Explosives
blebloblap
Join Date: 2014-09-15 Member: 198544Members
Join Date: 2014-09-15 Member: 198544Members
Can we tone it down on the explosives?
Hatching into an artillery barrage or seeing your three hydras of 9 res get wasted by two cluster grenades is getting super annoying.
Can't play marine? Just start lobbing everything that does area damage and what the skulks getting one shot everywhere.
Or at least tone down the player damage of explosives. What's the GL supposed to be, a homing shotgun or an anti-building weapon?
Hatching into an artillery barrage or seeing your three hydras of 9 res get wasted by two cluster grenades is getting super annoying.
Can't play marine? Just start lobbing everything that does area damage and what the skulks getting one shot everywhere.
Or at least tone down the player damage of explosives. What's the GL supposed to be, a homing shotgun or an anti-building weapon?
Comments
What I find most annoying is the lack of skill required to use these weapons with quite a high degree of effectiveness. Reducing player damage from GLs would be most welcome.
I have on occasion taken GLs from dead teammates and played around with them. I always feel guilty for killing so many skulks and lifeforms with them, it really doesn't require much effort to rack up loads of kills, especially if you have a jetpack, too.
Grenades always had this effect in most games, explosions in general... Artillery spam BF series anyone :P
And when it randomly bounces off the wall and hits you - not remotely intentional by the spamming rookie, what then?
Do they still deserve the kill?
I attest that they do not. This so called anti structure weapon one hit kills players far too often, mostly by accident.
It's frustrating and is a poor mechanic imo.
TF2 has a bounce of wall -> damage reduction thingy on that demoman cannonball launcher... But yeah that would be filed under hidden modifiers once more...
so GL = Onos?
Sounds to me that there are circumstances that lead to that scenario.
What are you trying to say?
Neither have I, but I imagine they would rather drop dead than bounce of like a bouncing ball. And even if Reality Is Unrealistic in this case, I'm willing to put my Willing Suspension Of Disbelief into it, last but not least for an enjoyable gameplay experience.
Add a small nerf on splash damage vs. player armor and bam, launchers fixed.
Can I get a medal?
(Btw, the new emoticons suck. I shouldn't get a freaking dropdown menu just because I try to type ":D". Seriously.)
edit: Do NOT try the above at home. I will NOT pay for holes in your walls! Thank you.
They require support yes but any marine position or push is going to have large amounts of support whether having more GLs, exos, shotguns, flames. GLs for a weapon that requires little precision and lots of spammyness, they sure have little downsides and lots of positives so they need to be toned down in 1 area at least. The problem is player damage being way too high on impact grenades. All its little positives as mentioned could be kept but maybe lowering player damage down 25% or so might help. It avoids the problem of skulks being 1 shot leaving them at very low on hp which promotes support from teammates and being careful with them, takes 1 more nade to kill a fade and doesn't 2 shot a lerk with upgrades included.
I know its torturous at the thought but go check out Wooza's server. It's an insane explosivefest, Gorge spam Vs Mine/Nades spam, that's pretty much all that happens. Yeah its not indicative of balance but its bloody hilarious, no comm even researches shotguns or gets early lab, straight to mines/PG and AA. Even though 16-24 player isn't as bad as that, it can be pretty bad at times.
Hand grenades are fine. To be effective, you need to commit to them to take down a clog position or a base and they at least don't 1 shot you unless skulks dont have biomass or cara.
For a game that emphasizes a lot on player skill, GLs are the complete enigma here.
Umm not sure. A weapon that can be dropped and picked up and can one-hit kill life forms and devestating structure = a life form that costs a ton of res, basically endgame, has to get within melee range to attack, can't one hit kill unless a0 (I believe), and needs to be able to retreat without dying, and if (s)he dies they have to wait for all that res.
Could be wrong on my interpretation.
BF3 metro.
Oh lawd.
Onos is a big target which the marines try to take down like it's a huge bull (which in some ways it is).
GL is just plain annoying in many scenarios.
Umbra currently struggles against a single Flamethrower, which has a somewhat long reach, effectively shutting down aliens from using Umbera in melee combat. Allowing Umbra to counter area damage could be the tool aliens have been sorely missing.
"No aim buy a gl" ...
Yea, grenade launcher physics has been bothering me since launch. It shouldn't be able to bounce off the wall with such momentum, and looking at how it explodes when it hits lifeforms/buildings, shouldn't that also make it explode when it hits a wall??
What if it would just explode when it impacts anything, will be more dangerous to use since you can't just shoot from around the corner or some weird angle like shooting the hive in Atrium from the entrance between Atrium and Reactor Core, this would also reduce the amount of ******** kills by a grenade that bounces at a messed up angle and then kills someone out of 'nowhere'.
