This would add some flexibility to the strain choosing, because if it’s a choke capping situation you can then go Oppressor or go the current base Prae later for the FOB sieges.
Doubt that many people would be against this.
The only problem I see with this is that I struggle to make up a name for the now base Prae strain…
Imo Prae should be more of a frontliner by default rather than being a glorified spitter. I’m up for this.
this exact thought crossed my mind, and I was stopped by the exact same issue - what are we gonna call base prae?!
Also if this happens then people would realize vanguard is a moderately fun caste that isn’t completely abysmal to play and it’ll get nerfed into the ground because god forbid xenos have anything nice
but I’m all for it
Good idea, but also buff the default “acider” strain to be more enjoyable, it’s really not that fun and pretty weak in general.
Base strain does just feel like a weaker version of warden. Like sure, you get the tiny shield whenever you do acid damage, and theres the acid stacks (good luck triggering it). But the clutch healing from warden is just so much better.
Base strain has the unfortunate problem of being a bit underdeveloped. Originally it was supposed to stack the spit stacks and then explode them by slashing the marine. Hence why it has the dash, which kinda makes no sense with the rest of the kit. But that only worked in open positions… So it was half-reworked into the current pure spitter.
In practice it’s not that bad, but it does not have anything uniquely interesting and acid is an inferior source of damage anyway.
So I keep dreaming that someday someone would rework it into something more interesting.
No don’t default people to the good strain we have enough 4 or 5 prae hives already
That’s the timeless CM tradition. Everyone goes Prae, all the Praes die in 10 minutes after the deployment, actually competent xenos evolve to T3. That’s what Darwin meant by natural selection.
Anyway, I actually see one downside of my proposal here, but a niche one. Lets say I’m playing base Prae on the siege, but then I can go Dancer for the hijack, because the voices in my head tell me. Then, of course die in 2 minutes.
The damage vanguard prae can do from a distance in such a short amount of time is absolutely bullshit and that wasn’t even its full combo. I agree that the default prae is weaker due to the nature of burn damage not being quite as effective as slashing due to it not generating fracs/organ damage. I find that most praes do not take advantage of its enhanced melting ability as it can be very oppressive in melting every single flare and cade melting when marines are not around.
Vanguard prae supremacy 
We love killin marines here
Jokes aside I don’t think this is entirely necessary, while vanguard prae struggles a bit in choke fights (vanguard prae should more be played on the flanks and hell, even in the backline if properly supported), you can still do some cool tricks at the front or in chokes.
IE, the dash behind a marine and fling him 7 tiles away from his friend into your teammates eager claws, funniest shit ever when it happens to a spec.
Was the exploding only changed because of it being too high risk to engage?
Or where there actually balance reasons, and not just trying a diffrent flavor of big spitter.
I think during the first tests it was kinda OP and doing too much damage.
Eventually it got nerfed into a reasonable level of damage, but now it had the problem of being too weak most of the time. Without the final slash-boom it did way less damage than a spitter, would outright lose all trades against a single marine and by the time you’d have 3 stacks of spit, you would already take so much damage that if the marine has any kind of backup, dashing in for that slash would just get you killed.
Then if marines are behind the cades, you’d do miniscule damage to them, since you couldn’t dash in. So the problem was that it very rarely could do the combo it was designed for.
P. S. I think I need to specify that by “exploding” I didn’t mean that it would do any AOE damage. It would just do enough damage to crit that one marine.
Ahh ok, what i imagined was that if marines had enough stacks and get slashed by the prae they would “explode” causing acid to splatter all around them.
Now that i think about it, that be very strong. But pretty cool.
Didn’t we have royal guard praes or something in the past? Just call them that
Just give it stun on acid vomit/raise the shield gain and max for spitting or make the grenade explode faster. I think it’s in a pretty good spot rn though
Actually a good idea. I think Royal Guard was that strain during the MOBA update that was so broken that it got completely scrapped in like 1 month of testing, so I never even tried it. I keep meaning to look into the repo history, to see what the kit even was.
And, just to continue the CM history lesson. The current Praes were all released in 2020, during what was known as the MOBA update, since it standardized xeno skills and generally left them 4 at most, like in MOBAs.
The base Prae before MOBA was actually a mini Queen - it had neuro\acid switch. It had Screech that would heal everyone around it, so stacking base praes was kind of a broken strat. And then finally it had a triangle shaped spray acid(with like 2 seconds windup). So if you ever wondered why the Spray Acid icon is triangular, that’s why.
Prae is the queen guard thats there job
You are guarding the queen by fragging marines and never allowing them to reach her 
i think logically, it makes more sense for a base prae to evolve into a vanguard, then a vanguard to evolve into a base prae or warden.
Spitter evos into base prae.
Warrior evos into Vanguard.
micdrop
reject moba, bring back 2017 prae that had nothing but a spit(it dealt 80 damage a hit)