Handicapping the lesser drone menace

Development Ideaguys
1

The other day i was playing and the same lesser drone kept tunneling to the same location over and over and over (the one engineer in the area had neither c4 nor an e tool) and it got really annoying because killing it didnt matter, it didn’t care about its own life, and since it’s a xeno it can slash and stab doing an appreciable amount of basically free damage. I would like to curtail the worst aspects of lesser drones, here are a few ideas i had, in no particular order.

Lives system: give each player 3 lesser drone lives, if they die or ghost or otherwise lose their spot, they use up a life, to prevent returning ad nauseum. Surviving for a certain amount of time, or performing some kind of constructive work might generate more lives because they aren’t being a shitheel.

Alternatively, you could give the entire hive a pool of lesser drones like larva, and so suicide rushing would now be the queen’s problem to solve, and so people continuing to take lesser drone spots to suicide rush and ignore the queen’s will could be easily noticed for abusing the role.

Make them take damage off of weeds, and prevent them from spreading weeds, so they can’t stray too far from the main xeno forces.

I can’t think of any in universe reason, but preventing them from tunneling would heavily cut into the time it takes to attack the same fucking spot over and over again from a tunnel people have to hunt down to find.

prevent them from tail stabs, remove acid blood, and reduce the damage of slashes, or even remove slashes entirely, so all they can do is cap, would instantly curb this problem IMO but might be too much of an overstep.

Make them as fragile as facehuggers off weeds, simple, and elegant, while still allowing the good faith lessers to do their jobs.

The last solutions i have, would be more implemented for admins to act on.

Lessers that attack the same marine twice in different lives within a few minutes of each other are automatically noted or somehow admin logged, same for if someone health scans a mob as ghost then attacks them within two minutes or so as lesser drone (maybe also for facehuggers). If it becomes a problem admins have a clear history of it in logs that they can use in the ban reason.

1 Like
2

This entire problem could be solved if you had an etool.

6 Likes
3

I hate the lesser spam meta as much as the next dude but the solution to them coming out of a tunnel in waves is to collapse the tunnel and if you aren’t packing an e-tool or a c4 as engie/SL then you ARE just asking for more marine handholding and thats not cool. Even as PFC for 15 points you can get the Engie pamphlet and use c4 from req so I see no reason, my issue is more with people looking at marines in dchat seeing someone having difficulty then using that metaknowledge to spawn and make that hard time worse.

5 Likes
4

I’m pretty sure you don’t even need C4, i think any explosive will do.

5

Maybe 13 damage on a tail stab, and less for slashes. I don’t think this example I am remembering was medicated.

It is a small item, comtechs get it for free amd, even if you disregard the squad vendor that makes them accessible to every squad role, have more than they would ever need to give out using their tool vendor in their prep area, which should really be renamed to the not-prep area by the sounds of it.

There is already a system for having a pool of lesser drones, when the Queen is off ovi it takes two minutes to get a single lesser drone. Otherwise it is 10 seconds. There shouldn’t be much responsibility for a ghost role, this is represented by the fact that lesser drones are pretty weak but you seem to have trouble with them.

This is already the case. Have you played as a lesser drone before? They can only place resin nodes in proximity to other resin nodes, so they both have to rely on actual drones to weed at all and will quickly burn through their plasma anyway, which both regenerates slowly and isn’t enough to single handedly build a construction node.

I’ve only seen marine die to lessers because of poor positioning which let them FF each other and themselves, from a player that could fight two comparatively more skilled marines as a T1. Lessers are really not that tough, already dying immediately to most weapons and are only a minor force multiplier because they can’t body block other xenos. I don’t see where you are coming from.

With less gameplay, and dying to a single off screen bullet rather than two?

I’ve seen insane PRs before that assumes that the entire playerbase is guilty before innocent. I am not saying “the xeno player base”, I am saying the entire player base. This is because there is an awful tendency to attempt divide the playerbase into the 2/3 that never metagame despite being able to ghost an infinite amount of times with a single character and the 1/3 that is intrinsically bad and evil despite the entry requirements to both of the teams or even the observe button as with what you are suggesting being the exact same of a computer and internet connection. I

4 Likes
6

This also isn’t metagaming, xenos remember what happened in past lives and if they find something they want to harass in a past life they can continue to do it.

1 Like
7

Your proposal is way too hard of a marine buff tbh

Best I can do is lesser drone gets 10% lower total hp but +1 to total lesser drone playable slots

8

I for one don’t really like the idea of a caste that’s there to just suicide charge the marines. “Oh but they have ulitity other than trying that” - Yeah but the most annoying thing about them is people just hop in them to suicide charge.

Acid Runner is already a thing and that’s handled quite nicely. Needing build up and skill/luck.

We should just buff the lesser drones plasma capacity and costs, and let them be more useful building and weeding. And nerf their respawn rate for the players to take them.

1 Like
9

Easy solution for less lessers:

  1. change their respawn time to 1 minute

  2. change facehuggers respawn time to 1 minute

right now people spam out lessers because 30 seconds respawn time and people who would go hugger don’t want to wait out the 3 minute time on something that can die to a stray bullet so they just go lesser instead. This would make dedicated lesser players less powerful + decrease the amount of lesser players in general.

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It’s wild to me that people are complaining about a role that literally dies in two two three bullets. If they’re harrassing your barricades, maybe watch them? Set up a turret?

If you’re actually sustaining serious damage from a lesser drone’s attacks, then skill issue from letting it slash you twenty times to break one of your bones.

2 Likes
11

As someone who embarrassingly has their most xeno hours in lesser, yes the majority of people who get bodied by lesser’s deserve it, but you also have to admit 30 second respawns is a bit dumb. SG’s are lesser kryptonite but if I am having a good round, every 45 seconds I can get into the middle of an ungaball and every bit of damage that I miss out in doing in swipes is done by some PFC via FF.

1 Like
12

i wasn’t the engineer

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You can get a free etool in prep from the vendor to the left of the attachments, if that’s somehow out (how??) you can get it for five or so points in the PFC vendor, and it takes up one (1) webbing slot. I bring one with myself.

14

Imo we should just mute lessers and huggers so they can’t spawn and go “MARINE FLANK NW” or “scout south”

2 Likes
15

agreed with this one fully, im just tired of huggers coming out of a morpher and screeching at me about shit i literally cant see because im not in dchat like they are

1 Like
16

i know, im saying i needed c4 or an e tool and the engineer brought neither which he ought to have had, and i didnt expect to prepare for a fucking tidal wave of the same guy coming back as a lesser drone or i would have brought one

17

solution PR’d

4 Likes
18

Good change imo

lesser was too short, hugger too long; if anything they should’ve been the opposite way but equalized is still an improvement.

Overall on lesser balance I don’t find them too game changing. The most impactful thing lessers can do honestly, is weed up the map, build walls, and help with caps.

3 Likes
19

Actually good solution proposed for a change instead of nerfing something that didn’t need a nerf.