Another way to fix that would be to significantly reduce the momentum the grenade has after hitting the wall.
I checked with some people and from their opinions it seems either reducing the rate of fire or player damage could work to help balance it a little bit. Maybe bring back the throwing back of Grenades from Whips(Only non bombard whips)?
@MaLuS :"If the Whips could throw back 1 grenade per second per whip and if the grenade launcher had a ROF of 1 per 0.5 seconds(Its 0.4s right now) then it would take 3 whips(because of delays in animation or other things) to cover the defence of 1 grenade launcher so thats a 39Tres investment for 1 grenade launcher defence i think thats fine because marines can still overpower that with a good push." You could probably do it with 2 whips but it wouldn't guarantee that all grenades get thrown back
But yeah, changing the physics of the grenades or the damage/ROF and re-adding the whip grenade reflecting(again, only for non-bombard whips) would fix some problems that grenade launchers have right now.
GLs are actually very much underutilized. Not that I think it's such a bad thing, cause they're mostly cheap no-skill spam weapons to begin with, but if you bring back the batting whips you might as well take GLs out of the game, because the only good reason to use them is to deal with tons of pve structure spam when you don't have arcs. And when I do, I like to at least have the chance to scare off a fade with a "lucky" hit, even though most good fades will rip me apart anyway.
Maybe whips could also react to normal grenades but it would just make them explode when the whip hits them. That would activate the 'cooldown' on the whip so if properly timed you can get normal grenades in there to take care of the whips. And 'most' whips get evolved to bombard whips anyways to do armor damage and those would not be able to throw them back.
With all the amazing and complex mods that have been made for NS2, I'm sure one of our gifted modders and cook this up within an hour and if it proves favourable & highly successful, something CDT could consider officially implementing.
It just makes common sense.
Problem solved.
If anything, a GLer is at least somewhat killable if you can manage to spawn or understand he has a GL and make the necessarily manoeuvres to hit him during a reload or sacrifice a skulk so he blows himself up or use a bonewall to do the same, not so much with an Onos, one on one.
If players don't want to get insta-gibbed by a GL, a more reasonable suggestion would be to have the GL not have the impact detonation on players/eggs instead of a all around damage nerf, and the explosion falloff is pretty short.
as @neoken pointed out, they are under used, and are kind of needed for a viable JP GL rush on a hive (50 pres btw), in which case it's highly risky, almost alreays results in a counter base rush, lost jetpacks, failed attempt on hive and a big commitment of pres. I have not experienced nearly enough issues with the GL on either side to warrant any change.
Put it this way. 2 fades against 2-3 marines in a base and if all 3 had GLs then it would be very unlikely for the fades to die unless they stand still. Change that to 3-4 fades against 4-6 marines in a base maybe 4 have GLs/2 rifles, it becomes a lot more dangerous to enter that room and stay in it for fear of being volley spammed and instantly killed. What is my point? You can die easily in this situation not because the marines have good aim but because they CAN purchase a GL in that situation with little skill, be relatively safe from fades and still be extremely powerful and unpredictable.
@It'sSuperEffective! GL/JP is 35pres but whatever, that's not my main point. Don't know why you mentioned base rushing a hive, that's not the problem at all, in fact, thats a plus that the GL should retain, it's risky absolutely but the pay off is big which I would consider a well-earned investment. The problem is if 1-2 players with GLs manage to hit just 2 nades on your lerk you're dead, 2 nades each, your fade is dead. It's completely out of the blue with little you can do to avoid it other than playing passively.
The 5 increase in Pres doesn't fix the problem of the GL itself which is random burst damage requiring little skill, it only solves the late game investment. It's a nice change but its not enough or the correct one.
I don't die to them often unless its some sort of base siege but when I do die, it's unbelievably infuriating because you lost your lifeform not because the player outplayed you or aimed well as with a shotgun, he just spammed 4 nades in a general direction and managed to hit you.
TL;DR - It's not something that is breaking the game, it's just an inconvenience of playing higher player count servers. A player damage change that doesn't affect competitive much but helps improve the public scene.
While you can take a nade midair, most damage is done from collateral damage due to explosions. Its a projectile somewhat bound by gravity.. aka.. if you did not get hit in the face that explosion will be below you.
And we non rookies ARE staying off the floor & attacking/flanking from behind.. right.. right?
It is not easy, and frankly smothered in truckloads of luck. 90% of the time, a fade of equal skill would decimate me with a JP GL, and that's understood IMO.
If you want to talk about 2 GL's hitting you, then that's 2 players, unfortunate, but you cannot make 1 v 2 = fair. But then you might as well have 8 players with GL and 8 gorges rushing a base. Increasing the number to prove a point is fruitless.