As i mentioned before the patch, as a veteren of crysis wars where cloaking was partial, even though it was far more effective than camo now is in NS2, people trained themselves to see it at any distance easily. The result was it never got used, even in pubs.
This was a poorly thought out change
I also played the hell out of Crysis / Wars and you speak the truth. Cloak was only useful for avoiding snipers at (very) long range. In NS2 though you go completely invisible when standing still, which really gives it a leg up over Crysis cloaking.
(Besides, Crysis cloak emitted that god-awful sound, remember? You could hear anyone cloaked easily, so finding them was no trouble.)
Completely off topic, I couldnt be more disappointed with what Crytek did to Crysis with Crysis 2 and 3. Completely ruined what was one of the best arena shooters ever made.
Sure the camo got nerfed.. but 100% invisibility while moving was pretty silly. I liked how it was a while ago where you saw a faint outline, now it's back to that state with a prettier effect (while moving anyway) and it forces you to use your head once again to carefully sneak on the ceilings when marines turn their heads. It's not useless, it's just not as newbie friendly anymore.
Please devs dont listen to some of these awful ideas, you did the framework now just polish up the trait and it should be good. Like fixing the partial cloak while running thing, it was a great perk of having camo.
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Can someone please explain to me how a change to the cloaking shader means that silence is bad now? Silence is completely unchanged.
100% invisibility while moving was simply too good and unforgiving for marines, especially rookie marines. If camo falls out of favor too much I believe the opacity of things can be tweaked in addition to the speed thresholds and the speed at which the shader is applied. Of course... it's been less than 24 hours. I doubt we're going to be rushing to push out a balance patch until the metagame has time to mature.
Being completely invisible is not camo... being barely visible is.
Thats how it was in beta, guess what it didn't work. Why they decided to bring something back that doesn't work idk.
Going by what you stated I'd be inclined to say they both do not work... however you should go with the lesser of the two evils in this case: more camo effect than inviso effect.
I wasn't aware you lose Celerity in combat, thats really bad as well, no wonder Marines are winning every game now.
This is perhaps the fifth time I've heard/read this in the past 24 hours. I sense a communication error!
That's because it's absolutely absurdly unintuitive and it's difficult for most people to notice the speed drop while they're distracted in combat.
I can't say I'm surprised about camo, I was expecting this because it seemed unlikely that they would rework the ability enough to make it generally useful without being frustrating for new players (which is really what is being fixed)
Anyone complaining that camo was too good before needs to L2BuildObs, seriously.
If any alien commander picks shade in either of the first two hives, I'll be F4ing.
The fact that countering Camo was so heavily dependent on your commander was the whole problem. I still maintain that Camo should not be revealed by detection and balanced accordingly.
Anyone complaining that camo was too good before needs to L2BuildObs, seriously.
If any alien commander picks shade in either of the first two hives, I'll be F4ing.
The fact that countering Camo was so heavily dependent on your commander was the whole problem. I still maintain that Camo should not be revealed by detection and balanced accordingly.
Thats only a "problem" when the marine commander is completely new to the game and doesn't understand what is fully going on.
You get ANY decent marine commander and shade = auto-loss, even before this change. Post patch its even MORE true that its an auto-loss.
Hell, a really good commander just drops an Obs at key locations, thus rendering camo completely null and void. Not like Obs are expensive.
I think it is borderline pointless to go Camo now. I'm walking around corners, EASILY seeing near stationary skulks on the ceiling (they claim they are stationary) and shotgunning them within seconds. That said I've played WAAAAAY too much games like Obscurity and the Hidden, where you are out to gun down a player is can only be seen by a very slight shimmer but is otherwise invisible. It is easier to see skulks than the creatures in those games though, and I was sniping those players with bolt rifles.
My initial thought is, clearly you need to go camo in a darker area where it is much more effective. This seems to work, but being forced to do that compared to celereity or cara, and just being sneaky as a skulk without camo is just no comparison.
edit: I think the camo should be tuned to be more in line with the badass cloakery of the hidden or obscurity. Right now, the effective is really cool, but just quite a bit more obvious.
Basically, I think this is... yet again, another case where we are gonna see too many posters jumping the gun, thinking the only way to deal with a problem is to face it directly, without looking at the periphery (namely, something related to camouflage: observatories).
Camo is in a good place, where it should've been from the start. Movement and cloaking should work like this, it makes sense (risk/reward), and is fair for combating players.
Really, Camo in a good place in conjunction with what?
Camouflage useless with lifeforms.
- Fade
- Lerk
- New camo makes it really bad for a Onos unless he is just sitting right at a entrance waiting.
-Two hive skulk(Leap)
- gorge without support
Camouflage useful on lifeforms
- Non moving skulk
- Gorge that has prior vision VIA drifter.
