For new players playing warrior might be hard to get accustomed to due to ammount of switching hands you gotta do when getting succesful lunge. I have seen a lot of young warriors lunge a marine and then stare at them by trying to slash the unfortunate marine with the grabbing hand. Why haven’t there been an QoL buff to warrior so it switches hands on every succesful lunge? Your guess is as good as mine - but here is my tip (or a mini guide of sorts) of how to deal with this problem, especially before you work up your muscle memory.
MY KEYBINDS (use whatever you desire here, I will use my own keybinds for clarity sake)
X – primary switch hands
R – punch (primary attack one)
E – lunge (primary attack two)
F – fling (primary attack three)
Z – tailstab
THIS METHOD ALSO SEMI REQUIRES TO DISABLE ABILITY DEACTIVATION – you do that by editing your character, going to settings and set Toggle ability deactivation: Off. Honestly even outside this guide I do not see a reason to have this setting on and I mean it for any xeno castes, not just warrior - too many times I double pressed lunge button by mistake, deactivating it and just staring cluelessly at marines, to me this option being set on as default is to grief new xeno players. With it off, you only cancel the current ability by switching to another, so you can press desired ability keybind how many times you want not worrying about it deactivating.
Also not a must, but I would also reccomend switching the button to activate xenomorph abilities from default shift click to right click, it is the same place you set ability deactivation. But that is up to your preference. In my case playing xeno never felt better. Thank the heavens they added that feature a while ago.
STEP 1. CHANGING YOUR HOTKEYS
So every time you play xeno and desire to evo into warrior, you gotta press esc button, go to edit hotkeys settings, at Human section, and basically make it so your lunge, fling, punch and tailstab abilities (xenos share a total of 5 buttons for abilities, check my keybinds to see which warrior ability is assigned to which number in hotkeys setting) are also binded as swapping hands keys. I do this because my keybinds are shared with marine settings, so I end up as marine switching hands when I don’t want to.
When you don’t play xeno just remember to go back to edit hotkeys, same place and reset all keys for handswapping and set it to your primary switch hands key only. If you have a better way to do this via black magic or just have much better keybinds that me - great, you can ignore this last part.
STEP 2. THE LUNGE PLAN
Now that you have your hotkeys ready I will explain how my strategy work. I will just cover a scenario were you succesfully manage to lunge a marine, I won’t cover gazillion possible warrior combos you can do, however I will cover one simple combo and reasoning behind it, in case you are really new to warrior.
So upon succesfully grabbing someone, you want to immidiately press either fling or punch or tailstab. Now for a simple combo with a warrior, you should choose the tailstab so it winds up while you slash the target 2 times, then tailstab followed by either fling preferably into solid object for more damage or punch if you cannot fling into a wall. If you fling into a wall the target will be stunned for a brief seconds and thats when you can finish up with punch and slashes. In short, switching to tailstab first is almost always correct unless you are certain that you want to immidiately fling or punch the target, for example to break contact because you are low health or marines are pushing you hard - more on this below.
Now what I said above is the perfect scenario - usually your lunges end up with someone setting you on fire, blowing you up with a HEDP or a rifleman rushing to you shotgun in hand, buckshot with your name on it loaded. Whatever the case you have to immidiately break the lunge, punch, fling or tailstab (or any ability on any xeno caste) does not require for you to use empty hand unlike slashes. So for example, you lunge a marine and prepare the tailstab to do combo I described above but suddenly his teammates rush in to pushish your lunge, you either punch the target to do some damage and release him to run away, or fling it to be extra safe, remember that punch only moves him one tile so if he gets up and PBs you with a shotgun and you die, probably it was better to fling in such scenarios.
Of course if beforehand you believe performing tailstab combo is too risky, you might skip straight up to selecting either fling or punch, that way you got your getaway plan ready to use when things go south.
WHY THIS WORKS
If you did the step 1 correctly, now every time you lunge, switching to your warrior abilities now counts as switching hands, effectively cutting out the middle man that is manually switching hands with primary switch hands hotkey between lunging the target and slashing lunged target. And since abilities do not require active hand to be empty you don’t need to worry about it messing up your ability activasion - and by logic of warrior combat, if you want to fling or punch your target then you will break your grab anyway, freeing your hand to lunge again or slash.
Might not seem like much but one less button to press when doing lunge combos is a big thing in my square opinion, as lunges are quite dangerous to do versus good marines. One less thing to worry about thanks to this handy automation sure helps me a lot. The sooner you start using this method the less you gonna have to fight your muscle memory to press X or whatever button you have to switch hands every fight you take.
Hope this guide helps you in your woyering jorneys. Praise the Queen Mother!