Just logged in to comment on the terribleness of that chart.
The proper, unbiased chart starts at 0% and ends at 100% on the vertical axis.
To put 3.5% in perspective, if you went shift hive 30 times, you would win on average 16 times, and lose 15 times. If you went shade hive 30 times, you would win on average 15 times, and lose 15 times.
That is assuming chamber choice matters at all... which 90+% of pub games are so stacked that aliens would either win or lose (depending on which way the stack is) no matter what chamber is researched first, or any at all...
Anyway, I'm tired so if I did the math wrong or whatever, you're welcome to be angry. However, the chart just pissed me off. That is all, good night.
Edit: I guess the thread is about something entirely different kind of. I've always thought camo+silence is OP. It only fails because people on pubs are stupid. You should absolutely choke marines early game with it, and hopefully ensure a win. On the other hand, I think silence only may be kind of hard on pubs, so when this is implemented even though it's not that much worse, shade hive will be even more raged-against than it is now (I'm always amazed when people complain when I go shade, I think it's currently quite nicely op as I mentioned before). Sadly the perception right now is that it's "less useful" and after this proposed change the perception will change to "eject immediately if it's researched as hive 1 or 2 and kick/ban from server."
I don't like percentage triggered abilities. I might aswell play a dice game.
The goal would be to set the numbers up so that it helps rookies but is of questionable value to veterans (either because it just never would actually trigger or because the research cost is too high).
What is of no value for veterans is / should also be of no value for rookies (noob trap or teaching bad behaviour).
Redemption could teleport you back if you survive on low hp for a significant time, indicating somehow for everyone around you (and yourself) that you're about to vanish.
So Marines get a chance to double their effort and poor healer Gorges can act before their meatshield Onos disappears.
I don't know about redemption as a passive ability, but I wouldn't add it as a crag upgrade. In the attempt to increase survivability, you would actually decrease it, since you'd miss out on carapace or regen.
Redemption could also work as shift upgrade, especially because of the similariy with the shifts echo. However, I don't know if its fun as marine, when you're about to kill a life form and it then suddenly disappears. The implementation really needs to be thought through. As fas I remember redemption in ns1 was pretty much useless.
Silence on Shift would actually be pretty good... seeing that celerity is the go-to for almost every lifeform for the spur upgrade. The hive feels very linear at the moment.
Silence on Shift would actually be pretty good... seeing that celerity is the go-to for almost every lifeform for the spur upgrade. The hive feels very linear at the moment.
Plus, a skulk with silence definitely feels faster.
I don't know about redemption as a passive ability, but I wouldn't add it as a crag upgrade. In the attempt to increase survivability, you would actually decrease it, since you'd miss out on carapace or regen.
Redemption could also work as shift upgrade, especially because of the similariy with the shifts echo. However, I don't know if its fun as marine, when you're about to kill a life form and it then suddenly disappears. The implementation really needs to be thought through. As fas I remember redemption in ns1 was pretty much useless.
Must be joking, onoses and gorges with redemption were the absolute bane for marines!
b) Split cloaking and silence. Move silence to shift hive, add focus to shade hive, add redemption to crag hive. Voila, every hive has 3 upgrades.
We ultimately do want to end up with something like this. The switch of cloaking from being paired with silence to being paired with aura is a short term solution- one in which we are trying to accommodate the NSL in their wishes to move away from compmod back to vanilla- and granted shade hive is already one of the fewer used hives, this won't be a noticeable change for most people. Hopefully we can look at alien upgrades in the more generalized sense like golden suggests soon after.
The thing with shade hive I think is the shade area of effect does not stack with the corresponding upgrade (phantom), unlike having regen near a crag or adrenaline next to a shift.
Would be nice seeing shades (the structure) get a slight buff, like giving them a silencing effect on top of the camouflage.
That way, if phantom is split into 2 upgrades, whatever shade hive upgrade is equipped (silence or phantom), there is a benefit to being in the radius of a shade unlike now.
Also Ink is a bit too situationnal, it needs to have more use outside of just denying arcs otherwise this ability will remain close to useless early game unlike echo and heal wave.
