Whips
Know pain
Join Date: 2012-09-04 Member: 157674Members
Join Date: 2012-09-04 Member: 157674Members
So whips have fallen by the wayside just like drifters? Anyone remember when whips would knock back a gl round or 2 to the person that was lobbing them into the hive? This way marines couldn’t just side outside a hive and just keep on firing gls in, wasn’t that the reason behind the arc/siege cannon?
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No, not really. They aren't fallen by the way side. They're still very prevalent in public games.
Whips are still really strong. But for different reasons. They don't counter the only AoE anti-structure weapon (that marines can carry) now.. which was really terrible for gameplay. Well, whips still are really terrible for gameplay but that's beside the point.
If Marines are given the positioning to sit outside your Hive and aren't forced off (by Fades/Lerks etc which are very effective at killing defenseless GL players) then they deserve to be firing grenades into your hive.
Deal with it.
And yeah, I remember when whips knocked back grenades. It made GLs into garbage weapons hardly even worth buying.
with that and making it an upgrade chamber... boggles my mind.
Would be cool if you could toggle that attack on or off.
Yes at this point whips were OP but that shouldn’t have meant to completely get rid of something that it was intended to do in the first place.
Now I don’t understand why upgrades were placed on the whip when the sole purpose of the whip is to attack and defend. It’s like telling the marines they need to have an arc to get weapons 3 and armor 3 but if they lose that arc, they go back to weapons 2 and armor 2.
I'm not sure I liked the implementation before it was removed where 1 whip could hit an infinite amount of grenades back at the precise point where they were fired from with perfect accuracy, i.e. basically 15 res that made an infinite amount of GLs perfectly and completely useless.
I would love an implementation where there's a toggle on the specific whip that you can turn on where the whip goes in panic mode and whips incoming grenades in random directions - even towards friendly structures (and smacks skulks on the ass as they run by, giving them a slight speed boost). Maybe make it off by default or something.
Edit: Should be really easy to implement, since the critical code is already there, and it's a decent balance between ridiculous OPness, and no defense against GLs at all (except killing the GLer).
But really... lets not give alien khamms any more reason to drop more whips than they already do.
From what I remember, the grenade whack was meant to reduce the power of the GL attachment to both destroy hives and kill lifeforms (since having a GL attached to the Rifle was OP as hell, despite how fun it was)
That being said, the grenade whack made the whip an incredibly useful defense tool (for when GLs were even used) and I would also like to see the whack make a return, but only return 1/4 grenades (so 4 would cancel 1 GL) and also have the GL buffed up a bit on structure damage to make it more worth using.
Basically, Whip vs. Grenade combat was awsome and I would love to see it back
Also, +1 for Evo Chamber, whips as upgrade towers is just silly. (hell, just make the evo chamber life the old shells, 1 Evo Chamber for each lifeform)
I like the 'panic mode' thing but I think really, if anything, Whip Bomb should be toggle-able as it often fucks up ambushes.
What I think would be an acceptable implementation of the nade-whip, would be whips knocking grenades out of the air; rather than knocking them TO a specific/random place, the nades should fall to the ground near the whip before exploding. This would mean a) positioning of whips would be important to save your structures from grenadiers, and b) a whip will eventually die after tanking so many nades for your other structures, making them not invincible killing machines.
yeah, give them a grab mechanic, and they swallow it kinda, so decreased aoe on the splash, should be relatively easy to implement.
Whips stopper whacking grenades when dem nades went predicted clientside.
This is a bit off topic, but AoE reduction would be a neat drifter ability for shade hive. And a nice re-imagining of Ink..
This might just be my perspective coming from someone who has played a fair amount of TF2, but I've always thought whips were very well designed compared to the other kinds of area denial/defensive structures present in most FPS games.
They almost never kill marines unless they're already weak. They can use bombard, but that does very limited damage, even to armor.
A whip basically serves two purposes: it provides soft area denial, and it slows down marine pushes by forcing them to spend time killing the whip.
But compared with nearly every other kind of passive defensive structures in FPS games, whips are one of the most benign to enemy players. They are much less unfair than mines or sentry guns, though their low cost means they are much more prevalent than sentries.
What makes them so OP is a couple of things.
1. The alien commander putting them in areas that the marines have to advance through and making them hard to shoot directly at. It takes more than a few clips of a rifle to kill a whip, that usually has a crag in range, and shotties have to move into attack range of the whip to make them worth the shot.
2. They are cheap, only 10 res. The alien economy doesn't need continuous investment in their tech tree, like the marines. What the aliens need are lifeforms.
3. Now that you've blocked doorways and whips are cheap to replace you now created a situation that the marines are fighting the whips and the lifeforms.
I agree with those points. But alien upgrades are expensive. At least in pub games, whips appear when there is no new tech point free for the aliens and all upgrades they got are bought. At this point, aliens can use their res to reinforce their positions. This means that marines are playing passive. When the aliens already got all upgrades from their 2 tech points, it should be more than time for the marines to get a few ARCs going. Either way, with a bit of teamplay, aliens will crush every marine base when enough onos appear. So the marines need to hurry anyway. I like the aspect that a whip spamming com forces the marines to use arcs and GLs.
On the other points: GLs are fine now. And an increase of the whip cost to 15res wouldn't be any problem (when skulk upgrades get 5 res cheaper).