Buff Crusher

Development Ideaguys
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Some of you are in the Discord, so you may have seen me make my case already.

But I’m gonna double down by making a short post explaining why crusher needs to be buffed. I’ll be mostly talking about base crusher here, charger is its own beast.

Crusher to its core

Crusher is a tank caste. It has its base strain, and charger strain. Crushers have the highest health out of any xeno that isn’t the queen. Base crusher also has its shield ability that can protect it from extra damage, and charger’s charge ability can make it run faster then a runner. Crusher in principle is meant to be an annoyance in the battlefield by absorbing lots of AP to protect other xenos vulnerable to AP like ravager, defender, and especially queen. So crusher should be handy for xenos to have, right?

Well… I think for a “tank”, it’s not as good at tanking damage as it should be. I’ll explain why in the sections below.

Marine Powercreep

No, this isn’t me saying nerf marines or whatever. But marines have gotten a lot of content that has made them notably stronger then in the past. Smartgunner CQC mode makes smartgunners able to shred xenos at cqc mode. Marines have OB and CAS, lots of new weapons with prominent ap, and marines experience delimbing way less then they used to. Marines have been at the best stage they’ve ever been in CM13’s history.

Crusher I feel wasn’t really patched to compensate for the amount of powerful tools marines have gotten overtime. Crusher notably struggles to fight a group of marines now, who can just AP the crusher into oblivion with their new tools they’ve gotten. Smartgunner AP, heavy sniper, all a big pain in the rear for crusher. Also crusher is not immune to fire, so it gets countered by fire quite hard. From my experience playing crusher, even as if I had places to retreat to, I found myself mashing to attack, but seeing my health go down so quickly by a group of marines who are all targeting me with AP, forcing me to crawl back to safety before I could even make a significant dent to the corps.

Some xeno players consider crushers to “die a lot”, which shouldn’t be the case for a tank caste. Also I should mention, crusher has the disadvantage of having a big hitbox and being one of if not the slowest xeno in the game, so with the marine powercreep, I just feel it’s not as powerful of a tank as it once was.

Counterarguments

Crusher does have strong perks. Its area of effect slash being able to go past cades is strong, yes. It’s nothing to laugh at and if you’re a good enough crusher, you can shred a group of marines who overextended from the main ungaball. And its shield is also quite strong, even being able to tank sadar hits. And well, you have stomp. Base can use it to slowdown and get slashes, charger can use it to do massive damage to someone flinged by it.

But at the end of the day, it’s a tank caste. For most newer crush players like me, it’s hard to get slashes in as marines will just spit their iff AP and god tier fire at you before you can even do notable damage. And marines are notably faster then you, unless you get a solid stomp in.

And there’s one caste I should mention that I feel that evokes more attention then crusher does.

Ravager

Ravager ravager ravager. Ravager is an ambush caste, being the best caste in the game for rushing marines down chokes and dealing considerable damage. Why am I mentioning ravager? Well, I agree with some people’s claim that it’s a bit overtuned at the moment. I’m not saying nerf ravager, rather I’d prefer if crusher was buffed to make it a viable alternative against the tricks ravager can pull up it’s sleeve. There isn’t really much to say about base ravager, but there definitely IS stuff to say about its strains.

Hedgehog Ravager

I’m gonna say it. Hedgehog ravager is a better tank then base crusher. It just is. Hedgehog also has a shield similar to crusher’s, but it’s gimmick of shooting spikes when it’s shot at makes it arguably better then crusher’s shield. Not only that, but RAVAGER IS IMMUNE TO FIRE DAMAGE. Crusher is not. So ravager can counter pyros, unlike crusher, which absolutely sobs at fire in general. Hedgehog is even immune to grenade stun much like crusher is. And hedgehog is faster then crusher based on base movement. Yes, base crusher is immune to AP sadar briefly with its shield, but hedgehog can be a better “tank” by being able to run into marines until its shield expires. And sadar is just one devil dog out of a hundred. Meanwhile, marine powercreep with smargunner ap, heavy sniper, you name it, can shred that shield in mere seconds.

