The most popular & effective capping methods have been nerfed or removed, lurker solo or lurker teamwork caps, warrior lunge caps. Back when these were a thing they contributed as much or more than Queen screech capping.
The only reliable way to solo cap now is as runner on a solo marine, which can be easily counterered by not being alone or having a shotgun.
There are still lots of way to use teamwork to capture, but it’s a lot riskier, requires more people and it’s a lot more involved than the previous methods. Examples:
Lurker pouncing a marine and then a runner tackling the marine for free since the stun is longer than how long it takes a runner to tackle, requires the marine to be alone but this is going to be an easy and consistent method. Low risk.
Vanguard dashing on/behind a marine, pressing the fling button and the marine is now half a screen away from where he was, now your teammates over there can capture him. Low risk.
Oppressor using his fling or whatever it’s called to do the same thing except he can’t magically no clip through marines and has to walk around him. Medium risk.
Warrior going out of his way to fling a marine behind doors, and then teammates capturing the marine. High risk.
Drone tackling a marine to capture him. High risk.
Compared to lurker or warrior capping before the nerfs, three of these methods can be instantly countered by the marine who is being captured PBing himself with a shotgun or using some other device that kills him, whether grenade or OD. And the warrior or drone one is countered by a shotgun or a stun from a friendly marine.
BEA keeps posting the same message over and over again, even made a thread about it, more than half the ‘queen’ and ‘screech’ mentions are from BEA.
As for 2 larvas per cap, it didn’t use to be this bad, but the burst timers are now ridiculous.
Unnested, a marine will burst in 7.5 minutes. Nested, a marine will burst in 5 minutes.
If a marine gets captured and the marines aren’t already next to the hive, it’s not possible for him to be freed.
I just had two more ideas: The first, Occam’s Razor compliant, idea is to make double-bursting a Boon. Won’t happen with survivors, won’t contribute to impossible numbers on first drop, and makes the endgame go faster. That said, I also have no idea how boons actually work, as I pretty much exclusively play Marine.
The over-complicated idea is like the idea I posted previously, except only one of the double-bursted larva is a nerfed version, with a different name (Lesser is already taken by the Lesser Drone, but something like that was what I have in mind) and has less health and can’t evolve into T2, as well as being in a separate, adjacent queue, seeing as some might not want to play the weaker aliens. Once again, both of these come from a person with less than 30 minutes total alien playtime, and none in the main round, so I am beyond certainly biased.
and that is exactly wrong aproach to capture balance, in the sight of normal players being able to capture and queen being able to capture a lot the apraoch was not to remove capturing from queen and leave the power and to the majority of players but rather double down and make the single player decide if xenos win or loose, more so now if “alegedly” moving captures was made harder (it was not but whatever) so capturing from front is the easier way and easiest way to cap on front is queen
same problem as zerk rav all over again. Just slash the baldass players to steamroll everyone but cap the newbies in the marine force for a guaranteed +2 larva.
+2 larva will just promote more megaFOB, FOB gameplay. Thats how marines will adapt.
It honestly feels pretty boring to play xeno now (as it was when double burst was a thing before) and i actually enjoyed the change to one larva per burst, while it is a good thing to speed up larva queue i don’t think thats the right approach.
What was proposed earlier might be good idea - to make a double burst a major boon since xenos wont be able to overwhelm marines 5 minutes after they cap 5 marines.
Other alternative could be to lower starting xeno numbers but that might end up with queen needing to instantly deovi to get some caps so xenos don’t get overwhelmed.
Marines didn’t had HEAP when there were double larvas from each burst, idk why was that mentioned at least twice.
Queen screech capping is what allows me to let xeno players actually engage mostly how they want to since all other capping methods are unreliable to sustain the fight outside caves. If you just remove/nerf queen screech in a meaningful way right now you will probably end with mass banishments and sitting at caves entrance till marines reach you. Maybe that queen rework will fix the issue but we will see.
hold on the Boon idea was kinda cooking… holding marines in the little membrane cells and then waiting for Boon of Bursting for a high risk high reward as you huge each of them once you have the boon for the vaunted Double Burst. The alternative, as well, that if you can’t capture the relays a Scout could find your holding cave and free a half dozen marines for a proto-Foxtrot of injured, long-ghosted guys who come back in PISSED and yearning for xeno blood.
