Fade and Lerk - frustration for new players
Kamamura
Join Date: 2013-03-06 Member: 183736Members, Reinforced - Gold
Join Date: 2013-03-06 Member: 183736Members, Reinforced - Gold
IMO those two lifeforms are the greatest source of frustration in the game. You save for them (especially for fade) for quite some time, then BAM, a shotgun blast and you are back at skulking again. Little time to learn. I am still learning fade, but for the new players who are afraid to use them (always saving for onos that may never come), here are a few pointers:
LERK
- Buy sooner rather than later, once shotguns are out, lerks have much harder time
- Some players are confused by the perpetual motion when flying, so to hit things, they perch and spam spikes. Never do that! Due to lag, when a marine spots you and you start eating bullets, you will be dead before you can react. Always move, always dodge.
- Lerk has a poisonous bite! New players do not know this. You can bite just once, retreat, let the poison work, and when the marine starts running to the base to heal, bite him in the back!
- Think basically in two modes - chopper and fighter plane. In chopper mode, just dodge left-right-up-down continuously, while spraying with spikes. IMO this has limited use, and you are quite vulnerable to rifle fire, but it's good for relatively safe harassment. Fighter plane mode - seek TyrsisXL videos on youtube, he demonstrates it perfectly. Mark with spikes, let the marine shoot wild, emptying clip, and when he's reloading, come close and kill him with bites. Alternatively, bite once or twice, retreat, let the poison work, then return to finish the fleeing enemy.
- Practice vertical dodging. People are good at tracking targets dodging to sides, but if you fly against an enemy who fires at you, and suddenly start climbing steeply up, they fail to track you. Practice zig-zagging up and down, it's a powerful evasive maneuver that will often save you.
- Check your map often. You are the fastest unit, you should respond to RT harassment, slow down pushes against undefended assets until rest of the team arrives.
Fade
- Don't go to battle without blink. Ask commander to research it before evolving.
- This one is tough as hell, seek TyrsisXL videos and practice the Shadow-step-jump-jump maneuver. Keep in mind that you are not a tank, fade is very fragile, so you should be never rushing head-on. Let the enemy shoot and then close using s-step or blink.
- Very effective for closing to battle is blinking not towards the enemy, but into the air above them, then fall down on them and start slashing. Chances are you will confuse them.
- Keep eye on your energy, always retreat using Blink.
- Do not attack RTs and building, you are doing puncture damage which is best against players. Leave demolition work to skulks, gorges and onos.
- As with lerk, never attack standing still, always shadowstep to the side when attacking. Confuse the marines, let them empty clips, then close in for the kill.
- Be wary around shotguns. Sometimes you can pick their rythms, and shadowstep out of the way just before the marine shoots, but it's hard.
- Pick solitary marines, groups of 2 at most. Never charge head on against an organized, large team. Fade is a glass cannon.
Most importantly, play conservative, and don't lose those lifeforms. They are a great asset to your team, offsetting marine permanent weapon and armor upgrades. If you die, the investment is gone. let expendable skulks rush first into combat and close in only after marines are shooting other targets.
This sums up my experience with those two lifeforms. After some 180 hours of playing, I can be an average lerk, but I still suck terribly with fade. However, for successful alien play, competent fades are essential. This quote sums it all:
"When I play marines, we are often massacred by a single fade. Put when I pick fade when playing aliens, I die in seconds. I don't know how to feel about that, besides rage."
LERK
- Buy sooner rather than later, once shotguns are out, lerks have much harder time
- Some players are confused by the perpetual motion when flying, so to hit things, they perch and spam spikes. Never do that! Due to lag, when a marine spots you and you start eating bullets, you will be dead before you can react. Always move, always dodge.
- Lerk has a poisonous bite! New players do not know this. You can bite just once, retreat, let the poison work, and when the marine starts running to the base to heal, bite him in the back!
- Think basically in two modes - chopper and fighter plane. In chopper mode, just dodge left-right-up-down continuously, while spraying with spikes. IMO this has limited use, and you are quite vulnerable to rifle fire, but it's good for relatively safe harassment. Fighter plane mode - seek TyrsisXL videos on youtube, he demonstrates it perfectly. Mark with spikes, let the marine shoot wild, emptying clip, and when he's reloading, come close and kill him with bites. Alternatively, bite once or twice, retreat, let the poison work, then return to finish the fleeing enemy.
- Practice vertical dodging. People are good at tracking targets dodging to sides, but if you fly against an enemy who fires at you, and suddenly start climbing steeply up, they fail to track you. Practice zig-zagging up and down, it's a powerful evasive maneuver that will often save you.
- Check your map often. You are the fastest unit, you should respond to RT harassment, slow down pushes against undefended assets until rest of the team arrives.
Fade
- Don't go to battle without blink. Ask commander to research it before evolving.
- This one is tough as hell, seek TyrsisXL videos and practice the Shadow-step-jump-jump maneuver. Keep in mind that you are not a tank, fade is very fragile, so you should be never rushing head-on. Let the enemy shoot and then close using s-step or blink.
- Very effective for closing to battle is blinking not towards the enemy, but into the air above them, then fall down on them and start slashing. Chances are you will confuse them.
- Keep eye on your energy, always retreat using Blink.
- Do not attack RTs and building, you are doing puncture damage which is best against players. Leave demolition work to skulks, gorges and onos.
- As with lerk, never attack standing still, always shadowstep to the side when attacking. Confuse the marines, let them empty clips, then close in for the kill.
- Be wary around shotguns. Sometimes you can pick their rythms, and shadowstep out of the way just before the marine shoots, but it's hard.
- Pick solitary marines, groups of 2 at most. Never charge head on against an organized, large team. Fade is a glass cannon.