Berserker Ravager

Crusher has good AOE slashes, I get it. But berserker is way more notorious when it comes to slashing. It has a passive lifesteal and rage ability, as well as other lifesteal abilities in general. Not only that, if you get lots of slashes on berserker, you can get a lot of amount of armor, attack speed, and speed in general. We’ve all seen that OWL clip of OWL getting many kills on hijack as berserker. Berserker can be a better tank if played in the right hands, given how much buffs you are rewarded with if you just keep on getting slashes in. Crusher doesn’t have any lifesteal, and berserker can get more armor then base crusher can if it gets slashes in, with lifesteal. Berserker is also designed to be THE CQC strain in general, but it also can get buffs to armor, attack speed, and speed. So… yeah. I can see why people say ravager is overtuned.

Ideas to Buff Crusher

Now with that ravager tangent, I’m not saying nerf ravager. Like how I’m also not saying nerf marines or whatever. What I AM saying is crusher needs buffs to accommodate for how strong marines have gotten overtime, and well how strong ravager is in general.

Buffing base crusher’s health and armor is probably the best way to go. It should be done in a way where it helps crusher be more effective at well, being a tank, but obviously not too much of a tank. There’s a sweetspot for crusher tank, and I think base crusher is on the underwhelming side at the moment.

Charger is a beast of its own, so I’m not gonna give suggestions for it here.

Conclusion

I imagine people who have played the game for longer are gonna take issue. But I’ve been playing this game for a fair amount, and I feel I should be able to give my ideaguys recommendation. In short, crusher falls victim to marine powercreep with marines being in a stronger state then ever before with stuff like less delimbs and lots of AP. It also falls victim to ravager, who arguably outclasses crusher in even tanking stuff with the hedgehog and berserker strain.

So yeah, buff crusher.

Edit:

After seeing the good replies, maybe the buffs should be very slight. Maaybe just a little more armor? Ravager feels more overtuned then base crusher, though I can definitely see how base crusher is a force of nature, and I’ve been doing better with it.

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Screenshot 2025-02-12 094733
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Come on man! SG CQC AP is the least of your worries as crusher, us SGs miss 80% of our shots anyways, so the true TTK is closer to infinity 35 seconds…

All jokes aside, AP availability has been well… mostly consistent? SG AP has been a thing for ages, and frankly based off how many SGs actually use frontline mode and the fact IFF AP was nerfed significantly, the overall impact of SGs on the round has been… mostly the same, if not lower than before. Besides that, I can’t really think of any additional sources of AP marines have recently acquired. AP MK2 continues to be the main killer, and it’s stayed consistent for years.

Now, you say that the Crusher is supposed to be a ‘tanky’ caste, and thus should lean further into that role. This is one of your main assumptions, but here’s the problem- It’s not really the case. The Crusher IS more tanky than most xenos- But compared to the Ravager, they’re actually strikingly similar.

This screenshot is based off shots to crit (STC) for 10x24mm Mk2 Pulse Rifle ammunition

Screenshot 2025-02-12 095347
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Base Crusher can tank 2 more AP bullets than a Ravager (and significantly more non-AP). That’s not very tanky, is it? If it’s a ‘tanky’ caste, and the ravager does a lot more damage- Then why doesn’t the crusher have a lot more health to compensate?

Except that’s not really the case. The Crusher only does 5 less slash damage than the base Ravager (40 vs 45), AND it has AOE slash. If you really think about it, the Ravager and Crusher are pretty well balanced relative to one another. They’re about the same power level, and neither is ‘considerably’ more powerful.

Base ravager has worse crowd control- Crusher wins in that regard, due to AOE slash. Berserker has good crowd control due to eviscerate and such, but it’s wind up is relatively long and vulnerable.

