Are there any effective counters against fades?
Matthew94
Join Date: 2011-08-06 Member: 114690Members
Join Date: 2011-08-06 Member: 114690Members
Comments
Ie. Best way is to find teammate/s and make sure you are always on covering range and that your moving order is correct! (Flamers should not go first!)
I'm not too concerned balance wise until exos and jetpakcs are in, but it does make the game a little annoying at the monent I grant you.
Basically, set him alight and jump around/dodge attacks. Eventually he'll run out of energy and he's useless.
That beeing said, one flamethrower marine + shotguns can take him down very easily. When a fade is on fire, he won't have the energy to attack or blink, and will have to run aways. A fade does not have tons of hitpoints and is quite slow when running. So you have a reasonable chance to bring him down.
Yes, the fade is a little overpowered right now, but there are counters, and its possible to kill him with 2-3 marines (with 1 FT)
Ok I buy a GL, so if a Skulk kills me the skulks must get nerfed hard as my GL costs so much more than the Skulk.
You spend resources to invest in a form that has usefull abilities to help you kill ( or support ), it shouldnt mean you are automatically unbeatable by the enemy unless they have more expensive items.
A Fade should be deadly, but still killable even by LMG if the Fade is not being used properly... ie tanking LMG fire instead of using its Blink to get into better positioning.
When my teammates are down and I am trying to return to base alone, shall I just throw my LMG away and fetch a coffee if I see a Fade ?
As a Skulk I can still believe I can take on any Marine irrespective of what they are carrying, it doesnt mean I actually so take them on and win ... most of the time I get beaten hard but I still think I can fight.
As a LMG Marine, there is a sinking feeling of impeding doom if I see a Fade, a feeling of [bleeep] thats it I am finished, no chance. Its that which in my opinion makes it less fun to play as a Marine.
Somehow NS 1 had a balance where a LMG could beat a Fade, you never felt completely out of the fight due to having only a LMG... least I didnt feel like that... I opened fire on that Fade, and often scared the bugger off or on occasion it died.
I'm actually inclined to agree, I think the game would be much better iff expensive stuff wasn't scaled quite so linearly in effectiveness.
Value is relative, if the most expensive thing in the game only gives you a slight advantage, it's still worth paying for because it's the biggest advantage you can get.
All you have to do is make sure that mid-priced things are mid-range effective compared to high-priced things, but the difference in <i>absolute</i> effectiveness does not have to be signficiant.
Right now getting a fade is something like 5 times better than being a skulk, to pull a value out of my arse, but the point is that it's a huge improvement. It should be that getting a fade is maybe 1.5 times more effective, same goes for marine guns and suchlike, all you need to do is make sure the same amount of res gives you the same amount of improvement, so if a fade is 1.5 times better than a skulk, and costs 50 res, an onos should be twice as good as a skulk and cost 100 res, a shotgun should be 1.2 times as good as a skulk because it costs 20 res, and so on. The numbers are close enough together that most of your success is determined by how you play and not what stuff you bought, but buying stuff is still desirable to be generally better, but mostly because it allows you to change your style of play.
This was not possible with NS1 because it used one res type for everything, but in NS2 you have personal res which is only used to buy personal upgrades, so you don't have to balance the cost of guns and gear against say, buildings, so make upgrades very minor improvements while buildings are much more useful.
Good shot placement also plays a huge role in combating one. Someone who can't shoot has no chance. Remember, it's always best to stick in groups.
The best counter to the fade is for the marines to either prevent or quickly take down the aliens 2nd hive.
That's <i>quite</i> the understatement :P
The best counter to the fade is for the marines to either prevent or quickly take down the aliens 2nd hive.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I agree. The counters mentioned don't work against good fades (that just blinks in, attacks and blinks out). When on fire they got enough energy to get away. The most effective counter I know is to have at least three shotguns and that each of them get a perfect shot during the very short window when the fade is vulnerable.
I got told off for being negative last time I tried to explain how annoying it is.
Fortunately I have the british national special ability of understatement to fall back on.
Fades should be combatable by being good at the game, it should be harder than combating a skulk, but doable.
Fades should be combatable by being good at the game, it should be harder than combating a skulk, but doable.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well in a 1v1 situation a marine should not be able to beat a Fade. Why? Because thats how Natural selection works. Marines are better in squads ;).
Why it doesnt work yet is because they did not add any squad boni yet and thx to lag and no initial blinking cost fades can blink around nonstop.
Think of the Onos in Ns1. It could SWALLOW a marine. yes run up, press a button marine is in your belly, wait a minute, marine is dead, swallow next.
They should be stronger, but on the other hand marines should be way stronger in squads. I guess it will just take some time until they fix the blink-cost and stuff like fade "fading" to invisible (as stated the engine does not yet support transpearcancy thats why it goes instantly invisible).
So just be patient about those things ;)
Halfway the fight, the second marine runs off the the most likely retreat point of the fade, (preferably at a corner where he eneds to exit blink) and just shoots the final shell in it. Your mate is probably dead, but so is the fade. And the dead marine can even come back to pick up his weapon!
Seems to be much less of the Fade being overpowered, much more of people trying to play the game like it was some arena shooter, bouncing around like crack-monkeys.