Most importantly, play conservative, and don't lose those lifeforms. They are a great asset to your team, offsetting marine permanent weapon and armor upgrades. If you die, the investment is gone. let expendable skulks rush first into combat and close in only after marines are shooting other targets.
This sums up my experience with those two lifeforms. After some 180 hours of playing, I can be an average lerk, but I still suck terribly with fade. However, for successful alien play, competent fades are essential. This quote sums it all:
"When I play marines, we are often massacred by a single fade. Put when I pick fade when playing aliens, I die in seconds. I don't know how to feel about that, besides rage."
Comments
Lerk:
1) Fade is fastest unit by far not the lerk.
2) Using the duck key drops you out of the sky quickly and allows you to stay on target while spiking (no need to look and fly downwards to go down). You can also use it to attack.
3) Flying across the ground can be extremely effective for both getting into and out of combat. Use it when appropriate.
4) Try to use a combination of spike and bite to be as effective as possible, learn when you just need to chip the guy a few times to kill him.
Fade:
1) Blink is absolutely not needed to be a good fade. Learn to play without it. Shadowstep is better for traveling around the map and for combat if you had to pick 1 or the other.
2) Retreat using shadowstep + double jump primarily not blink. (forwards, backwards, side to side and diagonal)
I suggest any one who is having big problems with fade or are new to fading like the OP is to use only shadowstep for a while (with double jump obviously) for both travel and combat. Blink is often a crutch used by new players and its by far the less powerful tool between SS and blink.
What Currently said. Blink is basically your 'Oh-Shit' button for movement correction. If you made a bad shadow-step, use blink to correct your trajectory path. If you rely too heavily on blink for combat and/or to escape, you will most likely run out of energy and die.
Edited cuz: I haz gud typing sklz
- Shadowstep-double jump is by far the best way to move with the Fade. It's tricky to master, particularly the air strafing aspect. Check out Bitey and Tyrsis's YouTube videos, they both do a great job of explaining Fade movement.
- Retreat whenever you are in danger. If you have less than 150 health, retreat. If you have no armor, retreat. If you see a group of 3-4 marines with shotguns, retreat. Being a good Fade is less about getting kills than it is about simply staying alive. Let the kills come as they will and put most of your focus into simply staying alive. When I'm playing Fade, I usually don't know exactly how many kills I have, but I could tell you easily how many deaths I have (hopefully 0!)
- Even if you're fighting one marine with an LMG, try to be evasive and shadowstep into him whenever you land hits. Sure, you could probably solo him by standing still and swiping, but you never know when another marine will come around the corner. You want to keep your health as high as you can.
- Don't stick around in a fight if you think you're in danger. It's tempting to think "I just need one more swipe, I can kill this guy before he kills me," but remember that if the comm wants that guy alive, that guy will stay alive. Fades can't get nanoshields and medpacks, marines can. If you need to retreat, retreat, even if it means leaving behind a guy with low health.
- Don't hold down the button when you blink. That drains your energy extremely quickly, and you need to make sure your energy is high enough that you can escape. Never blink into combat, and if you need to escape try just tapping the blink button or holding it down for a brief period of time. That will still give you a big momentum boost and it will cost less energy.
- Always have a retreat plan in mind before entering an engagement. Manage your energy so you will have enough to escape if you need to, and always make sure that there is an escape route nearby.
As for Lerk, well, I wouldn't touch that lifeform with a 10ft pole, so hopefully there are others who can give advice for it
1. Your odds of winning the fight are higher, thus your survival chance is higher and you will be lerk/fade longer. More practice time!
2. You see your role in a multi-alien/marine fight. With fade's high mobility, you should be able to get to the backs of the marines currently shooting (which you should be doing anyway) but you'll see just how much more effective it is with other targets in the mix. With lerk, you'll see how much quicker you can win a fight with good spiking and you can concentrate on aiming more since there are skulks biting at marines as well, or you can choose to bite in times where marines are reloading or distracted. Same general rules apply though - don't stop moving. Really helps you develop situational awareness and lets you exploit it as much as possible.
3. If you're playing with skulks that know their role, they'll willingly sacrifice themselves to save your arse should you make a mistake and need to retreat. Can't beat that kind of insurance unless you've got an egg waiting in base.
4. If you watch competitive games, you'll see that solo lerks/fades aren't really that powerful. Start to pair them and what you can accomplish is amazing. The strength of having many advanced lifeforms goes up exponentially.
5. You might even learn something by watching another lerk/fade fight.
Additionally check out as many tip videos as possible on youtube.
Finally, just keep practicing and you will eventually start racking up the kills.
But you're not going to learn how to fade in a combat server. It's so much about situational awareness that putting yourself in the unrealistic combat scenario is just going to slow you down. If you unbind your swipe key, you could still have a seriously huge effect on a public game just by being careful with your movement in the right room at the right time.
BUT, now it's balance test fade and much the same rules apply. But dying is easier
When an Onos pushes a location, go in with him. The Marines will generally ALL be focusing on the Onos, who will in turn be focusing on a Phase Gate / Observatory / Power Node, hopefully. Shadow-step/fly around the room, taking out Marines who come in, whilst they're all focusing their attention on the Onos. Not only does it help you learn the movement, but you can do it in relative "peace" as hardly anyone will be shooting at you.
A Lerk that sees a marine with a shotgun should NEVER die. Literally. Just adapt.
In pubs you can get away with stupid shit as lerk. It's relatively easy to capitalize on mistakes the marine and marine comm will make, hell many times you can even capitalize on mistakes you assume they are about to make which is even funnier. A shotgun marine will own a lerk inside and out given med support and good positioning. The same as a lerk will own a shotgun marine given the right situation.
It goes both ways. In the end one dies due to the others positioning mistakes (mostly)...