Base lurker caste is on par with T3s boy doesn’t even need any help, he just pounces, crits you and waits until you inject emergency or just fall over after which it drags you or finishes you.
So unless you get lucky and it misses its pounce your good as dead without any chance of survival. Oh yeah, did I mention it can cap you while your stunned under its pounce and the amount of time your stunned a face hugger from offscreen has enough time to pounce you and render you gone for good?
Yeah, a crusher can’t do the same or a ravager since you have a chance against them in solo.
To be fair, lurkers are a staight up 1v1 caste that fair very badly once it’s a 2v1. Because not only can you mitigate the stun to 0 if you shake your friend up, but the lurker has essentially no pounce until like 7 seconds after it ounces you the first time.
So if a lurker pounces you, and you have nobody near you, then you just gotta ask yourself the question of “why u lone?”.
Its still a 2v1 caste, since you disable the person you lunge first with frac and near death. And the other person can’t really kill u 1v1 most of the time because of your escape options.
Just takes a bit of finesse, like not going in when unnecessary.
I’d argue 3v1 very high chance of victory for lurker, if marines dont defend eachother. It’s very hard to get out of a lurker’s range once you’re in it so you can just poke them to death. It’s all about picking fights tho.
I hate fighting lurkers personally because i believe invis point-and-click instakill is a cancer mechanic… Skill issue tho because i can’t actually discern an invis lurker in most environments, nor take MD.
I don’t know where you are getting your experience from, or what scenario other then skill issue a 2v1 isn’t heavily favored by marines.
First of, if they are right next to each other, you have the advantage of surprise (you get 2 slashes, maybe 3) before the other dude just starts mag dumping you. And if you take 10 normal hits from an M41A, you are at 10 hp, where any stray bullet will end you. And that’s coupled with the fact that unless it’s a light armpit user, you have like a 30% chance to give the other guy a frac, or lower.
And in a 3v1? You are suicidal as a lurker if you pounce into a 3 man, and it doesn’t matter if you are a prime or not, you will be lucky to survive.
I think one big part. Marines don’t really value the “direction” of a front, being where most marines want to go. Everyone just follows a random person, and that is why it’s so disorganized.
If you want a cohesive front you need a goal - so like, if everyones at west beach, say go to west caves. That way more troops will know what to do, and will be more efficient. A front that knows what it’s doing is dangerous, but a front that is skirmishing without organization is useless.
I’d say it’s a lot rarer for a directionless front to frag out then a directional front. After all, a single marine fighting u is next to useless.
Ofc, as xeno you can realize this and avoid directional fronts - since they always have a goal of where they’re moving. Or disorganize them with things like area of effect abilities - queen scree, burrower stomp, etc. Single target xenos (warrior, runner, lurker) struggle if marines don’t overextend, since they are very restricted in movement. However, with marine cohesion, it’s very rare for fronts to stay standing after any punishment. A lot of individual marines also take up a lot of firing lanes with their poor movement, and REALLY makes fronts inefficient.
Ofc it dont matter what command says, since people will still skill issue and do nothing in bad morale/disconnected fronts. Only groundside marines can do like (say “Go go go! West beach! On me!”)
Knowing when to fight is all good, but you generally DON’T want to fight a marine 2v1 straight on, since it’s disadvantageous. You need to wait for either one of them to get some distance away from the other so the other one doesn’t intervene.
Experiences are heavily skewed by CM being dependent on a top 10% of marine and xeno players doing 90% of the work.
Most xenos who are bald and don’t know how to effectively chain combos aren’t memorable and die quickly, only exposing a handful a marines to them, whereas the one prime vampire who lives from round start to round end and stacks 30 kills is going to have been encountered by the entire marine population (and be public enemy #1).
The vast majority of people’s frustration against xeno castes is mostly because a good, skilled xeno player who knows when to disengage and fight is going to extremely hard to kill, and also frag a shitload relative to a similarly skilled marine (which is by design, as xenos are ridiculously outnumbered in most cases) + said skilled xeno player will be encountered a LOT purely because they know how to stay alive and frag.
I’d definitely say a prime vampire could 100% take on 3 marines and get away with it. Whether they kill them though, depends on whether those marines are intelligent enough to force the lurker to disengage or fluoride-starers.
A vampire is entirely different skill set wise then the normal lurker. Vampire is a MOBA assassin with more AOE and survivability (both having armor and life stealing abilities), while base lurker is the 1v1 master.
And just to throw it out there, I have a lot of experience with base lurker, but only like an hour at best with vamp.
Ah, fair. Yeah, base lurkers don’t have a fun time fighting groups of marines. They can pounce and break a few limbs and run away, but they can’t shit all over marines while healing and doing frequent stuns like vamps do.
