Let's talk about acid runner.

General Discussion
21

Wouldnt kill it, just make it a lot harder. Farming acid is a crutch. To remove that is important, because that makes acid runner more boring to play as.
But i agree that only one is to little. But unlimited is still not ok. Maybe max three slashes? Idunno, its a rutimentery number that can be changed as one pleases once the system is in place anyhow.

I suggested only one slash because then it should be easier to code. Being that you only need to check “if target has acid”. If you lower it to like three, you need to add a new stack for example to targets you hit( or whatever else someone migth come up with)

Wich brings the problems of:

  • How long should each stack take until its gone?
  • Should all stacks deplet all at once or one at a time?
  • Should you tie stacks to body acid, being that if acid is removed the stacks do so as well? And what kind of nigthmare would that inflict into the person that would code it?

Also yes, it would not incentivize to stay after all are slashed. But, if that is a problem it would also be a problem if, for exampel:
“You find a alone marine and give them one slash. Why would you stay and figth? You cant gain accid for your mlg montage multikill if you do.”
But realy. If they just run off to min/max accid gain instead of help figthing, its a skill issue. The big multikill is always flashy and tempting. But consident singel kills are ALWAYS worth more.
There is no need to reward that type of play heavily, because its already rewarded by an easier win. A little reward is a good idea though.

A nice insetive would help, but only really a wink. You dont need to push them with force into combat. If the player has fun to figth, they will do that on their own. And sitting in a corner slashing a marine with two other xenos spam tackeling the marine, is not a fun way to figth.

22

Acid runner has little actual counterplay, especially in situations with Z-level changes like anywhere near ladders or stairways, where all the problems it has are magnified.

Here’s the problem with how it actually works:

  • You hear the acid runner charging up for 10 seconds behind a wall in a vague direction somewhere that you could never hope to kill it (you don’t even get a chatbox warning for the direction)
  • your choice now is, drop everything and run, hopefully in the right direction, or wait for it to appear and maybe kill it, or even proactively assault where it is, but almost definitely just die
  • Suddenly the acid runner pops out
  • The acid runner explodes a half second later, before you could have even wielded your gun to shoot it
  • Even if you could have shot it in that time, there were 4 xenos blocking shots for it
  • Sometimes you get a queen screech thrown in for good measure first

The fact it’s even possible for an acid runner to be exposed for a literal tenth of a second and yet kill 20 people IS 100% a balance issue.

I think the greatest strength and utility of the acid runner, and what’s actually balanced about it - is being able to severely damage huge swathes of cadelines to enable xeno to push through stalemate situations similar to what marines can do. What I don’t find balanced is how little chance marines actually have of stopping an acid runner under actual gameplay conditions and especially if the runner player has an IQ over 20.

I don’t think acid runner needs big changes, but I do think it needs changes.

My first attempt at balancing the acid runner would be:

  • Remove the concept of ‘building up acid’; just make it an ability that can always be used right from the getgo.
  • Change the runner so it has to plant in place and THEN the timer counts down.
  • Health, damage resistance, timer length, size of explosion, length of time gas remains, warnings, etc. etc. can all be tuned AFTER the ability becomes a jump in and plant-in-place design.

This gives marines the option to actually shoot it
This removes the tedium of building up acid and makes the ability something that xenos can strategize around
It gives marines the option and TIME to disengage while knowing where to run away from
It prevents the most egregious balance issue of the runner popping around a corner/z-level and instantly killing 20 people

I think if you really wanted to see firsthand how badly balanced the acid runner is - just do a testmerge with acid runners always starting at full acid from the getgo. I think it’d be near constant xeno stomps.

2 Likes
23

Well, this is just not fair. Only time an acid runner can pop up and blow up a half a second later is with the ladders, but ladders only exist on Almayer and only marine hold near ladders is lower engineering. In every other case you would have more time to react. Acid runner while booming is quite slow and he wants to get in the middle of marines to get full effect. It takes some time to travel for acid runner and you have time to react.

Now let’s discuss the actual explosion. Yes, it can kill an entire screen of marines. But. It’s just acid damage. Acid damage don’t give you any permanent damage and is very easy to heal. You actually can even survive the explosion if you inject yourself with kelo and resist. If marines have reserves behind the exploded line, they will easily recover within like 5 minutes. If they don’t, well, then they were already hanging on a string.

I still agree it needs some nerfs, but some of you guys need to take some perspective.

24

Only time an acid runner can pop up and blow up a half a second later is with the ladders

You can do this literally anywhere there is a wall between the runner and marines.

25

Dying because someone walked in off screen and instantly exploded isn’t fun. The difference between a 20 second charge time and a 60 second charge time is irrelevant considering a runner will just time themselves to run in with less than several seconds before they explode giving marines zero chance to survive outside of sheer luck, incompetence or both.