(You mention OWL fragging out in your post. I don’t recommend basing your opinions much on what OWL does in a round. OWL is an incredibly skilled xeno player, and frankly they could make any caste look broken. Zerker may be pretty damn good, but it’s also very easy to fuck up and die with. It’s not like you’ll become the top fragginator by switching from base crusher to zerker- There’s some very good crusher players who easily eviscerate dozens of marines a round, for example.)

Hedgehog relies a lot on marine stupidity to get kills, but is extremely survivable. You could argue it’s the ‘true’ tank due to bone shard armour + shield, and frankly that’s probably true. However, the Hedgehog can’t dish out as much direct pain as a crusher- So there’s a significant tradeoff there.

The crusher stomp is a really good get-out-of-jail card when combined with the shield, while also being a strong offensive tool since it cripples speed significantly in an AOE.

The charge ability is a good, fast opener that doesn’t really let marines shoot you before you reach them, which indirectly aids survivability and offence.

Overall? Pretty balanced set of abilities, both offensive and defensive. Not really suited for purely tank work, the ability suite is more of a frontline brawler.

When you mention your inability to take on the massive unga deathblob… That’s by design. You’re not supposed to do it alone- You work with your team to create openings. E.g. Queen screech, boiler gas, or fallback into caves (chad strategy, always works until it doesn’t). In the end, you’re not the specialised tank who’s supposed to press me’*stares’ like the defenders (hell, they tank better than you do), you’re another lineage of frontline T3 who specialises in crowd control, slowdowns and drawing explosive fire (not AP rockets though…).

TL;DR don’t think of the crusher as a tank because it’s not THE tank- overextension kills everyone. It’s almost on par with ravs in offence and defence if you play your cards right.

P.S. If you want the REAL tanky crusher, go play Charger and spam click towards marines so your front is always facing them. You have 50 fucking frontal armour, 35 side armour and 20 back armour. The 50 armour lets you decrease AP rifle damage by almost 20% a bullet due to AP penetration being only 40, while you also get +80 HP.

Downside is you must now charge at the enemy and will probably die to overextension, but it IS really fucking funny.

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I would like to note that you should include abilities that give effective health, such as base/hedge rav empower/shield, and berz rav’s lifesteal, as simply taking the base HP/Armor of the caste without caring about their abilities seems a bit misleading.

I think that ravager’s full empower (3+ marines) is 200 shield. (identical to crusher’s shield)
Hedge shield is 500(?) shield for 3 seconds, effectively a period of unkillability (Plus explosion immunity)
crusher does get its own 200 health shield for 7 seconds (alongside 3[?] seconds of explosion damage immunity).
Berz rav healing is extremely high while at max rage stacks, im too lazy to boot up a server and see the healing per second of it, though.

Actually the way I see it, hedge is a better tank than the dedicated tank caste :thinking:, not only is its shield way stronger(and way more annoying for marines), it has movespeed to escape marines, and also inflicts shrap just to make marines angry.

I would also like to note that, while crusher empower does provide explosion immunity for a short duration, it doesn’t actually do anything to the stun caused by AP rockets (forced 3 seconds) :<

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Very good counterargument, I gotta admit it’s hard to argue against this. The wiki calls crusher a “tank caste”, and I mean it does have more health then every xeno except queen, and well its shield ability.

But I can see your argument.

Also I think charger’s slash damage is 30 and not 60.

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ngl the shrapnel causing 75% of marines to instantly stop what they’re doing and take out their knives is literally the single most OP get out of jail free card ever made

Yeah you’re right, thanks for pointing it out! Wonder how tf 60 got in there…

Screenshot 2025-02-12 163856
(^This just means charger does 10 less dmg than base)

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It’s a tank caste because it requires multiple marines to kill - it’s balanced out by its slow speed stat, but has advantages in the form of its abilities, both active and passive. These abilities combo well with each other, and it’s important to know this since they stall into each other and playing around cooldowns are a vital part of the caste.

It’s a good caste when played well.