It could for example, in addition to its current function, maybe spawn hallucinations of nearby cloaked structures randomly placed around the shade appearing with the echo animation to confuse marines.
Please don't reintroduce redemption. Personal RNG survival teleportation schemes which carry aliens to random hive locations upon successful rolls are not the way to go.
Aura is super powerful on its own, and it makes sense as a separate upgrade.
As for a new shade ability, has anyone considered something as basic as a decoy? The game already has hallucinations, so the concept is there. The ability would "split" a hallucination off of the player. Higher tiers would result in hallucinations with greater hp/armor (or possibly additional hallucinations). This would effectively allow individual players to use a weaker version of drifter hallucinations in combat without requiring comm support. It would help in most scenarios, since hallucinations would draw fire and/or attention away from you, which should help anyone ambushing and/or escaping from fire.
The ability could be active or passive.
If active, you'd need to add 1) an "active upgrade" ability binding, 2) at least one active upgrade to each upgrade path to round things out, and you'd need to 3) keep all active upgrades on cooldown timers. If passive, it would need to be triggered around a condition and cooldown timer (e.g., activates upon being fired upon, and can only happen once per minute). I think the idea of active upgrades is more interesting, though.
You might consider keeping cloaking + silence while reducing the maximum cloak effect and improving the baseline cloak effect. So rather than going from 0% cloaked (moving) to 90% cloaked (or whatever the maximum cloak currently is when standing still), you'd merely go from "less cloaked" to "more cloaked". You could also adjust the speed at which an alien cloaks/decloaks by fading toward or away from these cloak thresholds as opposed to toggling between "cloaked" and "uncloaked" states in a binary way.
Examples:
Tier 1: Cloak Minimum: 20% / Cloak Maximum: 60% (3 second transition from min. cloak to max. cloak; instant transition from max. cloak to min. cloak)
+ Silence: Muffles footsteps
Tier 2: Cloak Minimum: 30% / Cloak Maximum: 70% (2 second transition from min. cloak to max. cloak; .5 second transition from max. cloak to min. cloak)
+ Silence: Muffles footsteps and attack sounds
Tier 3: Cloak Minimum: 40% / Cloak Maximum: 80% (1 second transition from min. cloak to max. cloak; 1 second transition from max. cloak to min. cloak)
+ Silence: Total silence
These numbers are arbitrary, but you get the idea. The silence values would scale with each upgrade level as they do right now. This would convert phantom into something less centered on choosing terrible ambush locations due to the false sense of security cloaking imparts, and more into something designed to capitalize on rapidly resetting ambushes and/or being harder to track in the chaos of combat. Maps already offer plenty of excellent ambush locations which are far superior to the corner and wall hangouts naive phantom users rely upon right now, so let's not encourage poor use of the upgrade. By weakening cloak's maximum effect, you make it clear that it's inadequate for hiding in plain sight. But by increasing the minimum cloaking value when the alien is moving and by fiddling with cloak/uncloak transition, the ability contributes more clearly to normal combat scenarios.
This is an alternative to boosting cloak by combining it with aura (OP) or giving cloak 100% values when an alien is at a standstill (OP, annoying).
Make cloaked aliens 100% invisible with no distortion/shimmer.
I assume you don't remember the horrors of this in beta...
100% invisible aliens while standing still was also a thing in 2013... I guess it was before b250.
And yep, nobody wants it back. While it is indeed fun for the alien, it is 100% unfun for marines and bad for balance.
If silence is split from cloaking and nothing is done to restructure the way the cloak works then you might as well remove it from the game entirely and only allow shades to garbage cloak anything in game, I'll tell you right now i don't use shade upgrades because it gives me some sub par invis, i pick it because it makes me silent.
I admit that Shade upgrades need some work whatever form that takes, but I don't understand the need for a "short-term fix." The shade upgrades in their current form have been this way for a long time now, why the urgency? At least pair it with something that attempts to address the issues with Shade-first hives, e.g. poor higher lifeform upgrades.