Its basically the Xeno’s OB, but imagine that the Xenos get no warning of what direction it is approaching from and there is a high chance you could get stun locked and forced to tank the OB. Or that your time to react is <5 seconds and you are moving at human speeds not xeno.

Not a great feeling

1 Like
26

Revert this PR which made it survive two pbs and buffed its acid gain amount on standing targets and barely reduced the gain on stunned targets. Also made it so it didn’t have to commit two slashes to start gaining any acid.

27

I wonder if there is an instance when dying is fun. Probably only suiciding with OT nade.

Fun is very subjective, I think you can argue that when front getting wiped by an acid rouny deadchat is almost always excited.

28

I still think the largest issues of acid runner are fundamental to the caste and it’s design and that rebalancing it in its current state without nearly a full rework will not solve the issues.

Acid runner is a T1 caste that has higher game deciding potential than even some T3’s.

29

I heavily disagree with this point, dying with a fight can be a lot of fun. It’s part of the game, attempting to challenge yourself to see the odds that you can overcome via skill. It’s why people dislike dying to CAS or Queen screech, because there is no counterplay besides running away (queen can deflected if they rush you in the open but ignore that for the point of this argument)

The counterplay to acid runner often doesn’t exist/isn’t available, it’s just “oh shit an acid runner has entered my screen”, instant explosion, then you’re dead and xeno’s push and now you’re perma. While not even acid OB is that way, I think the best ones that have the largest impact from skilled runners end up that way, leading to players feeling cheated about how they can be 1 shot by a T1 caste that was on the edge of their screen

30

Yeah, you know what, when marines have CAS (with 3 screens offset), mortars, OBs, (and on a side note, stims, m46c, lots of other bs) maybe acid runner is actually pretty fair in comparison.

31

bad gamedesign versus bad gamedesign, we should be trying to snip it all off, not justify it.

32

We don’t have instantly hitting OB’s and mortars - they’re fired at a static location, they can’t track (CAS sort of does, but it’s pre-planned), xeno players get audio warnings and in-chat directional warnings, and there’s a long windup to give players time to actually move away from the impact location.

The comparative change to acid runner would be an actual windup (e.g. plant in place and wait 10 seconds) - which it doesn’t functionally have right now, because a 30 second windup or a 50 second windup, or a 5 second windup doesn’t matter when the runner is able to actively move around, chase people, hide from damage, etc.

Can you imagine how unbalanced an OB would be if a staff officer could actively adjust its landing position and guide it down onto xenos as its falling? It’s like the windup before it lands wouldn’t even matter at all - some xeno players would hear it, and that’s it, it’s over for them, because the OB will just be guided to them regardless of running away from it - and that’s how it is with the acid runner right now.

33

So imagine if to call in mortar you had to run to where you want to call it, lay down, turn green, make the most distinct sound in the entire game, and wait 20 seconds, dying or going crit cancels it.
Oh also the xenos all have guns, because fuck you.

On the upside the mortar hits instantly when you finish, that totally makes up for everything else.

34

If you made the runner be stunned for 10 seconds right before it blows, it would never do anything other then respawn the player. Hell, even 5 seconds, and teetering on 3. Because marines can kill T3s faster then that if it stands still.

1 Like
35

The mortar is already static, it doesn’t move from where it’s called in

and xenos have a lot of options for blocking LoS (walls, resin walls, gas), stunning (queen screech), or blocking damage (e.g. defenders) that it really is not a problem for the runner to plant in place. There are a whole slew of tools at the disposal to make it work and that’s before we even get into adjusting stats on the acid runner itself.

36

Honestly, just make it so a 1000 acid runner can load up into a boiler and be shot at cords like a cannon. Give it the same messages as OB and boom we built something.

1 Like
37

The mortar doesn’t have a significant chance of making the caller have to wait 20 minutes to play again if they fuck up, and can’t be cancelled in any way. Mortar also is up from basically the start of the game to the end, can be used in fairly quick succession, and doesn’t require any skill beyond communication.

And they’re all impractical to use for this application.

if you’re behind a line of walls, you’re in xeno controlled territory and you’re not going to kill anything.

Gas doesn’t last nearly long enough, and marines can just spray into the cloud, they’ll have a fair chance of killing you if everyone does it.

Again, doesn’t last long enough, everybody is going to stand up and unload their entire mag into you.

Marines can just… walk around the defender and shoot you (unless you somehow manage to get a full entourage of steelcrest defenders)

My point wasn’t that you can’t get into place at all, but that you’ll die even if you do.