  1. Shield is an incredibly powerful defensive option.
  2. AOE slash + slowdown on slash provides a more powerful slash then allies.
  3. Charge is an important movement option.
  4. Stomp is incredibly useful in many situations. It also slows enemies.
  5. All of these abilities and passives pair incredibly well with teammates.
  6. Cooldown is reduced on slash (1 second per slash, and 0.5 per extra person AOE’d)

further its abilities combo well with each other and provide consistent safety in many situations

  1. Stomp → charge
  2. Charge → stomp + slash (or tailstab for ranged slow) slash slash → Charge uptime is back
  3. Charge → shield + slash (or tailstab for ranged slow) slash slash → Charge uptime is back

So use your shield and charge wisely. Charge has a 12 second cooldown (15 second on click, but the 3 seconds of charge animation will effectively make it 12 seconds), so if you can survive for 12 seconds (ie: through terrain, allies, shield, stomp, etc) you can easily get it back and escape. Or you can utilize the cooldown reduction to quickly get it back by slashing a target. It can be better to use your 7 second shield early to lighten the cooldown, and reduce it with slashes + time. Skill expression as crusher is in utilizing its cooldowns well, positioning well, and playing well around allies and enemies.

It’s a defensive powerhouse of a caste. It will support your allies with deadly effectiveness and even alone you can do an insane amount to catch people off guard. It’s naturally forgiving because of how the kit is so built on survivability. But, if you let your guard down and don’t fully think through your attacks you may die, just like any other caste.

Unlike many other castes though, it has very little player RNG vulnerabilities because of explo resistance. Concentrated firepower will still kill it. It’s very vulnerable to positional mistakes too, since its slow speed stat means it’s slower to reposition. Much of that can be solved though by gaining information about the enemy. Much of that can be gained by improving situational awareness. Much of that can be gained by better mechanical execution.

It’s vulnerable to sadar too but that’s not an aspect of balance.

I think the main error in your post is how you defined “tank”. Tank does not mean it can deal damage all the time or get out of any situation unharmed. It just means they have a lot of hp, armor, and are slow. Of course they will still die if they get hit by 9 million bullets. Tank doesn’t inherently mean easier than other castes - but it does mean you don’t have to worry so much about movement, and you rely more on abilities. And the lack of definition seems vague, biased, and anecdotal.

so it doesn’t really need a buff IMO, since it fulfills its niche well and has good round impact as a cooldown-reliant CC tank. But I’m willing to hear out if any experienced crushers disagree, and I think that’d stir discussion in a good direction - I’m not an experienced crusher, all I can do is extrapolate what they are capable of based on experience and knowledge.

Marines are weak. Slash them and they will die. Get shot by them (esp. if you overextend, work solo/without team, or just generally mess up and make a poor play) and you will die. Counterplay is vital and comes with experience.

Crusher is not a weak caste by any means and has many options of counterplay/escape available, alongside the forgiving nature of having high tankiness + hp + shield.

Good crushers often don’t have as much round impact as good ravagers. But, their round impact is still incredibly high and should not be undervalued.

The problem with crusher isn’t that it’s a naturally weak and easy to kill caste - when played well it’s really difficult to kill even. The problem is that ravager can gaurantee kills/fracs with minimal setup, reposition faster, and deals much higher dps. While DPS may be valuable, crowd control abilities are still one of the most consistent ways to win the videogame especially when paired with high DPS castes. This can be done with teamwork though, and crusher’s AOE ccs are incredibly useful.

Crusher as an example ultimately more or less equalizes your defensive structure and mitigates counterplay. Hedge rav is good at that too you’re right, but it has weaker slashes and its abilities + armor rely more on shards instead of cooldowns. But I do agree it’s probably better than crusher because of speed.

Crusher shield lasts a fair amount of time though! Around 7 seconds compared to hedge ravagers 3 second shield. But has a much higher cooldown of around 28 seconds. CDR will lighten it though.