The 'strength in numbers' bit will get more and more pronounced once the server optimizations really get going, and larger games become playable. With NS1, small games favored Kharaa. The smaller, the more heavily. 12 per team tended to be about the tipping point as I recall, and 16 per team went <b>incredibly</b> Marine-heavy. As soon as you have 2-3 fireteams of 3-4, plus a comm and a base-defender/ninja, things will most likely settle down again. It's just the way of non-symmetric gameplay.
As always regarding balance complaints at this stage; beta beta beta, me-bad.
That isn't sustainable though, because if they bring 3 fades how many marines do you need to kill them?
<!--quoteo(post=1868049:date=Aug 10 2011, 10:28 AM:name=Talesin)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Talesin @ Aug 10 2011, 10:28 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1868049"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->The 'strength in numbers' bit will get more and more pronounced once the server optimizations really get going, and larger games become playable. With NS1, small games favored Kharaa. The smaller, the more heavily. 12 per team tended to be about the tipping point as I recall, and 16 per team went <b>incredibly</b> Marine-heavy.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
And you don't think that needs fixing for NS2?
It should be more like: 1 fade vs 1 marine, fade wins
3 fades vs. 3 marines, at least 2 fades die. more res lost for aliens. The more aliens there are, the easier it is to hit them
especially as soon as they add real heavy weapons.
but with all that: balancing is far from final.
3 fades vs. 3 marines, at least 2 fades die. more res lost for aliens. The more aliens there are, the easier it is to hit them
especially as soon as they add real heavy weapons.
but with all that: balancing is far from final.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The problem with that approach is that if you get more than a certain number of marines they become unstoppable, while at lower numbers they are at a massive disadvantage.
Unless everyone only plays on the same size map with the same size teams all the time, you're going to encounter a lot of problems.
Also, if half the team are fades, that means they have one or two skulks at the most, meaning they can't win because it takes a fade about 5 million years to kill buildings.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Tuning Fade to harass and assassinate more, while being less of a tank.
Bumped his acceleration while ethereal. Dropped health from 300 to 200. Decreased continuous blink energy cost and added an initial cost so he blinks a bit more intentionally. Altered damage and puncture damage type to make him very effective vs. marines and less against structures. Decreased swipe energy cost and increased swipe ROF to make sure he's never waiting around.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
To re-iterate my issue with the current Fade.
I dont mind if he blinks right to me, or to the side of me and swipes me to death while I am trying to run off... thats fine.
What irritates me no end is a Fade that screws up his blink, ends up far too short of swipe range on me and merely walks STRAIGHT at me while I empty a LMG clip into it at point blank basically, cant miss... yet the Fade gets the kill on me and still walks about the place swiping random Marines before wandering off.
I say if a Fade is so unskilled as to allow so many hits on him, even with a mere LMG, he should die... hes got the tools to close the range and get out ( they do need tweaking though, but fix the blink... not make the thing a tank ).
The fades right now are tough, I agree. Slightly nerfin them should fix this issue, atm just be patient.
Or...they could just camp the IPs with all the fades and slowly take them down.
The game is really unbalanced at the moment. To the point where I can't play it any more without getting frustrated.
I don't get the whole "a fade should be able to kill X amount of marines" thing. Even if he's a really bad player? Even if the marine is the best FPS player ever? IMO, you should ALWAYS feel like there was something you could have done to kill the opponent, even when the odds are stacked against you. That's good game design. A player should never feel limited by the game, only by his own ability. If you can manage to pull off some sick reaction shots even when the other player has an advantage then you deserve to kill him.
If it was the case that fades just auto killed 3 marines, then the entire alien team could just go fade and there'd be nothing the marines could do about it.
It's not fun to play against a super alien and feeling like you have no chance (regardless of the players skill level). It's okay allowing fades to kill many marines, but it should take skill, just as a good player with the shotgun can kill many skulks (but that doesn't mean everyone can). Right now it's like easy mode when you go fade and killing marines is not a challenge at all.
Sentry guns are the other big balance problem. I would love to see them limited to 1 per RT to greatly restrict them.
EDIT: fades are allergic to bacon
I had so many games where marines had good mapcontrol, are fully upgraded and the teamwork was nice also.
In that moment a fade appear, rines start dying like flies. In that moment the 2nd fade go in, game over.
A half skilled fade can take down easily 4 marines with shottys and flamers. Sure, u can say: this marines were unskilled. But i saw this with skilled players.
There seems to be a bug in the blink-code also. You didnt see the first hit of an blinking fade. 1st hit comes out of the blink, 2nd hit:dead.
There two things for Fadebalance i think: Get rid of the blinkspam (Some sort of cooldown), Fades must leave the blink to hit a rine and 2 hits to kill a rine is too easy for fade.
If a fade gets set on fire and only uses the regular attack, he'll only be able to kill one guy at most before running out of energy. If he uses the special attack and is good at it, bring a grenade launcher instead of a shotgun and bomb the fade while he's trying to one-hit the flamethrower. If the fade kills the other guy, the flamethrower should then get on the attack and burn the fade to death or pistol him if he starts running away.
If there's only one flamethrower and a rifleman, somebody's going to die, and if it's the flamethrower, have the rifleman pick up the weapon when the fade retreats.
There is no such thing as a skilled flamethrower. Just burn stuff and run; if you try to be a hero, you'll be out 30 res.