We have this slotted for next week If you guys have more ideas I'd love to hear them! Some of the things we discussed:
Redemption- I don't think it would be a bad upgrade to add for crag hive... however we'd change it a little from it's NS1 incarnation- instead of a % chance to activate, it would be a guaranteed chance (with a cooldown). But it would also make a sound when it "activates" and then have a couple of seconds of wind-up time before it actually teleports you, allowing marines to realize this and give them a chance to try and burst you down before you get away. It would also teleport you to the farthest available hive so you cannot re-engage immediately. (was my thoughts on it anyway)
Focus- maybe not quite focus, but some kind of Vampirism upgrade. Maybe a weak version of focus but it also has this life-steal capability as well- we're still discussing ideas.
I never found vampirism to be useful as the hp gained from each bite was insubstantial. Regen is a million times better... With focus on the other hand, if you can time and land your bites well it's just amazingly fun. (especially for skulks)
We have this slotted for next week If you guys have more ideas I'd love to hear them! Some of the things we discussed:
Redemption- I don't think it would be a bad upgrade to add for crag hive... however we'd change it a little from it's NS1 incarnation- instead of a % chance to activate, it would be a guaranteed chance (with a cooldown). But it would also make a sound when it "activates" and then have a couple of seconds of wind-up time before it actually teleports you, allowing marines to realize this and give them a chance to try and burst you down before you get away. It would also teleport you to the farthest available hive so you cannot re-engage immediately. (was my thoughts on it anyway)
Focus- maybe not quite focus, but some kind of Vampirism upgrade. Maybe a weak version of focus but it also has this life-steal capability as well- we're still discussing ideas.
WHY is there a need for redemption??? This upgrade makes the game again worse. RIP trapping lifeforms. RIP checking lanes and escape routes.
Vampirism is good though. Also it would make sense on the crag hive. Stop implementing that terrible redemption thing and instead add the vampirism thing to it as third upgrade. Move silence to shift hive and add a third upgrade for shade so cele / silence is not possible anymore, also would give skulks the ability to choose between things early game (with shift hive start adrenaline is 100% useless).
I gotta say redemption does seem like it would be incredibly op for aliens to have... Gorge bile rush their main.. Oh all your gorges have redemption and were teleported back to the hive...
Onos could potentially be even worse.. You're a marine who is FINALLY about to kill that onos that's been wrecking your entire team.. Nope redemption teleported him out with 10 hp before you could switch to your pistol..
What about keeping focus in all is glory (i really do love that upgrade) put vampirism on crag.. Silence on shift.. And drop cloaking altogether as an upgrade. (Maybe slightly buff the cloaking effect from shades to balance?)
This might even push shade hive into early game territory more since focus is so good early game..
Edit: maybe if you guys are dead set on adding redemption to help alleviate the rookies flashing life forms problem, make it a biomass upgrade (1-3?) that works automatically for the first like 60 seconds or so after evolving...
Yea, I completely agree MoFo, but not with your Edit. Redemption must not find its way into the game, ever. Would be okay for rookie servers though because I wouldn't care.
I would also be fine with a second balance mode like an official comp mod so that players who are not beginners or casuals can still enjoy the game. But then again the plan is to merge comp mod and vanilla for whatever reason (okay, I understand that you cannot rely on one person maintaining the mod, but that is why I think official comp mod is needed, not a merge).
It really depends how it's implemented. It could have a several minute cooldown each time you get recalled back to the hive... or it might have an activation time when your hp gets low... etc.
Comments
The proper, unbiased chart starts at 0% and ends at 100% on the vertical axis.
To put 3.5% in perspective, if you went shift hive 30 times, you would win on average 16 times, and lose 15 times. If you went shade hive 30 times, you would win on average 15 times, and lose 15 times.
That is assuming chamber choice matters at all... which 90+% of pub games are so stacked that aliens would either win or lose (depending on which way the stack is) no matter what chamber is researched first, or any at all...
Anyway, I'm tired so if I did the math wrong or whatever, you're welcome to be angry. However, the chart just pissed me off. That is all, good night.