Impact/situational utility in general though is not black and white, kills/fracs. The metric of how much you support your allies, improve positions, counter enemies must be calculated, and crusher is one of the best supportive castes available, ontop of not requiring much experience to play decently (the main combo charge → stomp → slash → run away with shield is very easy), while being deadly in the right hands and very difficult to deal with for marines (without using resources and catching the crusher off-guard).

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^^^^

This is peak, listen to this

Hit and run with abilities is king, just how MOBA xenos work

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Honestly, I’m surprised that the ravager even has the hedgehog mode (the one where she shoots a bunch of spikes, right?) That seems like a defender or Crusher thing.

Why not just give it an aoe super tremor if it jumps from a higher LZ or give it the ability to deflect bullets and shrapnel everywhere when it lowers its crest/charges?

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not only does it make marines angry it can also dissuade marines from rushing it as the hog flees. after all moving with shrap can give fracts and organ damage, so many marines are unwilling to rush before they clear the shrap.

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Yeah feels like we need a PR to nerf sharp itself. I mean IB and organ damage can perma a marine. Hedgehog does feel more like a defender strain but it can be countred by shooting and standing still.

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After seeing the good replies, maybe the buffs should be very slight. Maaybe just a little more armor? Ravager feels more overtuned then base crusher, though I can definitely see how base crusher is a force of nature, and I’ve been doing better with it.

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Crusher my beloved… what good about base crusher is that it is very simple to use, sheild and stomp. Health pool does not really matter once you are in front. Rav goes in life steal having fun or simply pounce away, on fire? No problem. As base crusher, once that sheild on 7? Seconds are over. You are dead, and beeing the slowest t3 you are the favorite sadar snack on flames even slower, Its impossible to miss.

Once it had passive that slashing took down sheild ability timer down. Instead of tweaking it, removed.

Don’t want more abilities on base honestly. Passive maby, but the speed i deeply wish was tweaked some on it.

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Isn’t the passive still there? It’s still in the wiki and works in my testing, or is shield excluded?

edit:
Fixes invincible base crusher by PhantomEpicness · Pull Request #2682 · cmss13-devs/cmss13 · GitHub oh that makes more sense

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I was talking about crusher again on the Discord and someone brought up a good point. Crusher’s big downfall is her slow speed. She’s even slower then ravager is in general, so marines can manage to run away and react to you better, unless you’re in a tight choke. But ravagers thrive in chokes too.

All xenos struggle out in the open, but I feel like with ravager’s faster speed, ravager can have a better time in places like highpop targeting fleeing marines for example. If crusher is meant to be the AOE counterpart to ravager, then why is base crusher much slower?

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Don’t forget about the impact of their abilities- While base speed matters, if you’re a crusher, you should be minimising the impact of your slow speed via. your abilities as much as possible.

Alas, I hoped to avoid analysing abilities because I’m lazy…

Let’s lay out the abilities for base crusher and rav, though keep in mind I’m mostly reciting these from memory:

CRUSHER (BASE)

CHARGE
Description Charge anywhere on your screen with a short wind up, unblockable by marines.
Cooldown 15s
STOMP
Description Microstuns and superslows every marine up to 2 tiles away.
Cooldown 20s
EXPLOSIVE SHIELD
Description Gives you an instant 200 HP shield that is IMMUNE to explosive damage (but not stun, plus all damage instances are reduced by some stupid shitty flat value like -12 or something, because fuck me. Basically means SGs do nothing to your shield, because their bullet damage is reduced to like 0. Lasts 7 seconds.
Cooldown 28s

NOTE:
Because God is dead and we have killed him, every time a Crusher slashes something their ability cooldowns decrease by 1 second, plus a little extra for every AOE slash. Basically, your ability cooldowns are realistically like 4 seconds faster than they actually are.

