wave keeps them alive.
I'm all for having Crags be useful healing aliens (high minimum heal amount to let skulks heal quickly, decent percentage heal amount to let Onii heal relatively quickly) but this feels a little silly when you apply it to something like a hive.
I'm all for having Crags be useful healing aliens (high minimum heal amount to let skulks heal quickly, decent percentage heal amount to let Onii heal relatively quickly) but this feels a little silly when you apply it to something like a hive.
Comments
Heal Wave lasts for maybe 5 seconds? That's a lot of res you're burning to keep a Crag up, and that's if you only need one wave at once to hold up concentrated LMG fire on your crags, which is usually not the case.
I would like to see Flamethrowers disable Crag Healing and Shade Cloaking on burning structures though; it would buff their usefulness and solve this issue pretty quickly.
That's probably why they changed that...
Problem? :P<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
Sounds balanced to me. Especially since it makes people LOL a little less at a flamethrower. It's a beast, and now has a chance to shine and be worth the massive P.Res and T.Res requirements for it's use. (Not that it wasn't useful before, but perhaps more so now that people are using aliens structures a little more wisely.)
Also, crags were useful for the exact same reason before the change. Can't say if it's a significant difference from the way it was, but I was using them before in the same way with pretty much the same result.
Oddly enough, it wasn't as effective before simply because I played against Marines that actually used Flamethrowers. Without them, and without shooting the crags, yes it would be rather difficult without GL's and/or Flamethrowers supporting your two or three Exo's. Good teams do this, bad ones don't. Same logic behind the Alien team having a few gorges and lerks to support a few Onos. It's simply more effective to have a few of each, rather than all the same structure/life form when attempting an assault mid-late game.
I admit it, I LOL'ed at this.
10hp per tick was just unspeakable.
one harvester has 2500 HP or sth like that.
healing one harvester with a crag (10 res each) is a little bit redundant. but keeping the res flow steady is good.and the crag provides defense for later assaults, too.
I never used crags but in the very end to asssist the last assault. now you just need 2-4 of them isntead of 6-10.
and they do really well for an expansion. and defending the hive. (it heals sooo slowly on its own)
heresy!
Exactly. Before the patch, crags were only really effective at healing lower level lifeforms in a reasonable time. Even if a khammander has dropped a massive farm of them, if you're an onos, or even a fade, often it's quicker to just go back to the hive to heal up. If an onos requests a bunch of crags in a forward location to assist with seiging, I will often just drop a shift and drop a bunch of gorge eggs instead (forcing the next people to spawn gorge around that location). Does the job about 10x quicker than a crag farm ever would.
Having crags actually be good enough to be useful isn't a bad thing..
Sure the active heal speeds things up a bit (I'm not sure just how significantly), but that doesn't mean the passive heal has to be absolutely terrible.
As you said, shades may be counterable, but they're still good. Shifts are good too. There's no reason crags need to be nerfed (too much).
The fact that it allows aliens to turtle better isn't a good reason, considering marines are the kings of turtling already. A few crags aren't going to change that.
So you guys don't really need to worry about craigs being overpowered right now.
now the stats (for 229) have been wiped and we continue tracking at a time where people know better how to play aliens, and its very much possible that, even without making any changes, 229 would make us think that aliens win 10% more games? which would be kinda absurd. i played about 30 games in public since 229 and have seen so far only in 2 games camouflage being used (1 with successful alien win) and 1 game where early regeneration lead to victory. all the other alien victories were due to quick forward shift + hatch, capture as many RTs as possible while your skulks pressure the marine team as much as possible with respawn from the middle of the map + basically unlimited eggs from shift(s).
now the stats (for 229) have been wiped and we continue tracking at a time where people know better how to play aliens, and its very much possible that, even without making any changes, 229 would make us think that aliens win 10% more games? which would be kinda absurd. i played about 30 games in public since 229 and have seen so far only in 2 games camouflage being used (1 with successful alien win) and 1 game where early regeneration lead to victory. all the other alien victories were due to quick forward shift + hatch, capture as many RTs as possible while your skulks pressure the marine team as much as possible with respawn from the middle of the map + basically unlimited eggs from shift(s).<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It looks so funny when a lone marine finds a forward shift. As they're taking out the eggs 10 more come out and by the time they have the shift killed people have spawned and no ground is lost.
I think it's awesome crags are finally worth the res, instead of something you spam around and whine about lol.
About regen buff, I don't know. It might prove overpowered, it's a really fine balance to find. But hell, ATLEAST YOU CAN USE IT NOW, before you'd hardly ever take regen over cara, maybe on a lerk or something...
And disable in combat regen. Finally useful against buildings instead of just lerks