Anyone complaining that camo was too good before needs to L2BuildObs, seriously.
If any alien commander picks shade in either of the first two hives, I'll be F4ing.
The fact that countering Camo was so heavily dependent on your commander was the whole problem. I still maintain that Camo should not be revealed by detection and balanced accordingly.
Thats only a "problem" when the marine commander is completely new to the game and doesn't understand what is fully going on.
You get ANY decent marine commander and shade = auto-loss, even before this change. Post patch its even MORE true that its an auto-loss.
Hell, a really good commander just drops an Obs at key locations, thus rendering camo completely null and void. Not like Obs are expensive.
Say whatever you want but a ton of games are played with mediocre commanders on both sides. Any strategy that puts a disproportionate amount of importance on the competence of the other team's commander - without really requiring anything from your team's commander - is going to be overpowered in your typical pub game and underpowered in a competitive environment. It's simply not a good way to balance the game.
Absolutely zero reason to go Shade before 3rd hive, zero. Especially with all the "cham" players lately. Seems roughly 25% of the playerbase is wallhacking with chams which further make cloak useless.
Cloak needs to be re-worked in the code to prevent wall-hacking from spotting you.
I wasn't aware you lose Celerity in combat, thats really bad as well, no wonder Marines are winning every game now.
Guess Crag/Shift/Shade is only build order now. Shame, this game used to be a lot more fun.
Zero reasons except you know, how silence CAN be used much more effectively than celerity or adrenalin (adren is pretty much unneeded at all).
You talk about tweaking the opacity of the camo shader. I can't really imagine right now how a not-so-opaque version of a fresnel-based distortion shader looks like.
As is stands, I will likely never go Shade first again unless the team is stacked, or I'm betting on early silenced Lerks.
I'd bet your money elsewhere. Have you not seen the lerk tracers? Gigantic "place bullets here" signs. Probably won't effect lerks that get in an bite lots. But harassing from the distance where not seen ? Forget it.
Good riddance aliens walking up to you completely invisible, and the only counter being scans at 3 each or obs at 15.
The new camo might be less useful (obviously, since it was ridiculous before), but it's far from useless. Same as silence, which was actually the "better" shade upgrade before, and maybe now will return to being it.
Shade hive is a little less attractive now overall, which is fine. Feign death needs to return and then it'll be actually quite a decent choice.
100% invisibility while moving was silly. But I am thinking that maybe allowing like 50% camo while walking at full speed but not in combat might make it good. Keep the almost 100% for people hiding above doors or whatnot and not moving. But for people out of combat (no damage taken and no jump/special ability like leap/blink used), let them have a 50% cloak at full speed. If they have been in combat, no cloak for you. At 50% the marine that is paying attention is still going to see you most of the time. (If 50% is too little buff it)
What's really annoying is that you cant see whether camo is activated in alien vision. I play with alien vision all the time and if I'm close to a shade I would like to know if I'm cloaked or not. I dont get why they removed this or did they just forget to change it?
If they tweak the decloak sensitivity, especially on small vertical drops/ moving over anything uneven, and make your cloak status more apparent in alien vision again it would help a lot with determining how effective a partial cloak is versus marines.
it works well right now, more of an ambush-role. Good for biting some res to get marine attention, then going camo on the ceiling to wait for them to come to the damaged res. Before, you were too mobile.
The thing they need to fix is alien vision wont let you know if your camo is on or off. gotta switch to regular vision.
maybe you guys should like stop moving when you hear a heard of marines coming? using sound is a skill. damn you kids are weak...
"pretty much useless" my ass. the only difference now is that you can't gorge camo all the way across the map and take out a base, or skulk camo up to a marine and bite him before he can even react. don't you want a challenge? don't you think you should have to use your damn brain when using an invisibility buff?
100% inviso is cheap and is not camouflage. If Aliens want 100% inviso then give the marines 100% cloak device and we can all run around the levels hoping to find each other.
I should be able to fly around completely invis with my lerk, creep around completely unseen with my fade, and for god's sake I NEED TO BE ABLE TO BE COMPLETELY INVIS WITH MY GORGE AND ONOS! HOW ELSE AM I GONNA DESTROY A MARINE BASE BY MYSELF?! To be honest, making me use a defensive upgrade in a defensive manner is just fucking preposterous.
Really I dont get it, I thought we had sorted out cammo during the beta, we tried all sorts of different effects delays, transparency/visibility levels etc etc. Was it not concluded that not being 100% invisible meant you might as well not be invisible at all which was why we ended up with 100%.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana
I was honestly shocked that they even touched cloak in this last patch. It made no sense to me, if I had a choice between silence and cloak I almost always took silence to begin with. Cloak worked like it should , rewarding good play and coordination and punishing the bad.