Edit: I guess the thread is about something entirely different kind of. I've always thought camo+silence is OP. It only fails because people on pubs are stupid. You should absolutely choke marines early game with it, and hopefully ensure a win. On the other hand, I think silence only may be kind of hard on pubs, so when this is implemented even though it's not that much worse, shade hive will be even more raged-against than it is now (I'm always amazed when people complain when I go shade, I think it's currently quite nicely op as I mentioned before). Sadly the perception right now is that it's "less useful" and after this proposed change the perception will change to "eject immediately if it's researched as hive 1 or 2 and kick/ban from server."
This gets my vote.
What is of no value for veterans is / should also be of no value for rookies (noob trap or teaching bad behaviour).
Redemption could teleport you back if you survive on low hp for a significant time, indicating somehow for everyone around you (and yourself) that you're about to vanish.
So Marines get a chance to double their effort and poor healer Gorges can act before their meatshield Onos disappears.
Kinda complicated: needs research, has a % chance, may teleport to the place you not wanna go.
Redemption could also work as shift upgrade, especially because of the similariy with the shifts echo. However, I don't know if its fun as marine, when you're about to kill a life form and it then suddenly disappears. The implementation really needs to be thought through. As fas I remember redemption in ns1 was pretty much useless.
Plus, a skulk with silence definitely feels faster.
...right?
Must be joking, onoses and gorges with redemption were the absolute bane for marines!
We ultimately do want to end up with something like this. The switch of cloaking from being paired with silence to being paired with aura is a short term solution- one in which we are trying to accommodate the NSL in their wishes to move away from compmod back to vanilla- and granted shade hive is already one of the fewer used hives, this won't be a noticeable change for most people. Hopefully we can look at alien upgrades in the more generalized sense like golden suggests soon after.
Would be nice seeing shades (the structure) get a slight buff, like giving them a silencing effect on top of the camouflage.
That way, if phantom is split into 2 upgrades, whatever shade hive upgrade is equipped (silence or phantom), there is a benefit to being in the radius of a shade unlike now.
Also Ink is a bit too situationnal, it needs to have more use outside of just denying arcs otherwise this ability will remain close to useless early game unlike echo and heal wave.
It could for example, in addition to its current function, maybe spawn hallucinations of nearby cloaked structures randomly placed around the shade appearing with the echo animation to confuse marines.
Aura is super powerful on its own, and it makes sense as a separate upgrade.
As for a new shade ability, has anyone considered something as basic as a decoy? The game already has hallucinations, so the concept is there. The ability would "split" a hallucination off of the player. Higher tiers would result in hallucinations with greater hp/armor (or possibly additional hallucinations). This would effectively allow individual players to use a weaker version of drifter hallucinations in combat without requiring comm support. It would help in most scenarios, since hallucinations would draw fire and/or attention away from you, which should help anyone ambushing and/or escaping from fire.
The ability could be active or passive.
If active, you'd need to add 1) an "active upgrade" ability binding, 2) at least one active upgrade to each upgrade path to round things out, and you'd need to 3) keep all active upgrades on cooldown timers. If passive, it would need to be triggered around a condition and cooldown timer (e.g., activates upon being fired upon, and can only happen once per minute). I think the idea of active upgrades is more interesting, though.
You might consider keeping cloaking + silence while reducing the maximum cloak effect and improving the baseline cloak effect. So rather than going from 0% cloaked (moving) to 90% cloaked (or whatever the maximum cloak currently is when standing still), you'd merely go from "less cloaked" to "more cloaked". You could also adjust the speed at which an alien cloaks/decloaks by fading toward or away from these cloak thresholds as opposed to toggling between "cloaked" and "uncloaked" states in a binary way.
