Carrier is just outshined by everyother support caste that theres no need to play carrier besides be a mobile eggmorpher.
(Yes i saw the other comments)
Giving carrier the unique ability to place eggs off of hive weeds sounds good with a limit to how many can be placed.
Or
making carrier a frontline caste in the sense that when they hug a marine, nearby xenomorphs get a surge of strong frenzy or debuff marines with a slow because they just saw their friend get captured infront of them.
Just a thought
Here’s some shitty strain ideas
For every hug the carrier gets. That carrier gets better stats (obviously no combat buffs)
Or make carrier a threat you cant ignore
Give carrier extra health and an ability that lets them topple a marine for a good second or two and if the carrier hasn’t been interupted by any damage they get a free captured marine
I don’t have a complete design in my head yet, but here are some ideas:
The main philosophy should be making carrier into a hugging glass canon.
Keep the carrier tackle, if not make it even better.
Lower carrier HP and give him a shield provided by every hugger. Each hugger provides X shield and when you lose that amount, a hugger dies.
Give hugger a berserker-like AOE hugging ability that has some windup.
Carrier also needs some kind of working long range hugger throw, but I struggle to find a way where carriers won’t be abusing marines in chokes with that.
Upping plasma regen and giving it plasma transfer would be a simple buff.
I’ve been arguing for comingling of strains such as Drone-Gardener with eggsac (no fruit) to help with cross play and upping the value of taking a T2 slot.
Marines can literally spam airstrikes and mortar fire to clear xeno postions or hold them off.
If you ask me, two or three carriers abusing a choke because the marines are too retarded to use grenades or find an alternative path is an acceptable risk of giving carriers a functional long range hug.
Remember when huggers used to leap across an entire screen if someone opened an egg at the right moment? We dealt with that for years without THAT much abuse. We can survive the weakest support caste doing something similar.
I was thinking about a hugger shield but it doesnt make sense in-lore, xenos dont want death to the little ones and even more so their eggs. But besides that i can see it working but it being a black hole for players that try to make a play but just end up wasting huggers, going back and forth every time they get hurt for more huggers.
If we REALLY want to talk lore, it’ll depend on the author in question. The movies made it clear that while xenos had a willingness to sacrifice their lives to eliminate a threat, the Queen didn’t seek out needless conflict that would endanger her offspring.
Many of the books/comics paint the xenos as prioritizing the Queen’s life above all else, willing to sacrifice themselves to do so. There’s an argument to be made that in the grand scheme of protecting the Queen from a hostile attacking force, that the life of a hugger is less than a fully grown alien up the hierarchy.
I always assumed a hugger/egg was worth more but tomato potato.
I was thinking back to the “Accounts of the earth war” as those were the ones I’ve had.
There are other little buffs you can do. If you want to get “fancy” give the carrier passives that buff huggers and eggs.
Huggers latch faster, jump farther, and have more health near a carrier.
Maybe carrier placed eggs are hardened… and immune to bullets (but not fire or explosions). With wider hugging ranges
Allow carriers to “toggle” eggs for hugger spawns removing the cooldown to join as hugger. So you build the interaction between player huggers and the carrier player.
Hosts burst faster in line of sight with carriers.
Got a little too carried away with that last one but i understand.
Carrier and her huggers always deserved some love, but there needs to be some kind of restructure when it comes to carrier running back and forth to resupply.
I think having the egg morphers capacity for huggers to be increased and shared across eachother would be better for frontlining with.
Yeah, unfortunately it does somewhat show. People burn through huggers very fast, and thats even assuming you have the sentient huggers spawn turned off.
The traps have been nerfed for a while, as it is now, traps are glaringly obvious and you’re limited on places you can put them, usually being items left on the floor by the map spawn and usually in the exact same spots every time. Saturating the area with traps has limited use as after one is trigger, marines usually spot the others due to their predictable locations, it’s not uncommon to see many of your traps be destroyed at once.
You used to be able to put them in doorways, or move xenomorph bodies and place the bodies over the trap, but both of those methods no longer exist. Usually, the only time traps work is if the marine is extremely distracted, new or the marines forget carrier exists, as they’re a rarer sight.
Which should really be fixed. I didn’t understand why half of the good places to put traps were fixed because a bug would hide the trap under map decorations. That is literally the best place for them.
Infecting marines on the frontline is a noob trap anyway. Make it back to the hive and have a marine explode because they woke up by the time you made it home and they immediately arm the thirty grenades in their bag the moment you spit them up.
Maybe the easiest carrier buff would just be making it a T1, not a T2 slot, easier to evolve/de-volve into if the support is needed and you don’t have to touch it other than maybe reducing health