People talking about cloak allowing for easy kills, well, stop standing in one spot as a marine. Seriously, that's the only time I'm ever able to sneak up and get an 'easy kill'. If a marine is constantly moving and checking their surroundings cloak becomes much easier to deal with. You will have to uncloak to catch that marine and they will hear your footsteps, simple and fair. Moving while cloaked was soo slow that if you weren't close to a marine it took quite awhile to sneak up on them, this goes back to them moving once every 5 minutes.
You already couldn't move at full speed with cloak so...that wasn't really a change to begin with. Cloak to me was great the way it was for early game play, but not for mid to late game. It could help stop expansions with the marines, which was easily countered with scan but those do cost a hefty 3 Res!!
Maybe we just need to change the name to cloaking so people stop saying that camo isn't supposed to make you 100% invisible.
Cloaking will inherently be difficult to implement compared to the other five upgrades. Let's take a look...
Carapace - automatically applied to your health pool, no outside-game user interaction can negate upgrade
Regeneration - automatically recoups your health pool, no outside-game user interaction can negate upgrade
Celerity - automatically applied to base speed, no outside-game user interaction can negate upgrade
Adrenaline - automatically recoups your energy pool, no outside-game user interaction can negate upgrade
Silence - automatically removes sounds, no outside-game user interaction can negate upgrade (this would be different if your silence reduction percentage changed depending on speed... now see cloak).
Cloak - reduces visibility based on user input, outside-game user interaction CAN negate upgrade
Because Cloak has a percentage effect, its strength against an opponent can be negated by the adjustment of their gamma (as mentioned. Whereas turning up one's speakers doesn't negate the other player's use of silence).
The other major difference between cloak and the other upgrades is that the "effect" that is applied is variable. No matter how hard you try, you carapace will ALWAYS be +X hitpoints. Even adrenaline, no matter what the player inputs, the adrenaline will always recoup at a set rate. Cloak's effect changes depending on the user's input. Is this bad? Not at all, but it becomes "imbalanced" when compared to the other non-user input dependent upgrades.
The challenge here is to either find a way to make Cloak assimilate with the other five upgrades and their path to simplicity -or- open up the possibilities by assimilating the other five upgrades into the Cloak's user input/skill based variable effect.
This is not an argument that factors in how an upgrade is implemented (by pro/noob).
I hate the camo change. However, if UWE is determined to keep it, then I suggest making aliens retain the partial cloaking even when jumping/attacking (still revealed by obs/scan).
When I played alien I could always just walk around inviso killing tons of marines (stationary ones and moving ones) with very little effort. I stopped using it because I felt like I was using a game exploit and the game was extremely un-challenging to play like that.
Invisible when standing still.
Slightly visible when moving slowly.
Slight more visible, yet still under effect of camo when at full speed.
Fully revealed on obs, scan, combat state.
Noise still apply for full speed.
Comments
I also played the hell out of Crysis / Wars and you speak the truth. Cloak was only useful for avoiding snipers at (very) long range. In NS2 though you go completely invisible when standing still, which really gives it a leg up over Crysis cloaking.
(Besides, Crysis cloak emitted that god-awful sound, remember? You could hear anyone cloaked easily, so finding them was no trouble.)
Completely off topic, I couldnt be more disappointed with what Crytek did to Crysis with Crysis 2 and 3. Completely ruined what was one of the best arena shooters ever made.
Please devs dont listen to some of these awful ideas, you did the framework now just polish up the trait and it should be good. Like fixing the partial cloak while running thing, it was a great perk of having camo.
100% invisibility while moving was simply too good and unforgiving for marines, especially rookie marines. If camo falls out of favor too much I believe the opacity of things can be tweaked in addition to the speed thresholds and the speed at which the shader is applied. Of course... it's been less than 24 hours. I doubt we're going to be rushing to push out a balance patch until the metagame has time to mature.
Going by what you stated I'd be inclined to say they both do not work... however you should go with the lesser of the two evils in this case: more camo effect than inviso effect.
That's because it's absolutely absurdly unintuitive and it's difficult for most people to notice the speed drop while they're distracted in combat.
I can't say I'm surprised about camo, I was expecting this because it seemed unlikely that they would rework the ability enough to make it generally useful without being frustrating for new players (which is really what is being fixed)
If any alien commander picks shade in either of the first two hives, I'll be F4ing.
The fact that countering Camo was so heavily dependent on your commander was the whole problem. I still maintain that Camo should not be revealed by detection and balanced accordingly.
Thats only a "problem" when the marine commander is completely new to the game and doesn't understand what is fully going on.
You get ANY decent marine commander and shade = auto-loss, even before this change. Post patch its even MORE true that its an auto-loss.
Hell, a really good commander just drops an Obs at key locations, thus rendering camo completely null and void. Not like Obs are expensive.
