how do we return carrier to a good place?

General Discussion
1

As it stands a Carrier’s biggest issue is resupplying, the requirement to suck dry every egg and morpher in the hive to make traps or act as a spawn point on some maps is impossibly tedious unless you have very active burrowers keeping tunnels so you can keep going back.

As a caste it is encouraged to make traps, and for the most part they can sometimes work, it’s funny when they do but marines will usually shoot them out.

It can slap huggers on people, but has very little health to support it doing that at the front, being able to die super easily.

It recovers health and plasma incredibly slowly compared to other drone evolutions, making it fundamentally a weaker support caste in terms of weeding, or sustaining pheromones (that make your plasma count fuckin minimal if you do)

Then there’s eggsac, it’s genuinely super fun to play, droppin lil’ egg mines to help friends cap, let huggers spawn from them. But even then the caste suffers immensely from terrible plasma regeneration, health and 0 armour, but the increased accuracy to hit the larger carrier.

It has abilities which are objectively trolling to use, like hucking huggers which immediately get shot and have a huge cooldown to turn on, or the contentious act that make other xenos flame you - carrying eggs because resupplying sucks.

As it stands I place 16 traps, then go eggsac when I play carrier because the resupply is simply just not worth it. Carriers feel like a t1, not a t2. Compare it to other t2 drone evolutions, the Hivelord, a master of building, the bane of marine pushes, and massive plasma battery, and Burrower, one of the most infamous castes in the game by people like PIG. Whereas… Carriers can spawn huggers, make a few traps… and kinda just exist. No marine fears a carrier unless it’s a pure 1v1 and the carrier lucks into frenzy tackling you to slap a hugger. Assuming you don’t kill it with the middling health pool, unimpressive speed and so on.

Edit:
All frontline capping can just be done by sentient huggers, invalidating the t2 caste in entirety. Or alternatively ghosts eat all your huggers and die, getting no hugs and forcing you to do tedious resupply. It feels like this entity which is genuinely horrific, carrying many horrible, scuttling huggers is aimless at the moment. If we solidify it into a better frontline caste, maybe that would justify it being a t2?

8 Likes
2

The simplest and easiest way to make sure every single hive has a Carrier is to add a bit of flavortext to their ‘nurtured’ facehuggers (with a pinker sprite, I don’t care) who impregnate hosts with a whopping two larva.

Otherwise, I could see a lot of benefit from giving them one of the drone Strains, allowing carriers to heal sisters with plasma like normal or to heal them immediately by expending an egg, or to convert eggs into resin fruit with some helpful regeneration.

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2 Likes
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I don’t think Carriers need more strains, the first focus should be making the main version fun to play. Even if Eggsac was just merged into normal carrier (+ the plasma regen) that’d at least mitigate the horrible resupply issue

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4

Would be nice to have thrown huggers useful again.

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5

Maybe base carrier should generate huggers over time? Why not? Huggers are kinda free anyway because you can just put bursted bodies in the egg morpher.

And I kinda like the idea of buffing carrier’s huggers (especially sentient) in some way. 2 larva sounds too much, but if sentient huggers get default hug stun instead of current short stun, it would be very useful.

4 Likes
6

Generating huggers over time honestly would be an excellent QOL change.

1 Like
7

I will briefly underline the main issue with carriers, both base and eggsac.

Carrier issues:

  • Abysmal plasma regeneration and plasma count. - Eggsac + Base

  • Hugger AI is extremely dumb. - Marines can walk in to huggers which have been dropped and thrown without any risk for nearly the whole life cycle of the hugger. - Eggsac + Base

  • Lack of basic building tools - As a carrier, you are by design, designed to lay traps and ambush marines. Due to the change in meta, structures are much easier to destroy yet we’ve had no actual changes regarding that. (Removal of pylon, not a bad thing but only Queen, hivelord and drone can build, and that is if the drone is not a specialised strain, meaning the building pool is still small yet destruction of structures has been made much simpler) - Eggsac + Base

  • Sentient Huggers - These players have no real reason to stay with the carrier, most usually spawn on you and run off, usually dying swiftly, leaving you with less huggers and no real positive interaction. Addressing that or even being able to carry/throw sentient huggers/incentivise them staying with you, would be a step in the right direction. - Egg-sac and base

  • Eggs being restricted to hive weeds - Placing eggs as an egg sac carrier is a miserable experience, made worse by some issues above. It takes a while to fully make a cluster, during this time, your egg production is usually hampered during this time. Then, as a builder caste - You lack the ability to make ANY defences, so even if you are fortunate enough not to have the are CAS/Mortared, the marines see it a mile off and can merely shoot the eggs, making this an extremely unrewarding experience which never really has any pay off. Egg-sac and base

4 Likes
8

Two larva just leads to one carrier player sitting in the hive completely undermining any attempts at further balance morrow setup.

