this is acid goop in a serious discussion
lurkers can take the damage from the buddy unless he throws a grenade at you but thats not good for anybody
If the lurker is a real cheeser he knows how to make you enter paincrit in 5 seconds. Nothing you can do about that. You gotta trick the noobish ones.
Lately when wandering alone, i’ve had success acting like I enter pain crit shortly after the first pounce. They start thinking you can be capped and start dragging. You get up and BLAM. Then they tailstab you and your guy has an aneurysm before falling over.
Or it had low enough health and you just made it fall for the oldest trick in the book, and may thus feel super good about yourself for fragging a lurka. Then you enter paincrit
6 Likes
My lurker gameplay for the last few years have been standing at containers staring at the 5 most robust marines on the force. So if you nerf the lurker further to cater towards it not being a threat even to complete baldies, those most robust marines would have a field day, this would lead to lurker being even more dead and it becoming the “I wanna grief the hive” kind of caste. And in turn, those robust marines would have nobody to fight against.
I think CM is not celebrated enough for it’s gameplay actually forcing the proper roleplay on the playerbase. You either learn your role and play by the rules, or you ignore them and just die. Even if you play by the rules you often die anyway. CM is a horror RPG. Sure, there are many players who dislike that and just want to be catered to, but there are just so many other games that cater to your basic power fantasy. Those games even have way better engines.
10 Likes
I think poster should get to elder lurker working the frontlines and then tell us if their opinion has changed. I do backlines as a lurker because the frontline is a mess and you will be body blocked to hell if you are stealthed. If you are on the backlines you are very weak and if you get slowed by shotgun, grenades, or catch on fire you are finished. Maybe they do have elder but I doubt it.
2 Likes
Did you stare menacingly?
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I think a lot of marines over-estimate just how durable they really are. You should either be directly next to a marine who you know can shake you up or be ready to suffer the consequences.
Lurker is kinda stupid tho in that it can just instafrac you from one pounce, very little skill involved and it takes not even a second to do so. Im not a big fan of the whole crippling strike not having a slash cooldown, takes a lot of the risk away and in many scenarios you are basically impervious unless you are unlucky enough to stumble into a marine who has insane reflexes with his shotgun.
3 Likes
Very true. You are not in fact Rambo just pretending to be. Accept the risk and have fun.
1 Like
I don’t agree with how you’ve presented scouts in this.
Scouts are amongst the best equipped to fight off lurkers alone, given they have long-ranged stuns, incend, a god-tier bayonet if you put it on their gun, and the ability to cloak forever.
Scouts might be fucked 9/10 times after a lurker pounces them sure, but a lurker is also fucked 9/10 times if a scout manages to stunlock them, after hitting incend, and while making use of their bayonets.
Something-something he who strikes first wins sun tzu art of war quote 
2 Likes
something something lurkers will fuck almost anyone if they’re alone, and scouts are usually alone
scouts will fuck any t2 or t1, even if they’re with teammates. It takes skill sure, but it’s still busted and nigh uncounterable.
1 Like
What else lurker is supposed to do if not give fracs? Imagine pouncing someone, then having to disengage because only PVTs walk alone, and then marine just takes a sip of unga and outheals all the damage you dealt. Fracs at least give lurker some sense of accomplishment.
2 Likes
Yeah I mean you’re right in that sense and maybe I wasnt clear that I do think that lurker as a caste has to be “overtuned” (not saying u said that) at least in comparison to the normal xeno otherwise it stands little to no chance to fight in the backline. That isnt some 4d move from me to try justify a rework of lurker or anything, im just saying its really stupid that all a lurker has to do to frac you is pounce you, frac twice, your teammates have no counterplay for the most part as the lurker is gonna get out of dodge faster than most people can react.
I just wish it was designed differently, the tactic of pounce insta-doubleslash yields almost no risk. Idk how much adding a cooldown for slashing on crippling strike would change lurker gameplay other than not being able to get free fracs on people you should definetly not be pouncing, once you reach a certain point of skill, at which that tactic becomes moreorless uncounterable.