1 Like
38

Again, acid runner is a lot weaker than even incend mortar in terms of damage. You need one defib to bring the dead back to life. At least with incend mortar they would go below -200 and you would have to deal with it. You cannot really spam acid runner as you can spam mortar. You don’t risk anything (except FF) while using mortar, meanwhile if you die during for the hive — this is it. No respawn, minus one xeno, and you just blew away your chance. And mind you, to get better effect, you need to take higher risk. You need to get in the middle of the crowd to get maximum effect, thus they will have more time to react while you’re traveling. You are a lot slower during for the hive too. Unless some borderline cases (one ladder on Almayer and locations with a lot of walls, although in that case you still get audio que to react to) you always have more than half a second to react.

Even screech + boom is a bit overrated, because most marines know how to dodge screech. If your entire platoon got hit by a screech, chances are you are fucked even without an acid runner. There are many deadly screech combos: zerker, base crusher and even boiler can capitalise on a good screech significantly, so acid runner isn’t even unique here. You can argue that they are not T1s, but unlike acid runner they can potentially do this every screech and take a lot less risk if they somehow fucked up.

Also, people don’t know, but you need clear los to hit someone with a boom. Boiler gas can actually fuck you over with bad timing.

1 Like
39

so what you’re saying is stun-play for marines is UP eheheheheheh

40

I like acider because as a caste you can run into crowds of enemies nonstop and get bonebreaks. Since marines are bad at shooting - its a skill issue when you aren’t suppressed. It’s also one of the few castes in the games to have NO stun, which opens up a lot of interesting counterplay.

Solo acid rouny is honestly not even that good a fighter aside from its speed. The low health makes it very difficult to stay in engagements. its best purpose is to follow up on other xeno’s ccs for an instakill - but only very few do that. Xeno combat relies on stuns more often then not, since stuns translate into instakills on any target.

Simply click the sprite.

It’s not op since it dies after 3 kills always (depending on your skill), that’s the way it works for acid rouny. You risk a lot to take on fights (as a solo), so it isn’t “the ultimate efficient fighter”. While its fire burns bright, it also burns the shortest.

Base rouny and acid rouny have 2 different playstyles. I’d say it has a similar potential to normal rouny - the thing about normal rouny, its even WORSE with the idea of “If you’re fighting someone good, you’re forced to run back and heal”. You can’t teamfight nearly as effectively with base rouny either just because it has way less sustain. I’d argue, base rouny relies on a crutch too- being its stun chaining. That stun chaining does help a lot though ofc, since shutting down 1 person can win a fight more often then not.

I do think it’s easier to just instakill using base rouny w/ 1 pounce, 2 slashes, walk 2 tiles away, then pounce, 2 slashes, walk 2 tiles away (so you have a good aim), repeat over and over. Especially in 1v1. Works against 90% of opponents. But once it gets to 2 or 3 good players you’re blocked from action.

But in teamfights its often useless. If you want to go full aggro as base rouny, you have to very specifically pick your fights. That’s where acid rounys potential for skill expression lies.

I feel like the ultimate use of acid rouny is to fight 1v2 or 1v3 since it’s a really fun caste to do so as. Or even to go full stupid and just charge into the front trying to dodge every single person. Just play FULL AGGRO as the evil acid rouny. Your strength lies in your speed, your speed is how you get damage, and your damage is how you suppress.

In the end, how many times have you died in ANY open area against an acid rouny 1v1? I’d say it’s a low number if you know how to avoid acid rounys. Just position better. It can’t backline against good players since it can’t stop you from shooting it - it’s inherently a 1v1 caste where it only wins if they outplay you. If you get outplayed, it is often a skill issue. The caste has NO stun abilities so you can fight back.

It’s only really scary in backliner groups, since other backliners can do the stun. Acid runner has double slash speed, so it has highest slash dps in the game so its the best one to follow up on stuns. (except for oppressor on stunned targets). Ofc, other castes have abilities which bring their dps to a higher level - double slashes, hard ccs, etc - it’s just an instakill tactic in general to only follow up on stuns. You can’t do shit as marine if they only pop out to instakill people

Bad fronts are bad too, since acid rounys can get in range to kill you without getting shot at by your teammates. If you have no cqc skills, thats the best way to sharpen it - 2 pb bursts will get it away on any front, but it wont kill it unless your team follows up. You may have a bonebreak at that time - which means you’re basically dead if the acid rouny can easily cleave through your front like that, since other xenos would also be planning to assault, and acid rouny is best when you rely on the chaos of an engagement.

Otherwise you need to manage to gap close with surprise and dodging in order to get kills - which you CAN do pretty often, but takes skill and the large survivability in order to get away. If you REALLY hate acid rounys. Just flip on full auto. It makes it so easy to fight them,

For the explosion - I think it’s silly. it’s a bit op i do agree, and if your gonna nerf the caste focus on that, not the rest of it. I also think it’s intentionally op, just like mortar.