No idea why carriers are being nerfed. the main strategy theyre trying to get rid of barely works, throwing huggers behind doors can easily countered by just right clicking. and its not like you have infinite huggers.
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Dropping huggers will have a cooldown to prevent this. You will be able to maybe drop 1 and it MIGHT prime before marines get up, better off just grabbing one and dragging it away to hug it safely out of range at this point.
I’m thinking of making a video of what I’d consider a “decent” round for everyone to watch this in action before it gets nerfed. And then you can decide if it needs nerfing or not, mind you as marines have become more savvy to this I do not get that many successful caps a round as opposed to when this first started. I’m also back from a long break so I’m rusty but I can show you all what it looks like from my perspective.
Spoiler: It’s 50% me running back and forth to morphers.
What I expect you’ll see
-Marines bullseyeing my huggers off screen in the dark consistently.
-hugger AI not working as intended, bouncing off of walls even if marine is next to them
-Occasional Gun-ho thirsty marines seeing i’m injured and trying to rambo up a free kill and chasing me into primed huggers
-the sad truth that 70% of my huggers die to CAS, Mortar and Grenades. (hence the morpher runs)
-Huggers practical uses in covering xeno retreats (not game breaking)
-trying to do funnies with huggers behind doors but it never actually works and breaks my heart and results in my death.
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is there even a point playing carrier now when facehuggers are more useful since they can actually move?
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Might as well rename them to trapper when the strain gets removed, as thats gonna be the only thing they do.
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Blame the carriers who drop 10 fucking huggers in a corner that instafuck you when you dare sneeze in their direction. You have to understand that getting hugged is a almost guaranteed round-ender for a marine and the ways carrier did it was cheesy as fuck.
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Queen is getting nerfed hard to compensate. That has nothing to do with carrier, just spreading out the round impact from one person into an actual team game.
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Queen Nerf sounds like a good idea. I am interested to see how this turnsout.
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This is a nade buff tbh.
I dont think it rly fixes the caste tho. It makes clearing resin a lot less threatening probs
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There’s no guarantee the change is coming, although it’s likely:
I think it’s whatever, I’m personally hoping instead of roleplaying like it’s a “1:1 rebalance” we get TGMC Carrier ported over while retaining the trap gameplay.
Hugger mechanics are stupid for the carrier to have to try gimmick into working at huge expense for themselves (and other Carriers).
Being hugged sucks for Marines because Bravo hates securing medbays.
Honestly I’d be down, at that stage, that if your weapon is wielded you get a brief stun but not hugged (like the movies).
Tgmc carrier is awful to fight i wana shove it in a blender. Cm carrier should Not become that…
Yeah hopefully it’ll turn out okay, most T3s having a zerker-rav power equivalent would be a fair trade for queen losing the funny AOE stun. Ideally rounds will be less swingy since you wont be 70% reliant on one player.
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True, it’s mostly a reaction time test but part of that is there’s less “fuck you, waste 10 minutes shipside” from one mis-step
How does TGMC carrier work? I’ve only got an hour or two of playtime there
Pick 1 of 6 types of huggers
Throw huggers, they leap after 1.5 seconds onto a Marine
If they are a larva hugger they leap after 1.5 seconds, but TGMC has many more mechanics to prevent / remove larva easily so hypothetically imagine it’d be a 2-3 second timer here
All the other huggers inject toxins on hugging a marine , stab marines on hugging a marine, drop acid on hugging a marine, drop sticky resin on hugging a marine
The savior Xenos need! This whole thing is folly.
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^^ Thanks for giving my posts so much attention by the way. Who doesn’t love living rent free <3
And @BasilHerb I also agree with those changes, I’m okay with queen scree getting nerfed and buffing T3s but this carrier nerf came out of nowhere. I just figured there’s so many other things crying out for balancing and carrier was not anywhere near the top of that list. If even on it at all to be quite frank.
Although queen scree getting nerfed begs the question…. how will hives reliably get caps? Especially with the nerf to carrier. Most hives are going to die out relatively quickly imo but we will see.