I disagree. Most of the times in 2v1 you can only land two slashes before disengaging for at least 15 seconds. This is nothing. Otherwise you’re getting PBed or bursted or UBSed into burst. It really depends on the skill of your enemy. You can even 5v1 bravo NPCs if they shoot each other, but you cannot expect everyone to be extremely unrobust. So against competent marines you really can’t easily win 2v1, a reminder that all it takes to completely negate your stun is one shake. And after your stun is removed, you have no advantages. You’re slow, you have big delay between slashes, not much HP and no armor. Your only chance is hit and run, but since invisibility cooldown is 15 seconds, your enemy can disengage easily in the time.
Lurker is the best illustration of a players ability to, at a glance, determine whatever or not nearby marines are astoundingly bad at the game or not.
When I play Lurker there is a huge difference in my willingness to start an engagement based on whatever one of the marines has tried to look as distinctive as possible because they are a long term player invested in their character, while twitching around with a M37 and M4A1 with angled grip.
…and the NPC looking SG that is holding a HEDP, which they insist on holding while giving me the souto stare, only to prime and throw it just for it to explode their teammate who just escaped the pounce stun, then running away from the direction of the FOB, in an exact cardinal direction, firing down a corridor to let me know where to go once CDs are up.
Xenos suffer from the same problems of a young sentinel (the guide says to go with the worst T1 caste in the game to learn the game) with no gamesense, and their relative experience in the game and their specific caste being in plain language (“Mature”, “Elder”, “Ancient”, “Prime”) and the maximum length of their tag, much easier to read than a mental list of femstatics and their relative power levels.
Which is why prime xenos often play as (XX) in order to subvert expectations of marine players. I’ve observed marine players “I got you OWl” or a “that’s a prime crusher” .
Marines and any known force of armed soldiers require basically
Morale
Ammo
Armor
Support (CAS/MORTAR/Medical)
Intel
Reinforcements
Proper Command and positioning
Morale to charge the damn queen, Ammo to have the correct load for dealing with either T1s and what no, Armor for being not slow but also not frac’d to high hell to go die due to “MY FUCKING LUNGS DYIN HERE DOC”, Support CAS and Mortar are soulful when the enemy is in the Open a good lase can kill least two hostiles if their blind an deaf or clear out massive wall areas so marines aren’t again scared to push, Intel meaning who and whats there. If its a warrior people are gonna prioritize it if its a hedgehog rav people are gonna avoid it to the best of their abiity and get CAS to blow it up or someone else to stun it like SADAR if their lucky, Reinforcements to make sure if someone makes a mistake or gets knocked out of action they can be replaced by a refreshed and undamaged soldier to fill the gaps and start shooting.
Now onto Command… Command is a powerful tool. Hearding cats Major in College so. That is a joke Legally.
Anyway, Think of it like this telling people who want to get frags in and kills you might wanna tell them oh queen here wounded or perhaps tell them to go after some high target. Trust me they will get it done one way or the other IF they have the supplies to do it. Which means you have to trust req but even then you have to trust medical to not fuck their ball up so they fix the guys up and let em run back out into the field EVEN THEN you have to trust engineers to make sure cades are up to protect the damn medics… One man cannot pull the chain it requires several others to pull the chain of victory along and raise the flag over the corpse of xeno/Commie/Rebel scum alike. One flaw in this chain could have catastrophic effects for the operation at large say req runs out of funding and then Alpha has no more ammo and delta is enraged about it.
What I am trying to say here is a commander must put least most of the elements together to think how do they want to play it out and how do they wanna win. Cause you aint gonna win all of the fights going in thinking you will win makes it hard to think how are you going to recover from when you lose. and I mean lose bad. Cause if you don’t have a back plan things will spiral out of control…
Same with Xeno players as they have most of the time (If marines are good enough) A lower count of people cause hive doesn’t need a req system or a Medical system. The medical system is the floor. Aka the weeds and the drone healers and gardners (You guys are soulful. Keep it up droners). A good queen can figure out how they wanna win if the hive is willing to work together that means evoin to fill lost rolls like the much needed boilers, Ravagers, and Warriors for hive defense (And the Minor amount of defenders. Yes I know you exist but could you maybe stop beating my cades while fortified thanks.) Anyway. The point is strategy matters a lot more to xenos as you can’t just toss xenos at something and expect to win as if you lose one a lose is a lose but you can cap to get it back and oh god they just Ob’d the boiler oh fuck their pushing hella quick into hive. QUEEN WHATS THE PLAN!
Anyway TLDR
Plans require people willing to carry them out and enough people to carry them out
Commanders need to strategize and put people where they are needed and mostly but preferably always have a plan of action
People need to have a good sense of morale to keep on fighting. Doesnt Mean you need to lie to herd people all the time just don’t be a defeatist as you will put everyone else down if you are. ‘Its so over’ - Average Delta Marine after Delta Wipes
Exhale If I am missing anything else be free to redicule me and my nerd face. But oh I already did it so HAHA
But oh I already did it so HAHA