Thoughts regarding use of pulse grenades (or lack of)
Yojimbo
England Join Date: 2009-03-19 Member: 66806Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Shadow
England Join Date: 2009-03-19 Member: 66806Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Shadow
Good afternoon ladies and gentle gorges,
Today I would like to discuss the use or lack of use of pulse grenades!
In the whole 1600 hours of NS2 playtime, I feel they haven't been to their full potential! One primary concern of mine is that the damage that is inflicted upon yourself is enough to put anyone off! The effective use of these electro puppies are highly effective in deterring bilebomb rushes, insta damage against a group of skulks or slowing an onoses gore down, you can even zap a fades ability to blink away!
http://wiki.unknownworlds.com/ns2/Hand_Grenades
I never understood how a electromagnetic pulse device manages to damage a marine so much and yet still able to use his credit card to purchase a round at The Onos Bar?
What are your thoughts? Discuss!
Today I would like to discuss the use or lack of use of pulse grenades!
In the whole 1600 hours of NS2 playtime, I feel they haven't been to their full potential! One primary concern of mine is that the damage that is inflicted upon yourself is enough to put anyone off! The effective use of these electro puppies are highly effective in deterring bilebomb rushes, insta damage against a group of skulks or slowing an onoses gore down, you can even zap a fades ability to blink away!
http://wiki.unknownworlds.com/ns2/Hand_Grenades
I never understood how a electromagnetic pulse device manages to damage a marine so much and yet still able to use his credit card to purchase a round at The Onos Bar?
What are your thoughts? Discuss!
Comments
Would you rather marines spawned with them instead?
Prime and throw speed needs increasing.
The grenade itself is quite strong.
It's simple... They run a tab
Yes they have their uses, but many of these uses are situational. Meaning more times then not, you die with nades on you. (or you spam them away uselessly.)
Sometimes like mines can be placed strategic and is less a waste of res.
I am still for spawning with a grenade, but I can see the worry of people 'spamming' the map with them.
Perhaps a simpler solution would be that you do not drop the nade. But you keep it through respawns UNTIL its been used.
2 skulk frags for 3 pres? Better to just use the lmg - it's free.
So unless you are in a situation where you can make use of the splash damage, it feels like a waste. And as @DC_Darkling puts it:
Having nades be droppables, is a start I guess. That way you can be more selective about when to spend your nades. But why would I spend pres in a pub, so some other dirtbag can pick up and waste my nades?
This works with other gear as that gear is actually more useful than in rare situations.
It currently isn't very effective against Lerks and Fades, because of their attack patterns emphasize more on evasiveness rather than raw damage; Pulse barely scratches the Onos, and primary weapons do a better job at deterring/killing Onii.
Against ankle biting Skulks, marines tend to hurt themselves more with their Pulse Grenades, thanks to the large auto-detonation radius which ironically protects aliens from receiving full damage from the grenade, while the grenade user often takes full self-damage. I would suggest significantly reducing, or removing the damage Pulse Grenade deals to its owner.
Speeding up hand grenade arming animations would improve their usability, and definitely see them get used more often.
It screws with a fade's rhythm more than anything. It's not that it directly weakens them all that much it's just that most fades can't cope with it because they just don't know how. Safer to run and wait it out.
Of course if they were used more often, they probably wouldn't be as effective.
I'm all for spawning with a single standard frag grenade once researched. (a single grenade per marine, per life wont cause serious spam; anyone who claims a marine will suicide to keep spamming isn't considering spawn and travel times)
Either dropping grenades on death, or spawing back in with them will encourage their purchase more. Currently, the risk of wasting the res on them is much higher than the use the average person will get out of them (only ever had 1 great play with grenades)
For pulse nades specifically, I think they are fine as is personally, slowing down attack speed is amazingly useful.
I think there are a few simple changes that can be made to make grenades more useful.
If anything was to be taken away from this thread it would be this, self damage from a "pulse" grenade is alittle too much imho!
This is not my experience with it. I see people hitting every swipe regardless. Sure you die slower, but I find that I don't even get half-way through my lmg clip before I'm dead, whereas if I just use my lmg without a grenade, I can deal enough damage to actually push the fade away the majority of the time.
Grenades aren't very good for soloing in the first place...especially LMG v fade. However, they are fantastic in a group push where you have harassment from aliens.
Sometimes you get it right, too, and have the right nade for the right time, but the above combined with the other factors covered here like cost and having them disappear on death is one more nail in the coffin of dissuading spending res on nades, or a particular nade type (as Jimbo noted, pulses seem rare on pubs).
One possible solution, under the 'Coz nanites' banner: what if you bought a 'Grenade Nanite Pack' at the armory, and the type of grenade it becomes is chosen upon use -- you 'prime' it to be an explosive, gas, or pulse grenade as you pull it out, and once primed stays that way. This gives you flexibility to the situation and makes spending the p-res on a pack more appealing.
Do we want something so cheap to scale into late game?
Why do Rifle, Pistol, and Skulks scale at all then?
I believe in the philosophy that everything should be useful at any stage of the game, to keep the decisions in the game interesting. This game needs more varied strategies and counter-play, and fewer irrecoverable resource snowballing (especially in pub games). The only tools that shouldn't have scaling are those that would be overpowered.
i like martigen's idea, flexibility of usage would see it get a lot more play from me at least.
They shouldn't kill a full HP skulk biting an RT, just enough to do some damage to flush them out. Grenades were fun to use in NS1, and there was a little mini-game with flushing skulks out from behind RTs and vents. You would hear the 'pin' drop as skulk and you could choose to escape or rush the marine while he didn't have his gun up.
Other than that, +1
I like this idea too. Mostly, actually. At the moment clusters are great for doing decent AOE damage, and it's fair this costs p-res. It's also logical to reduce its damage if it's going to be a freebie every spawn, but then now we lose the main explosive damage dealer for marines that isn't a GL.
At the risk of further complicating the game, we could keep the current system and grenades as they are and add one more that you get at spawn -- a flash grenade. You only get 1 per spawn, it does no damage but will blind aliens briefly. If you're a skulk biting a node and you get blinded, you're going to try and high tail it out of there asap because you're at disadvantage now as the marine approaches. One problem with this though is the amount of flash spam since everyone is going to spawn with it... but there it is.
Unless, instead of flash, it was a grenade that created a sonic wave that 'pushes' nearby lifeforms. Like an explosive force without the damage. Closer to the source, the more you're blown back. And the larger the lifeform, the less effect it has, until at Onos it does nothing. This would make it good vs skulks and gorges, and not as useful late game, which is precisely what you want, as marines would need to invest p-res for more powerful grenades rather than relying on a freebie.
Only problem with this that it breaks consistency of where a marine manages his weapons. If we had other elements to add to such an interface, it'd make more sense.
MY only concern with an implementation like this is the increase in spam.. each of those have spammy effects and lord just knows if you have 1 automatically on spawn they will be used to siege a room in a spammy way.
it takes more than one grenade launcher before things really start feeling spammy.
on a team of 12 marines, if they all threw their one free grenade in a room at one time, there would be a chain of explosions and then...no more until a marine dies, respawns, and gets back to the area. In this time, a single GL can get AT LEAST 12 grenades out.
Granted, if these hand grenades caused the same ammount of structure damage as a GL nade, marines could almost instagib anything with a coordinated volley. Easily solved by having the free hand nades not do as much dmg as nades that cost res
a single free hand grenade cannot cause spam on the scale implied to be a problem.
People will get rid of their grenades without second thought.