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I think the queen rework is onky coning after all the T3s reworks get merged. Killing wise the hive should be strong enough on its oen, capping wise it should still be okay. Two tap tackles exist and once a marine goes down, they generally stay down. You already see tons of caps when xenod actually try, even when the queen is off ovi so I doubt there will be much impact.
The biggest factor in xenos getting caps has always been whether xenos are actually trying for caps. Most people prefer slashing and killing because its more fun and less tedious.
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While the hive is slash happy alot of it has to do with the fact that capping is tedious as you said. They need more interesting and interactive ways to get caps but are instead removing them, the hive needs more ways to cap and priming huggers is what I’ve found to be the most satisfying and effective. A carrier should have high capping potential and be able to use it’s huggers more aggressively not just passively. I think nerfing queen scree and buffing T3s is fine but this carrier nerf is coming from such a sideways angle it almost feels personal from the one coding it. I’m also afraid making T3s Stronk again will just encourage slash and dash behavior with no reliable frontline capping caste.
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If you want to lure marines in and punish them thsts what hugger traps are for, I think you’re holding way too much onto 3 tile range huggers. Hugger traps do the same thing re: punishing over extending players, and are extremely effective in that role. It was never common enough that it became a mainstay of capping, the vast majority of caps on average has just been the good old tackle spam. Its more of an annoying remnant of an earlier time that never got addressed.
No caste should be reliably capping on its own, its just bad game design if you can round remove people with minimal counterplay on their part. Capping has always been a team effort. We killed hugger combat because it just wasnt very fun (scary as fuck huggers that forced you to replace your helmet every 5 seconds), and this recent surge in pre-priming is badly reminiscent of that, except this time helmet hugger protection is non existent if you arent a GL or Pred.
I think you might have been away for a while, but addressing hugger AI has been discussed for quite a bit, it may seem sudden but its been brewing in peoples heads for a long time. It just so happens a pseudo-green light was given this time, though whether it was a joke or serious is eh.
In any case, hugger combat has always been universally despised by the people who were unfortunate enough to play it, so its been pretty clear since it’s removal that this kind of gameplay isnt desired.
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See when people say “it’s bad for gameplay purposes” bad for who exactly though? I’ve managed to turn this niche little design into an effective capping method. There’s probably 10 xeno players in Larva Queue waiting to rejoin, why is the marines experience more important than theirs? Xenos need caps to play. We do not pop back up out of the ground like daisies similar to marines. If they had some form of way for Xenos to regenerate numbers even slowly without caps then this wouldn’t be as big of an issue. Although a massive blow to Carrier utility and skill expression at least there’d be some compensation for the hive.
It seems like they are trying to make the hive deadlier which in turn MAY make it less dependent on caps, although probably not, since again just killing marines is a ton of fun but ultimately futile if momentum is not on your side and you are bleeding numbers.
I mean I could say Dragons Breath is “Not fun” because it sucks you into it and you die. But I have to also let that happen by being close enough, I get punished. And it’s fun for the CAS player. But see? I get punished. Should we also remove grenades because if I charge into them I get stunned and shot to death? Depending on the grenade I might also just get insta gibbed. That’s no fun… well it is for marines but that seems to be of more importance.
Marines charging headstrong into 3 tile range of something they can kill with a single bullet (might if it decides to work the majority of times the AI does not actually spring into action as effectively as most think) is an example of being punished. Not fun for them no. Fun for the dead hive players and the carrier? yes.
This being an “issue that was never addressed” is only an issue to one side and not even greviously so it’s more of an occasional annoyance. That somehow worked it’s way to the tippy top of someone’s nerf list. Because like others have said as well, this is a nerf.
Edit: Also meant to address “minimal counter play” Theres huge counterplay to this in the form of a bullet, grenade, mortar, CAS, anything to make me just now waste the 10 huggers I dropped. You can also still bumrush the carrier and kill it before the hugger AI actually decides to do what it’s supposed to do this also happens quite often because it does not work always. I actually don’t ever fully depend on it in most cases. It’s great when it works but its really bad and time wasting when it does not. My aforementioned tactic of getting low and having a marine chase me is a 50-50 gamble of whether it will leap or watch me die. It’s literal gambling
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