There’s been a long discussion on wanting to reduce the reliance on stuns, since being stunned is a terrible feeling. I’d propose a possible alternative to the current Warriors Lunge to move her away from being stun centric to being more combat/boxing centric.
A lunge no longer stuns and grabs a target, instead.
Lunge range extended to six tiles
If Lunge connects to a target, the following actions occur
Target is struck with attack that deals double damage
Target is afflicted with 3 second slowdown
Target is forced to drop any items in their hand slots, the target is NOT stunned however (there should be a slight delay before target can pick up another item so you don’t get a 1 picosecond shotgun into point-blank incident, if someone is going to help the Marine it should be someone else)
The Warrior is granted a temporary 100 health shield that lasts for 6 seconds
Possibly increase lunge cooldown if the overshield is too strong, or decrease overshield health bonus.
The idea here is that the Warrior is transformed from a stun lock entity into a more boxer style one. A warrior will open an engagement by lunging at a marine to deal heavy damage and daze them, before using their new overshield to move in and engage the target, or a group of other targets, using their skills to dislodge and disrupt any other Marines.
The Warrior is still capable of displacing marines with her punch and fling skills, but it will require a greater level of skill and commitment to do this outside of stunning, moving 2 tiles, then flinging a marine to Brazil. This would be further assisted with her new overshield if she lands a lunge.
Furthermore I feel this would make the Warrior feel more in-line with its genetic lineage. Warrior always stood out from the Defender and Crusher, you go from a Tanky xeno, to a weird stunning xeno, to a Tanky xeno. Now the Warrior still feels like it remains a logical extension of a Defender and that its not so far fetched when it returns to a Crusher.
This might be a terrible idea, but I leave it to the reader. I’d make a PR to propose this but the coding change is slightly beyond my abilities.
lunges marine (dealing damage equal to TWO SLASHES)
punch
(optional) charge tailstab
marine is unable to fight back (unless magharn bypasses the whole "drop item and be unable to pick up)
slash
(optional) tailstab
marine can now fight back
fling into a wall
slash until overshield breaks, marine dies.
run away to heal
this actually requires a lot LESS commitment for the warrior, as they have no superslow from dragging a marine and can immediately run away after punch if they’re fighting on the frontline, because they’re still quite tanky ESPECIALLY WITH THE OVERSHIELD.
maybe instead of instant overshield, only have it activate if the marine is has allies within 3(?) tiles
and maybe toss on a slowdown for the warrior so that they can’t instantly run off after getting their combo off in half a second?
The question that immediately comes to mind for me here is whether you would want the lunge to still be instant like it is now, or add a short channel akin to the chrusher charge
furthermore as unknown already layed out, the burst damage potential sounds rather high before a marine is able to fight back at all, tho that would be a matter of just tweaking numbers i suppose.
Minor things like numbers, damage dealt, or how fast a marine can fight back, can be tweaked, ultimately the concept is a general overview of a change I’d be interested in seeing used.
Crusher is trash exactly because of the channel. Most of the time you just miss the one of your three abilities and stuck with cd. And T3’s time is very expensive. The fact you missed your ability and cannot use your only combo (charge + stomp) means it was a waste. Yeah you still can land slashes, but it doesn’t really change anything. I don’t really understand why people think that channel will be a good solution to all the issues with warrior.
I do agree that Crusher’s channel is quite punishing as it means you rarely land hits and usually just end up dashing into a open area that you are now forced to retreat instead of landing a hit
a fair point but also part of the reason why i asked. a instant 6 tile lunge that lets you murder marines seems vastly better than a channeled charge that mostly misses.
This would imply that the T2 is actually superior to the T3 which is supposed to be an upgrade.
I can see that this may be a crusher rather than a warrior issue as they’re arguably the least scary T3 but that may be beyond this topic
I do agree that the warrior idea needs to be scrapped and a new xeno should be in its place. I really dislike the idea of being unable to push a choke without the most hugest risk of being grabbed and tossed into the line of two tap drones with a high possibility of your round ending.
I agree with morrow, cause at this point its abilities are beyond saving. You’re not getting out of its WWE choke unless a Chad marine ( like myself ). Comes and shakes you up or grabs you so its stun gets cancelled placing you both in danger. Or some guy who uses slugs shoots him just in time before he enters the resin doom fortress.
No one likes slugs except some maniacs. They suck at damaging and are really not the best choice for travelling alone to the frontline.
I am so very tried of this very, very, very stupid conversation. No matter what game I play, no matter what level of play, it’s always just violently fucking stupid.
Stuns - or crowd control - are a NECESSARY part of a TEAM GAME. You as an individual in your kit/caste have an ability that - if followed up upon - deals more damage than if it has been done alone.
We shouldn’t be removing or nerfing stuns. More forms of Crowd Control should be ADDED to the game and existing crowd control should be BUFFED. Xenos should be encouraged to charge in to save a stunned target by attacking the stunner, or by securing the stunned. Marines should be encouraged to rescue a stunned target instead of leaving them for dead, or counter-CCing. I have told every 4902371984 times that you as a Marine have a point and click stun/slow with a 1 second cooldown from anywhere on screen. It is called a slug.
Hard CC that prevents people from actively playing the game or controlling their character is a notoriously difficult thing to balance in every game. This may be why you seem to run into this very topic so frequently.
While you are correct, CM is a team based game and the most overpowered thing for both faction is team play, it still doesn’t make stuns any easier to balance around or makes them less frustrating in any way shape or form.
Your argument of adding more CC is directly countered by the fact that M44 heavy rounds are being tweaked/removed right now, which is quite likely to go through.