1 Like
9

Unmentioned so far, but Carrier also counts as T3 for tunnels at least, so it’s horrendously slow, and since they have no health or armor, they’re forced to be really careful if doing backline stuff.

So, remove the big size tunnel penalty and see how that pans out as a small buff, because it is absolutely a buff to tunnel fast and lose wall-tearing.

As it stands, carrier is objectively worse than a burrower in every way except frontline hugger support, and that’s not even that good of a strat to begin with. Not to mention very boring. Acid traps are just overall more useful than hugger traps, barring some edge cases. Burrower is both more mobile and tankier than a carrier, has more utility with tunnels, and is a much smaller sprite to click.

3 Likes
10

Carrier needs a movement speed buff (like 10%) and maybe a tackle buff so it can be the BEST xeno tackler in the hive. Maybe a tail trip ability that can pair with throw hugger. Maybe throw hugger automatically hugs downed or incapacitated marines to pair with tail trip. Lastly, reduction of plasma cost for resin holes instead of buffing its plasma. makes burrower stronger too.

3 Likes
11

I think that giving one of the slower, weaker, and least combat-capable castes who can be killed unlike structures all the way in the hive a bonus to burst larva isn’t an issue.

The worry of course is that 100% of caps would go through them, which would be broken if they did: However, this ignores the reality of many players who over-slash their hosts so that tracking down a specific caste for a hug is not viable.

Secondly, dragging someone from the frontline to one of the single worst options for the front line means that the Xenos put their larva factory at risk: The closer the Carrier+ is, the riskier the cap. This offers more engagement to players on bothsides, as it makes those Xeno plays exciting and dangerous, but opens marines up for rewarding counterplay with air support and long-ranged weaponry. Both are less frustrating than losing an egg-morpher to an OB on the front, or getting devoured and going on a five-minute trip all the way back to the hive.

Thirdly: it has now eaten a T2 slot. While the value of a single tier 2 slot could be argued, losing the bulk of power within a hive is no laughing matter, and it’s a unique exchange of resources over the simple plasma, hive structures, and time that Xenos currently deal in. You need to invest in the growth of the hive to be paid in it’s power later.

Finally, as a balancing concession: You could make it so that the two-larva huggers are restricted. Either it only applies to huggers the carrier directly drew from their own pool and applied themselves to ensure they must prioritize engaging in more of the battle to reap their rewards, or anyone spawning as a ‘nurtured hugger’ spends two huggers from the inventory: severely depleting the pool if spammed.

This all sounds like a way to not only promote more strategic and thoughtful play amongst the whole hive, but to add value to an under-utilized caste and make their gameplay more exciting, all while pushing them towards a playstyle that allows marines more room for counterplay than watching as a random hugger runs up to someone being tackle-spammed by three other xenos.

2 Likes
12

now that i think about it…carrier is literally a drone strain that requires evo points…well it would be if we chose to do that

if carrier was nerfed to only carry a few huggers it could literally be a drone strain since it trades building and all that jazz

2 Likes
13

Bring back shaman plz

14

Some people were talking in discord about lore effects on humans after being hugged

Would be cool to implement them in some way, if hugging marines gave benefits to xenos other than impregnation, like making marines hallucinate or see things it might provide an advantage to xenos, or at least make for some potentially cool RP scenarios, and make carrier a bit more worthwhile in the process

15

forgive me for asking, but what is shaman? never heard of it

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small issue with this, if it causes the effects for the marine then it’d cause the hugged marine to notice they are hugged if they arent already, maybe an effect where they are tackles a ton easier to help reclaim caps could help

1 Like
17

I mean usually marines know when they’ve been hugged tho, but I see what u mean.
Also making hugged marines easier to cap would be cool too, give a consequence instead of some guy just getting hugged and running around like nothing happened for 20 mins

18

Hugged are slightly easier to capture, sentinel neuro stuns them instead of slowing, that’s it.

Shaman was a carrier strain that could kill eggs to give AoE buffs.

I once saw an invaluable eggsac carrier fighting a retreat with a queen and a couple T2s, spamming eggs to slow marines down, but that was before the change that added a long cooldown to egg generation, and the hive core cooldown implementation. Can’t really fight retreats as well when base weeds are so fragile and your entire caste breaks when the hive core is lost (no hive weeds, no eggs)

1 Like
19

Give them some niche powers

Like i would do is make carrier being able to uniquely plant eggs on normal weeds.

They could then lay traps. They could rebuild the hive if the core is down.

They could put eggs near the front for huggers to spawn at.

Etc.

1 Like
20

Remove playable huggers.

Each hug will give a benefit to the hive or carrier or ally

1 Like