My initial thought is, clearly you need to go camo in a darker area where it is much more effective. This seems to work, but being forced to do that compared to celereity or cara, and just being sneaky as a skulk without camo is just no comparison.
edit: I think the camo should be tuned to be more in line with the badass cloakery of the hidden or obscurity. Right now, the effective is really cool, but just quite a bit more obvious.
Really, Camo in a good place in conjunction with what?
Camouflage useless with lifeforms.
- Fade
- Lerk
- New camo makes it really bad for a Onos unless he is just sitting right at a entrance waiting.
-Two hive skulk(Leap)
- gorge without support
Camouflage useful on lifeforms
- Non moving skulk
- Gorge that has prior vision VIA drifter.
Say whatever you want but a ton of games are played with mediocre commanders on both sides. Any strategy that puts a disproportionate amount of importance on the competence of the other team's commander - without really requiring anything from your team's commander - is going to be overpowered in your typical pub game and underpowered in a competitive environment. It's simply not a good way to balance the game.
Zero reasons except you know, how silence CAN be used much more effectively than celerity or adrenalin (adren is pretty much unneeded at all).
I'd bet your money elsewhere. Have you not seen the lerk tracers? Gigantic "place bullets here" signs. Probably won't effect lerks that get in an bite lots. But harassing from the distance where not seen ? Forget it.
I'll only F4 if they get camo instead of silence, or if they get both, and I see on the map the entire team creeping around super slowly.
The new camo might be less useful (obviously, since it was ridiculous before), but it's far from useless. Same as silence, which was actually the "better" shade upgrade before, and maybe now will return to being it.
Shade hive is a little less attractive now overall, which is fine. Feign death needs to return and then it'll be actually quite a decent choice.
The thing they need to fix is alien vision wont let you know if your camo is on or off. gotta switch to regular vision.
maybe you guys should like stop moving when you hear a heard of marines coming? using sound is a skill. damn you kids are weak...
"pretty much useless" my ass. the only difference now is that you can't gorge camo all the way across the map and take out a base, or skulk camo up to a marine and bite him before he can even react. don't you want a challenge? don't you think you should have to use your damn brain when using an invisibility buff?
sons, i am disappoint.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana
So true in many ways.
People talking about cloak allowing for easy kills, well, stop standing in one spot as a marine. Seriously, that's the only time I'm ever able to sneak up and get an 'easy kill'. If a marine is constantly moving and checking their surroundings cloak becomes much easier to deal with. You will have to uncloak to catch that marine and they will hear your footsteps, simple and fair. Moving while cloaked was soo slow that if you weren't close to a marine it took quite awhile to sneak up on them, this goes back to them moving once every 5 minutes.
You already couldn't move at full speed with cloak so...that wasn't really a change to begin with. Cloak to me was great the way it was for early game play, but not for mid to late game. It could help stop expansions with the marines, which was easily countered with scan but those do cost a hefty 3 Res!!
Maybe we just need to change the name to cloaking so people stop saying that camo isn't supposed to make you 100% invisible.
Carapace - automatically applied to your health pool, no outside-game user interaction can negate upgrade
Regeneration - automatically recoups your health pool, no outside-game user interaction can negate upgrade
Celerity - automatically applied to base speed, no outside-game user interaction can negate upgrade
Adrenaline - automatically recoups your energy pool, no outside-game user interaction can negate upgrade
Silence - automatically removes sounds, no outside-game user interaction can negate upgrade (this would be different if your silence reduction percentage changed depending on speed... now see cloak).
Cloak - reduces visibility based on user input, outside-game user interaction CAN negate upgrade
Because Cloak has a percentage effect, its strength against an opponent can be negated by the adjustment of their gamma (as mentioned. Whereas turning up one's speakers doesn't negate the other player's use of silence).
The other major difference between cloak and the other upgrades is that the "effect" that is applied is variable. No matter how hard you try, you carapace will ALWAYS be +X hitpoints. Even adrenaline, no matter what the player inputs, the adrenaline will always recoup at a set rate. Cloak's effect changes depending on the user's input. Is this bad? Not at all, but it becomes "imbalanced" when compared to the other non-user input dependent upgrades.
The challenge here is to either find a way to make Cloak assimilate with the other five upgrades and their path to simplicity -or- open up the possibilities by assimilating the other five upgrades into the Cloak's user input/skill based variable effect.
This is not an argument that factors in how an upgrade is implemented (by pro/noob).
When I played alien I could always just walk around inviso killing tons of marines (stationary ones and moving ones) with very little effort. I stopped using it because I felt like I was using a game exploit and the game was extremely un-challenging to play like that.
Slightly visible when moving slowly.
Slight more visible, yet still under effect of camo when at full speed.
Fully revealed on obs, scan, combat state.
Noise still apply for full speed.
That's what should make camo viable.