2 Likes
I get that getting near instant fracs from lurkers is annoying as shit, but lurkers being good at ambushing (and frontlining, which I dislike) serves a very important incentive in forcing marines to not run around on their own. Lurkers are fragile and rely heavily on their pounce-cs-slash combo, something that can easily result in a monumental fuckup if they have a competent buddy with a shotgun and the arcane knowledge of clicking on your victim with help intent.
A lot of the time people illustrate how highly skilled players can muscle memory chain their abilities together for truly horrific effects, and whilst I think such interactions should be nerfed to be less slimy (you shouldn’t just lose immediately without counterplay if you get pounced once, there should be several chances as with runners), I also think it’s kind of… just hyperfocusing a bit. Put someone like OWL in most frontline xeno roles and they’ll make anything look broken- Xenomorphs have a high skill ceiling and the players that can reach it are almost unkillable, even if the average xeno player struggles.
I’m just hoping that base lurkers don’t get overnerfed into the ground, as true as it is that 10% of players contribute 90% of the round impact, a T2 designed to punish solo marines shouldn’t be balanced to be ‘average’ for 1v1s in the hands of a skilled player, lest it end up being impotent for the 90% of players who use the caste.
TL;DR I believe that some aspects of lurkers are overtuned and should be nerfed so you can’t disintegrate people on the first pounce, but I’m hesitant in having it go too far. I think the skill ceiling should go down so the top-performing players can’t slime you without counterplay, but the skill floor remains unchanged.
Re: New players being victims, I don’t think this critique is necessarily valid. New players are often the first casualties of every single combat encounter because newbies lack game knowledge and thus do reckless things such as wandering alone, NOT using awareness aids (binocs, MD), inability to resist (no shotguns, flamers), and just walking right into the most obvious traps. Bald marines are always the first to get capped, because they walk right into the open arms of warriors behind doors. They walk into eggs, They fail to kill huggers or lessers. They fail to… well, force xenos to disengage in general.
Similarly, bald xenos overextend. Bald xenos run into fire and CAS and everything under the sun. They fail to use their abilities to disengage or prevent McProtagonist from fragging them into oblivion with HEDP stunlock slime. They grief you with bodyblocks and end up wasting larva.
These are just new players being new players, it’s a universal experience across every single game imaginable. Newbies suck and will end up being cannon fodder, they will die and if they like the game (because if you ragequit from dying to a lurker, which is at least PARTIALLY your fault, then you will NOT have a good time in CM, where you die to things completely out of your control, i.e. god-awful fucking teammates like Close Xeno Support and bodyblocks), they’ll learn, get better and eventually become fraggers.
Even if lurkers were removed as a caste, the experience of the newbie wouldn’t change, they’d just end up walking into an egg and die instantly anyways. Hence, I don’t believe that argument for nerfing lurkers holds up.
3 Likes
People should play lurker before complaining about lurker. If you are not cheesing caps, your overall impact on the round is about zero. Again, if you kill someone in backline, they will get revived in 95% of cases. But that’s a huge if. Good luck finding a lone PVT. Most people understand the threat of lurkers, so they move at least in pairs. And against groups (unless they are complete baldos) all you can do is to skirmish hoping to get a frac from CS. But if you slip you fucking die. That’s it. Base lurker is a relatively low risk low reward gameplay. Please don’t tell me that dealing a frac or two (or even a few non-perma kills) over the course of your life is a decent accomplishment. You can do rather decent in groups, though, marines can always get a bigger group. If you get a nice team wipe, marines will just throw at you everything they have and recover the corpses. And no, distracting marines from hive assault is not a good thing, because they stop feeding caps in order to get onto you.
The xeno to marine ratio is 1:3. So you need to perma at least 3 guys to break even. Most of the times lurker players don’t even get 1 perma kill. Unless you frontline/sideline/pouncecapping or anything else but what you are supposed to do.
4 Likes
Honestly the cloaked pounce into slashing combo is not the most interesting or difficult thing out there. I’d support them losing this initial killing potential in return for some actual staying power in combat.
As it is, lurker is quite bland with you ending up spending a lot of time waiting for cloak to cooldown.
2 Likes
Nah, I am just going to complain. Tis tradition.
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i need to mald reply on forum at least once a week to stay sane. extra replies for rng one hit fracs
2 Likes
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