Examples:
Tier 1: Cloak Minimum: 20% / Cloak Maximum: 60% (3 second transition from min. cloak to max. cloak; instant transition from max. cloak to min. cloak)
+ Silence: Muffles footsteps
Tier 2: Cloak Minimum: 30% / Cloak Maximum: 70% (2 second transition from min. cloak to max. cloak; .5 second transition from max. cloak to min. cloak)
+ Silence: Muffles footsteps and attack sounds
Tier 3: Cloak Minimum: 40% / Cloak Maximum: 80% (1 second transition from min. cloak to max. cloak; 1 second transition from max. cloak to min. cloak)
+ Silence: Total silence
These numbers are arbitrary, but you get the idea. The silence values would scale with each upgrade level as they do right now. This would convert phantom into something less centered on choosing terrible ambush locations due to the false sense of security cloaking imparts, and more into something designed to capitalize on rapidly resetting ambushes and/or being harder to track in the chaos of combat. Maps already offer plenty of excellent ambush locations which are far superior to the corner and wall hangouts naive phantom users rely upon right now, so let's not encourage poor use of the upgrade. By weakening cloak's maximum effect, you make it clear that it's inadequate for hiding in plain sight. But by increasing the minimum cloaking value when the alien is moving and by fiddling with cloak/uncloak transition, the ability contributes more clearly to normal combat scenarios.
This is an alternative to boosting cloak by combining it with aura (OP) or giving cloak 100% values when an alien is at a standstill (OP, annoying).
I assume you don't remember the horrors of this in beta...
Or if that's too op, have it so a mini Ink cloud appears shortly after being scanned to quickly hide the alien again from marine detection.
100% invisible aliens while standing still was also a thing in 2013... I guess it was before b250.
And yep, nobody wants it back. While it is indeed fun for the alien, it is 100% unfun for marines and bad for balance.
Lol, just buy a gem.
What? This should be fixed.
The behavior of a cloaked alien was once like this.
Uncloaked = On minimap
Cloaked and Moving = On minimap
Cloaked and still = Not on minimap
All of this is only if the alien is in LOS.
I thought this was fixed in B281. https://trello.com/c/XMypkvL9/88-fix-los-bug-detecting-enemies-through-walls
If it has not been fixed. Aliens that are cloaked and moving should not show on minimap. They are more visible enough if a marine is paying attention.
Redemption- I don't think it would be a bad upgrade to add for crag hive... however we'd change it a little from it's NS1 incarnation- instead of a % chance to activate, it would be a guaranteed chance (with a cooldown). But it would also make a sound when it "activates" and then have a couple of seconds of wind-up time before it actually teleports you, allowing marines to realize this and give them a chance to try and burst you down before you get away. It would also teleport you to the farthest available hive so you cannot re-engage immediately. (was my thoughts on it anyway)
Focus- maybe not quite focus, but some kind of Vampirism upgrade. Maybe a weak version of focus but it also has this life-steal capability as well- we're still discussing ideas.
I never found vampirism to be useful as the hp gained from each bite was insubstantial. Regen is a million times better... With focus on the other hand, if you can time and land your bites well it's just amazingly fun. (especially for skulks)
WHY is there a need for redemption??? This upgrade makes the game again worse. RIP trapping lifeforms. RIP checking lanes and escape routes.
Vampirism is good though. Also it would make sense on the crag hive. Stop implementing that terrible redemption thing and instead add the vampirism thing to it as third upgrade. Move silence to shift hive and add a third upgrade for shade so cele / silence is not possible anymore, also would give skulks the ability to choose between things early game (with shift hive start adrenaline is 100% useless).
Onos could potentially be even worse.. You're a marine who is FINALLY about to kill that onos that's been wrecking your entire team.. Nope redemption teleported him out with 10 hp before you could switch to your pistol..
What about keeping focus in all is glory (i really do love that upgrade) put vampirism on crag.. Silence on shift.. And drop cloaking altogether as an upgrade. (Maybe slightly buff the cloaking effect from shades to balance?)
This might even push shade hive into early game territory more since focus is so good early game..
Edit: maybe if you guys are dead set on adding redemption to help alleviate the rookies flashing life forms problem, make it a biomass upgrade (1-3?) that works automatically for the first like 60 seconds or so after evolving...
I would also be fine with a second balance mode like an official comp mod so that players who are not beginners or casuals can still enjoy the game. But then again the plan is to merge comp mod and vanilla for whatever reason (okay, I understand that you cannot rely on one person maintaining the mod, but that is why I think official comp mod is needed, not a merge).