There’s a lot of issues there that could be picked apart I’ll admit but I like the idea.
Banking caps without immediately hugging for a potential greater future return on larva is some risk/reward gameplay that benefits both sides.
Should it replace the “lol free instant 5 larva from ” boon? Seems more soul, the only balancing lever is how long it lasts to be worth it (too short and it can be ‘wasted’, too long and we’re back to the problem this PR has - I’m feeling 15min tops - and you still need to work to get something out of it like with the other boons, instead of just getting a one-off freebie - I LIKE IT)
If the issue is “xenos need more ways to cap” then you nerf screech and buff every caste’s ability to cap in different ways. I would love that change, would make xenoing a lot more fun. Giving a blanket two larva for cap is actually going to decrease the number of caps total because marines are going to be petrified to give up any kind of captures ever.
The thing is, it’s not going to decrease the number of caps, as getting capped is already the worst thing for you as a marine no matter if it’s 1 or 2 larva per cap, and usually you do everything you can to avoid being captured (including suicide).
I think that a lot of potential solutions to the capping issue are outside the domain of the 2 larva per cap thing. Like I said above, I believe that a lot of the premier methods for xenos capping have been reduced or removed and it’s made the queen all the more impactful. I think the 2 larva per cap thing is just something that makes no sense in the current gamestate. I would rather we return to an older state regarding capping, where some castes can reliably cap if they know what they’re doing without incurring too much massive risk.
The reality is though that the people with complaints against queen screech will probably whine and rally against the unfairness of any buffs to xenos that let them more reliably cap without utter reliance on teamwork (and teamwork that fails a lot, because these team strats give marines a lot more leeway to just shoot themselves and deny a cap.)
I’d argue it was way more fair for a warrior to be able to cap reliably compared to the queen screech runner strat, since a warrior cap can be countered with a single slug, a single grenade or a reliable ally but guess what? Queen screech never got nerfed, but warrior sure did. First they nerfed warrior tackles and made them less reliable then they outright made it impossible to lunge cap by forcing harm intent on lunged targets. Lurkers stopped being able to cap solo too, which is iffy to me. If some idiot is alone in the backline and gets lurker pounced they should suffer the ramifications.
The issue with nerfing queen screech outright and trading it off for buffing other xenos is the mindset. You’re trying to equate nerfing one caste being worthy of then buffing other castes. This is why queen screech never gets touched. People just want to trade its power into another form of power that seems more fair to the game or they just want to thoughtlessly reduce the Queen’s ability to be effective off ovi entirely. The reality is the queen caste needs a fundemental rework and that takes time and actual thought and development most people don’t got.
Double larvae burst is not the issue, its the lack of any foundation behind the change that is.
Queen screech, burst time being incredibly fast, and recent changes like BRUTE that make pushing harder (since it has limited ammo and breacher being removed as part of the PR) means experienced players will get overrun by hordes of xenos before they can even attempt a proper rescue of their fellow man.
Should have been TM’d with other additions to the game, like Queen rework and higher burst times.
And yet, everything you’ve proposed thus far has actually been pretty good.
Second one would be cool to see implemented but maybe changes the structure of one team and is hard to code but there definitely is a distinct category of people who like playing T1s and being skilled at it and not going further (i am one)
First is outright good, though. Xenos can buy 5 extra larva as a flat number later on as of now, but having a multiplier as a boon addresses the early round stuff you identify and also contributes to ending already ending rounds faster.
It’s funny that if you’re swallowed by a non-runner you simply have no chance to escape with such damage cap and such tiny amount of mele damage. Not to mention that reverse bursting was completely cut out. Doube xenomorphs, you still can’t avoid capture (unless you kill yourself first), drag-takle still works. How can this even be called a rebalance if there are only buffs.
the part with it being boon exadurates the issue this was trying to solve in the first place, the issue being long queue and you do not improve that by stacking captures for 15 - 30 min before hugging them to get double larva
risk/reward gameplay that benefits both sides.
” boon? Seems more soul, the only balancing lever is how long it lasts to be worth it (too short and it can be ‘wasted’, too long and we’re back to the problem this PR has - I’m feeling 15min tops - and you still need to work to get something out of it like with the other boons, instead of just getting a one-off freebie - I LIKE IT)