Recently while playing xeno (mainly lurker) I’ve been noticing people use the lock face north to hide that they’re holding a shotgun so they can PB gullible runners/other xenos
Personally I think it’s quite easy to tell when they’re doing this, but it’s a really weird and meta ‘strategy’ and I think re-adding the slowdown you get for it would discourage people from doing so.
they also do this on sadar, which is much much more useful than any other gun since it hides the yellow highlights and reduces the sprite size by around 3x
i’ve ahelped this on three occasions with zero reply so i guess abusing top-down pov isnt a gameply exploit
Fine, but remove directional lighting, the only reason why marines don’t get slowdown on directional lock. Alternatively give xenoHUD vision icons for basic marine gun types applied on marines.
I don’t think you need to remove directional slowdown just because you have a directional light. Might as well give it to xenoes as well since they have extra front armor on some of their castes. (It is also kinda silly watching a dude run backwards at full speed while scoped in with a rifle).
Ngl the removal of direction locked slowdown kinda caused what I expected to happen, which is every powergame marine abusing this. Now you have SADAR’s facing north in order to blend in with BRUTE sprites, same with shotguns and certain armorless spec players doing the same thing.
would be super interesting, or the shift inspect thing someone theorised somewhere else on this forum
Honestly, why can’t xenoes mark targets of priority? Make it so queen eye can mark marines as priority targeting and boom SADAR can’t hide behind target locking after being found. Also makes it less metagamy by giving them pre selected icons for different marines instead of “KILL NOW” and “KILL LATER”.
Edit: Could also make it so stimmed marines get a mark like they do in lore (stims made of xenoes make xenoes target them harder).
Another way to do this would be a mouseover label that just says whatever they’re holding in their active hand (or offhand if the active hand has nothing).
ngl, does not sound like a slowdown problem but more like a sprite/readability issue. Guilty of doing all that before slowdown removal.
Just make everybody face south permanently. Cuts workload for spriters too 
Why shouldn’t marines get a debuff when lighting up what’s behind them? Also current dir light is not that harsh compared to what it used to be.
The tradeoff is that they don’t light up what is in front of them. Unless it is a small, fairly coordinated marine team working as a proper unit with few guys who watch their back, this rewards that miniscule ammount of teamplay. Why we should nerf small squads, even though they are already pathetically weak?
Dirlock slowdown makes it completly useless to ever do besides hiding what gun you have. Better to not see what is behind you and be fast than to have perfect NVG and be slow.
Not artificially, they already move slower organically. Why just punish those few guys on the rear who light up additional 3 tiles? Anyway it is super minor, I lived and played quite a while not being aware that marine dirlock doesn’t slow you down, so personnaly I won’t see the difference, I can just click behind me to light it up for a split second, enough to see if there is any xeno there, or not, which is more convenient than holding alt, moving my hand from mouse for arrow keys, or stoping movement for little while to use movement keys for that.
Don’t you think small coordinated squad moving in a formation should still be slower than a singular marine running forward?
Could this all be solved by allowing xenos to examine?
Which is offset by marines having what is essentially, infinite flares. It is one of those resources I have never seen run out, while both ammo and metals gets actually run dry. I don’t think marines should get a “buff” that is grossly missused if it was the purpose. Especially one that looks so stupid.
Infinite in theory, in pratice they are not. You never see marines run out of flares, because if they don’t have them, they don’t throw them, or if they forget they don’t throw them, or if they have a loadout that doesn’t pack any flares they don’t use them, or if they simply decide not to use them. While you do notice marines running out of ammo, because they stop shooting at you, or you notice them running out of metal because they stop fixing breaches.
Why not fix the actual problem which is marine gun visibility for xenos, instead of this bandaid half measure of reverting dirlock slowdown? Marines running backwards is just as stupid as marines looking back for a split second while running full speed, which is already superior to dirlock in terms of usefullness. You might revert it, but it wouldn’t even be a nerf to marine vision.
Why not fix the actual problem which is marine gun visibility for xenos once and for all? Overtly fixating on marines dirlocking north forgetting that pixel clutter exists, specs can just drop their armor etc.