Currently their kit’s extremely boring, binary and frustrating to play against - they teleport next to you screenwide, apply a slow even if they miss and get to instantly tailstab (delay waited out mid charge channel) or just stomp to stun you, all the while having a shield that renders them immune to any counter.
Basically there’s nothing the marine can do aside from just taking the slashes, maybe PB himself in the preferred limb to avoid broken bones elsewhere. About as frustrating if not more so than perma stuns - in this case not even your team can do anything to help because the crusher cannot take damage during shield duration.
As for the crusher side it’s rather limited as well - after you brutalize some poor guy, you’ve no choice but to make the walk of shame towards the nearest xeno structure/corner before the shield runs out. They mostly die because they get bored of this cycle and overextend without shield, rather than any real misplay or outplay. The super short charge CD and cooldown reduction on slash is very rarely relevant as CD on shield has been raised sky high and charge cast time takes too long thus is rarely useful past the initial engage as it just exposes you to bullets.
As for how to fix this state of things I’d propose simply fleshing out what’s already there - put more emphasis on charge as the kit’s core and move most of it’s armor into directional armor (see charge) and add more displacement to it’s kit.
Base stats - reduce armor overall. Should have most up front, less on sides and even less on back but not so little that buck would two tap or otherwise annihilate it - concept of dir armor needs testing
Charge - Reduce the range to around 4 tiles, reduce the cooldown to roughly 3 seconds aswell as shorten cast time and raise directional armor so as to make shooting at it frontally pointless. Make dir armor persist for 2-3 seconds after the charge ends (as long as it keeps charging, armor persists?) as well as add a brief movement speed boost
Basically remove teleporting from screen edge while still letting it engage via movement buff, shift most of it’s defences towards the frontal area to encourage flanking it to bring it down. Cooldown to make it mobile mid engagement - ideally it would distrupt crowds charging around to maintain dir armor while marines fan out to flank vulnerable sides and box it in.
Stomp - leave as is, possibly CD regain on hitting charge successfully
Shield - remove.
See below
Slashes - replace cdr with shield gain - 15(?) for main target and 5(?) for each adjacent hit by slash AoE
Moving the on demand DR and shield into slashes to allow, encourage and reward fighting and distrupting crowds.
New abilities
Unnamed1 - let it toss a marine directly in front of it behind it, rooting for a short moment
Unnamed2 - let it kick a marine directly behind it several tiles back, stunning the marine
Pretty self explanatory I think, intended as either a combo or separate use to further displace marines and throw the xenos an easy marine to jump on.
Can be further decoupled by raising the throw distance of first so it doesn’t combo as easily or fused into one hotkey as a two step ability where using the first one switches to the second.
If coding 1 proves difficult or it faces some other issue keep 2 and use oppre prae toss for 1 instead.
Unnamed3 - a frontal shockwave that slows those affected
As an alternative to 1 or 2 or if they get fused or possibly to replace charge slow, dunno. Basically a “what if” if it struggles engaging.
Pretty easy to implement overall as most of it is existing code and new abilities could be added even to current kit. Mostly unsure if charge and directional armor would work well in proposed state.
Probably my last ideasguys for a while. I hate crushers.
I have a feeling you died to a crusher just 10 minutes before typing this.
Anyways, jokes aside: All it takes to defeat a crusher is fire, doesn’t matter which fire it is, you could just squirt some fire onto the thing and boom it’s done for the day, there’s absolutely nothing preventing you from using fire
As always, when in doubt, burn it to the ground
I’m all in for tweaking though, good ideas, especially:
Basically remove teleporting from screen edge while still letting it engage, shift most of it’s defences towards the frontal area to encourage flanking it to bring it down. Cooldown to make it mobile mid engagement - ideally it would distrupt crowds charging around to maintain dir armor while marines fan out to flank vulnerable sides and box it in.
I really love the idea of flanking a xeno, like flanking a tank with absurd front armor
Nah, I’ve hated and complained about base crusher kit pretty much since it was introduced so it’s not new salt. It used to be OP and frustrating but since shield changes it’s weak and still frustrating.
As for fire I’ve played crusher enough (ancient iirc) to know that doesn’t matter - normal fire is entirely ignorable and they can mostly shrug off blue fire because of the shield. Besides, once shield is down you can just burst them with AP so their stats ain’t the issue, the binary nature and shield focus is - shield on? OP. Shield off? Entering dchat.
Crusher is extremely slow, by removing its ability to teleport across the screen you will severely limit its capabilities to engage and disengage. Ok, you want to reduce wind-up, but at the same time you want to harshly reduce crusher’s armor, especially on flanks. It does not seem like a well-thought idea.
Crusher already outright melts without shield, now you want to both to reduce its armor and remove the only ability that lets it to frontline as a T3 (without it you melt, unless you’re in CQC area). Every T3 needs a disengaging ability in their kit, especially such a slow caste as crusher. Good luck running away or even charging away with zero armor on your back.
So please answer the question, how do you disengage? Ravs and praes have instant dashes/shields/speed. Your version of crusher would only have 4-tiles charge with a wind-up, that exposes your armorless back.
Addressed by movement speed increase on charge end.
Being invulnerable up front seems pretty strong to me for frontline purposes. Shield is also moved to slashes to help it soak.
Depends how it’d perform. Maybe I should have better highlighted that the numbers are by no means final as the entire idea for charge rework is highly experimental - frontal armor reliance like that needs to be tested to know how much it’d soak in practice.
As for how to handle this - depends on the windup speed we’d settle on and could either gain some side and back armor during charge windup or just have default side/back armor a bit higher. 4 tile charge obviously ain’t final either. Could end up a skill issue too if someone gets behind it to buck it - facing can be freely changed for the most part and nothing prevents it from charging sideways or even towards the front, then walking back with locked facing.
But yeah I agree that taking full buck damage might be excessive. Gonna edit the initial post to reflect.
Unironically - old Crusher charge windup Crusher becomes the base Crusher.
Plasma req for charge (but never an issue on weeds/only a very brief time to recover after multiple charges)
Does pretty decent damage on the charge - (bring back occasional delimbs Devs please)
Can be blocked, but given a few tiles of windup will knock down anyone who tries (with some minor damage during the initial charge up)
The strains are other Crusher variants like current basic Crusher and maybe a Crusher that is designed like a pseudo Defender (but has some reflective property akin to the hedgehog rav)?
Ravager is already far better than crusher and is fire immune.
He is already slow enough. Crusher already gets burst down and cannot heal from slashes like other t3s.
Aside from his very telegraphed charge… he can be run down by marines. And is slow.
Your suggestion to throw a marine BEHIND you would be awful. Crushers are marine body blocked to death enough as is.
Honestly what someone should do is take spikeyboy strain from ravager and put it on crusher. Makes no sense that rav can become tankier than a tank t3.