You all know this topic had to be made. I am unsure who said what to whoever so I don’t know if our complaints are being vocalized.
Anyways, Vampire Lurkers, what the fuck. It should not take an entire 15 man squad and 2 specialists (scout and sniper) making a total of 17 marines (i have no idea how many was with me it felt like 20+) to kill one vamp lurker.
I am unsure if this is true but I’ve heard xeno player OWL (this is not a complaint about him) has been abusing the absolute shit out of Vampire Lurker to get it nerfed and it’s been a solid month now, probably more. If you get in contact with him he’ll probably say he scores +100 kills a day cause vampire lurker strain’s abilities are broken. Soloing 1 marine, fine whatever. 2 marines, ok, but being able to take on a squad of 20 without losing ground is insane.
The main issues is the stun-lock gameplay and the healing factor. Why does a vampire lurker get two stuns and a healing ability? I don’t play xeno so I’m unsure whatever passive abilities it has as well.
Like I legit do not know what to say, the lurker strain has been complained for months and I don’t hear any future developments being made to do something.
hey now… we removed tailstab didnt we… its nerfed enough trust me bro trust me please… its nerfed
PLEASE DONT NERF IT PELASE OPLEASE I LOVE FEELING SPECIAL AND GETTING ALOT OF KILLS WITH THESE OP ABILITES PLEASE…please maine marine have mercy… please…
You know at first I thought vamp lurker was overpowered - moves super fast, does a stun/knock back at will, has an escape and an engage, can heal itself, is extremely potent off weed let alone on weed, is able to pull things off no other caste in the entire game can do and it’s just a T2. But it’s been the same for months now, would the maintainers really leave something completely overpowered and broken in the game for this long unknowingly?
I’m sure plenty of people have yelled at the devs about vamp lurkers and talk about vamp lurkers happens every single day in OOC/D-Chat/Discord/Forums so I’m sure they’ve heard the general feedback by now.
Maybe vamp lurker isn’t overpowered and OWL is just THAT good that if they played any xeno caste they would make it appear super strong. Like you know when BOMB is on rav compared to anyone else. You can tell when PIG/ADHD are on burrower compared to anyone else. You can also tell when Eric Overstreet is on SADAR compared to most players.
Maybe the majority of us just suck at combat and the devs want everyone to get good? Maybe behind the scenes marines were winning a little too often and the goal is get them xeno win rates up even more so than they are currently?
I have no idea I’m clueless about how CM is balanced. All I know is that when I move into an oppressor hook and get captured it feels fine. When 2 boilers have locked down a choke point for 30 minutes it feels fine. When I’m solo captured by a lurker/runner in the backlines it feels fine. When a second acid runner hits the FOB and causes a evac it feels fine. When a solo T2 vamp lurker is able to kill 7 marines trying to get comms online it feels frustrating and ridiculous. When the top xeno kills is a vamp lurker round after round, it feels ridiculous. When a player themselves says what they’re doing is overpowered, it feels ridiculous.
Round after round after round after round this has been happening, and sometimes the xenos still lose. At this point I’m 100% convinced this is going to remain not because of neglect but by design. We marines just gotta get use to it and improve I guess.
most nerfs on vamp are just stupid salt nerfs, focused on stuff like tailstab instead of looking at WHY vamp is so extremely survivable.
390 health, 20 armor making it tankier than OG lurker, faster speed than OG lurker, both an entrance and exit ability incase it gets pressured or the fight doesnt go its way, plenty of microstuns so you cant body block it.
but no, lets remove the hand hold tailstab, thatll fix it right?
Wow someone is being exceptionally good at the game time to nerf the things they play.
Vamp got only one microstun ability, but I agree that armor is something that can be nerfed as vampire was supposed to be more fragile than base afaik.
You’re right, but also the cooldown isnt that huge (to my memory) so it is used multiple times in a fight since vamps survivability.
I think the optimal nerf would be the simplest and just knocking its armor down. why does vamp even have nearly t3/queen level armor in the first place
The knockdown from the jab is proposed to be removed in Vampire tail jab changes (try 2) by Red-byte3D · Pull Request #6376 · cmss13-devs/cmss13 · GitHub if it doesn’t result in a wall slam but I haven’t merged it because of outstanding requests to the PR that aren’t resolved (an early return that’s skipping code incorrectly). That is the only ability that “stuns” so I don’t know what you’re thinking is the second one.
Good point from dchat: tailjab unlike tailstab doesn’t use the same CD as slash, so you can slash and use the ability (abilities) at the same time which is pretty strong DPS-wise.
I don’t understand how you can see a single player frequently get a kill count that’s 1/3rd of the total lobby size (they often play low-mid pop) and go “Yeah, this strain is in a good state, they’re just good at xeno.”
They didn’t though. They went from dropping 15-20 kills as a warrior playing on the front to 30-40 kills off weeds in the marine backline. The latter of which is significantly harder to play around since they can just appear anywhere, melt you, then disengage and come back 8 seconds later when they have everything off cooldown and do it again. I 100% agree that they’re a great xeno player, but even they are open about how overtuned vampire is in its current state.
Yeah, I really don’t know what the fuck people are on when OWL says vamp is OP, says he plays vamp to get it nerfed and bring attention to how OP it is, but then people go “lmao guys just spriteclick it’s a skill issue have you tried using shotguns??? Oh, what’s my ping? Yeah, it’s like 40ms, it’s pretty high ikr”
I feel the issue here is that the Vampire brings up three major issues with CM in general.
Fast mobs are incredibly hard to hit with attacks. Runner, Lurker Vamp and Humans with no Armour are good examples.
Actually hitting a target in CM with a ranged firearm is actually fairly difficult. Especially when combined with movement speed and ping.
Your ping has a huge impact on your ability to hit things. Once you go above 100 ping expect your gameplay to become worse.
I also think that the Lurker Vampire is a unusual case of speed and armour since the Runner and a Unarmoured Human, whilst both run fast, also both suffer from extreme frailty, a few bullets will crit a Runner and a few slashes will either fracture or just kill a unarmoured human. Vamp has decent armour and runs fairly fast off-weeds, but it also can tank a lot of damage and it has a leap to run away even faster
Personally, I don’t really think Lurker Vamp is some egregious class, I think it just ends up putting itself in a position where it highlights the weaknesses of CMSS13. I also don’t see the difference between an elite player dominating with a Lurker Vamp versus them dominating with a Ravager or Warrior.
Edit: Lurker Vamp is also a far more effective frontline fighter than Warrior. Warrior struggles when more than 2 people rush it whereas Lurker Vamp can kite, evade and continue to attack and be effective even against groups of people.
A good Sniper player in Team Fortress 2 can dominate the server. Does that mean the class is overpowered or is it just overpowered when a great player takes it?
Just a few days ago I was playing and a vampire lurker killed me and 4/5 other marines as we were moving to the frontline. Smartgun, two shotguns, and the rest had rifles, but it didn’t matter, we all died within a minute.