The real reason why warriors are a good target to be reworked is because their ambush predator playstyle is unfitting to the caste named Warrior, which evolved from a tanky damage sponge and evolves into a siege tank or support commander role.
Stuns suck, there is no question about this. Its not a perfect mechanic and it never will be but in many cases it can be a necessary evil, its the reason why i’ve carried a lot of M44 heavies specifically to stop other marines getting dragged off by warriors. imo if one goes, so should the other.
slugs are strong but also as accessible as a sidearm and can’t be compared to buckshot in damage, there is not enough MOU heroes to keep everyone safe
Most non-moba games gravitate away from crowd control abilities because it grinds the game to a halt and massively frustrates players who are at the opposing end of them.
Being grabbed by a Warrior with no ability to do literally anything at all is as unfun as the million stuns there were in Overwatch 1 (which got complained about so much that they removed most stuns in Overwatch 2). Team Fortress 2 has no real hard crowd control either. In fact, stuns are relegated to memey taunt kills. This doesn’t mention how most other 2D shooters are basically unanimously free of hard crowd control because the gameplay just doesn’t lend itself to it.
Really, when you say “Team Games”, you mean MOBA games, because those are the main genre of game that makes big use out of them. This is, however, because MOBAs are fought out between as few people as you can count on one hand, and stuns are used to give individual players and teams major advantages in team fights which help decide engagements and even matches.
CM isn’t a MOBA though. We have more than 100 people regularly playing, and a single Marine or Xenos is comparatively irrelevant to the round. You can’t ADD stuns to the game because at that point the frontline quite literally devolves into trench warfare where nobody wants to set foot into the open because as soon as they do they’re going to get stunlocked and deleted from the game. It’s fundamentally flawed and not the right move forward, because it isn’t fun. For anyone. Even if these stuns were highly skill-based and required practice to land it would destroy CM’s ordinary gameplay loop, a loop that is already highly infringed upon by stuns as is. People want to play, not get stunlocked and killed before they can retaliate. And unlike in a MOBA, they can’t respawn and the game isn’t going to be massively pivoted one way or the other because somebody got stunlocked and lost a fight. It’s just a player that got helplessly destroyed, with little impact on overall round progression, but a major upset towards their own satisfaction.
TL:DR Stuns are bad, and most games naturally avoid them unless you happen to be a MOBA.
CM isn’t a MOBA, but it’s also not a first-person shooter. And most notably, not TF2.
How you can compare a first person shooter to an Asymetrical Warfare tile-game without breaking your ankles is crazy to me. Maybe the game wouldn’t be over for the player you mentioned if he made a buddy who promised to watch his back and shoot a warrior that grabbed him with either focus fire, heavy rounds or slug. Or y’know, just fucking grab him while the warrior grab is 10 seconds long.
And the last line about most games “avoding them” is the most insane cope I’ve ever seen. Finding a game without crowd control is harder than finding one with one. Counter-strike - the most popular FPS alive - smokes, and flashes need to be learned just to get out of silver. Even single player RPGs, MMOs, Fighting games, fucking SOULSBORNE GAMES, Adventure games like God of War, and so on. I could literally just list to you every single game worth a damn ever and they all have CC. If you just want to click on people and win, there’s Call of Duty or TF2 for that. Do you want to have a game that requires thought and teamwork or do you want to run around as scout chungering people with 30 hours as you have 15K.
Hell, let’s just fuckin go ball-to-the-wall here. If you really think about it, me dying to the warrior ability that will come after is a form of stun. Ravager killing me is a stun. Mispositioning is a stun. Bodyblocking is a stun. I should just live forever and not die for where I walked or where I aimed an ability on the tile-based game.
Balancing the game around bronze NPCs who can’t talk or position or coordinate does nothing to help the game be a team game.
LilPenpusher absolutely right - the stun mechanic in almost all games is a cringe, which is gradually being removed from all multiplayer games. His argument was precisely that we are taking mechanics that are inherent in games where you can spawn almost immediately after you are killed due to stun, into a game where we are talking about a hardcore “one life” 2D simulator that requires very a lot of knowledge in itself. Even though I myself have killed a Warrior many times even after he stunned me with a shotgun, this does not change the fact that because of this, the last thing you want to do as a Marine is move forward. At the same time, we introduce pylons to encourage the Marine to move forward, but at the same time we have the whole “come out of the corner, grab, stun ad infinitum” mechanic. If you argue with the fact that no player wants to be active in the attack when there are mechanics that are designed to ensure that the front is as static as possible and we come to a point where the best strategy is to sit behind the barricades and shoot at the xenomorphs and neither under no circumstances should you go one meter close to any corner - this is a very strange position and no one will support it.
Morrow is right - just cut out the tumor. I’ve played many different ss13 builds and all I can say is that no one fucking likes stuns, even if it’s a paradise build. Nobody obliges us to cut this mechanic so much as to exclude moments when you die in a second due to a warrior jumping 4 squares without any way to counter it, because there is an incredible amount of abuse associated with this. The most basic thing you can do in this situation is to instead of stun, add a flashbang effect, where you will see almost nothing on the screen, but you will be able to move very slowly.
What does it matter if stuns are being removed from some other games? It really does not prove anything at all. This is an absolutely shallow take. Stun combat is not a problem, lots of competitive games have it. Yeah it’s infuriating, but guess what else is infuriating? Dying, getting capped, run out of ammo, getting FFed, etc. Are we going to turn the game into some kind of hugbox so players won’t be upset because they got owned? If you think a game (especially a competitive one) should only give you good emotions, then you are just delusional.
I wonder how good is that game doing, as I heard not very well. (I never played overwatch but this take is just very funny).