RAVAGER (BASE)

CHARGE
Description Click anywhere and you’ll charge towards it. 5 tiles of range. I’m pretty sure if a ravager has enough empowers (iirc 3 marines), this ability gets uber charged and uber-fucks the poor marine you charge into. I imagine this is how all these ravs keep instant killing my ass with this.
Cooldown 15s
EMPOWER
Description You get like 80 base shield, plus an extra 80 per marine within 3 tiles, up to 5. The shields last for 15 seconds, but receives full damage from explosions and lacks the damage resistance effect of le crusher, so realistically speaking this is worse unless you decide to fucking surround yourself in marines (risky idea, only takes one bodyblock hero). Oh, and every stack of empower gives +2 slash damage, so you can go from 45 slash to 55 if you have balls of steel (or ovaries of steel, I guess.)
Cooldown 15s
SCISSOR
Description This isn’t really relevant, all it does is give you a ranged ability. It does slow if you have 3 stacks of empower, but otherwise it doesn’t really matter for this comparison.
Cooldown 10s

Okay. So, what does this tell us about base crushers and ravagers?

Well, first off- The crusher has way better disengagement abilities, all of which complement one another very well. If I’m a crusher, I can use my charge to get into a fight (preferably ramming myself into someone like Ashley Bullard), slash the shit out of Ashley Bullard & friends, stomp to CRUSH Ashley Bullard, stun and super-slow them, AND have my charge go off CD in time (thanks to me beating up talls to recharge my abilities) for me to GTFO back WHILE under the influence of my epic shield.

The stomp also makes sure the majority of the marines that are trying to kill me will NOT be able to catch up. Go to my pocket healer drone girlfriend, rest until abilities charge, and repeat.

Now, what about ravager? Well, I’m in a bit of a pickle. My charge ability has a shorter range of 5, has a cooldown of 15 seconds (which I can’t shorten), and I’m incentivised to use it offensively AFTER I empower. As such, I’ll probably have to walk into the middle of the angry talls to empower for at least 240 shields (3 talls), which is also generally weaker than the crusher one. After that, I slash, beat some talls up, delimb Ashley Bullard, and if I used my charge offensively during all that, I’ll have to walk back with full-speed angry talls hot on my heels. (This is why you need fellow sisters to cover and help you push.)

Due to all this, it’s just natural that the base ravager would be faster than the crusher. I mean, your abilities aren’t as protective or as good for disengaging, so you kind of need it, especially given you’re a bit more fragile.

The ravager is functions as sort of a full-on DPS high-risk high-reward caste. You’re incentivised to rush into angry talks to empower and use your empowered abilities to tear shit up, but are much more prone to overextension as a result. You can mitigate this by being so good at rav surviving 15 seconds is trivial, by NOT diving deep and preying on overextended marines instead, or by just saving up your charge as a get-out-of-jail card. You’re also relatively more vulnerable to explosive stuns e.g. HEDP, something crushers don’t really give a shit about.

The crusher on the other hand, is more med-risk med-reward. Having shitty positioning is less of an issue, because your abilities explicitly allow you to disregard certain factors in positioning yourself. You may be slower on paper, but your abilities make you better at disengaging by a significant margin. Just remember to slash the shit of out of people.

TL;DR crusher slower than rav but crusher abilities make it balance out

EDIT: SAD, DID THEY ACTUALLY REMOVE THE PASSIVE CD DECREASE FROM SLASH FOR SHIELD? SO XENOVER.

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Last time I saw you play crusher the Marines were pretty much entirely unable to kill you until you overextended like 3 screens off weeds into an ambush I had set up with AP ammo, alone.

Part of that was due to those uniquely bad marines & the valk helping but I also think it speaks to how tanky and forgiving crusher is.

Caste is fine hedgehog is just overturned and dumb.

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wat da hell!!!
fcuked up…

I don’t think so.
Oh huh, apparently they only removed its AOE de-cooldown

Keep in mind too, crusher has some insanely good passives too.

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Oh what, thats still pretty good I guess. Extra AOE slashes only shaved off like… maybe 2-3 seconds in any engagement, maybe?

Damn, are there more? I was only aware of the slash and AOE slash CD reduction.

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Yus, don’t forget about slowdown on slash too.

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MOTHERFUCKER THE WHAT NOW :skull::skull::skull::skull::skull::skull:

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