in all honesty i think that CAS and mortars are most problematic for those who are hearing impaired or just want to jam on music - the queue that CAS is coming is auditorily often 2-5 seconds BEFORE the chat message, and the chat indication of where it’s landing is wildly misrepresented.
in my experience the vast majority of my deaths to CAS have been from misreading my chat and then getting hit on one of the 12 tile firing missions that usually kill more than just me - but equally there’s something appealing to my monkey brain to see CAS light shit up with massive guns
tl;dr: readability may make it far easier for the majority of benos to dodge
It is a damage buff because you are getting more shots out that you normally would not get, therefore increasing your damage overall. It increases your DPS. Damage per second.
Can we like make a separate thread for fire support coping? It’s annoying sure, but nothing new.
My hot take on that is that sure you can dodge fire support as much as you want and not die to it, but the problems start when you also have to fight like 100 marines at the same time, who also may be comfortably sitting in their multi-layer FOB on top of that. Maybe remove FOBs, remove marines, keep fire support dodging Dance Dance Revolution gameplay.
Seeing as this has turned into a cope thread im just gonna throw down my final opinion on this whole mess.
Let Morrow cook and lets see what happens. Yea it feels really shitty to go from being top dog winner of almost every round to near 50% win rates as xeno.
However the main point is it appears we are trying to drive CM into more of a ‘balanced’ game though I do not agree that we should punish EVERY XENO for what the top 1% are doing and we should instead focus on making changes that would instead affect the top 1% instead of the masses in general. As the majority of xeno players are just your casual people who are trying to have fun and not tryhard and as such their chance of dying is high. Compare that to a top 1% who rarely dies and focuses on being competitive I think its more of a nerf on the general 99% of xenos compared to the 1%.
Moving onto others. As long as the marines get balanced such as xenos it should be fine once this ‘dark age’ of xeno gameplay is over.
I do agree however on allowing for free respawn for xeno ghosts in forms of ‘lesser xenos’ though I do not think it should be limited to only drone. But instead offer it up for Lesser Sentinel, Lesser runner. And Lesser Defender. In order to open up new possibilities to combat the 1 larva per cap problem that the xenos are facing.
The main thing I REALLY ENJOY that the dev team has done is encourage the queen to stay on ovi. By allowing xenos to effective respawn at 1/3 of the hive’s overall numbers as a lesser variant to go throw themselves on the battlefield instead of forcing the queen to exist as the counterweight to the marine swarms is a nice improvement. I hope that additional ovi encouragement benefits are thrown in.
In short the dev team should focus on patching things that affect the 1% instead of the 99% if that is their main focus on balancing. If not then what they are currently doing (Free xeno respawns, Hard nerfs, and encouraging queen ovi) is fine as long as they balance the marines out as well.
Idc if beans get nerfed. It’s just how the cookie crumbles. I never cared about winrate either, I do dumb shit as the Queen on purpose just to try something new. Half the time it gets my hive butchered.
I care about my CM experience not sucking ass, and making inconvenient and unintuitive changes makes my CM experience worse, not better. COUGH COUGH LURKER STEALTH CHANGES, NODES UNDER WALLS, LARVA QUEUE.
Xeno swarms are gonna be the last nail in the coffin for this game since its just TGMC arcade experience being ported over on top of another step towards WO’ification of distress signal.
I personally don’t mind the swarms too much. I like the use of swarm mechanics.
But I think they should be player directed swarms of AI creatures so individual players can still feel powerful on both sides, with powerful alien commanders (Almost like minibosses to the Queen’s big boss) managing and fighting alongside swarms and human players mowing down waves of hostile creatures.
I normally do not like being a divisive person but the last nerf to marines that took place a day or so ago was not met with a massive complaint thread. Perhaps this is a teaching moment.
Juuuust gonna say. The logistics of ammo for marines is far, far less grueling to lose the big pouches as opposed to some of the stupid xeno changes that occured.
Its a decent nerf in terms of a significant reduction in availability of powerful healing chemicals and a reduction in large pouch’s (general, mag, shotgun) which puts a little more pressure on ammo and equipment supply.
Large pouches are barely relevant, you just re-sort inventory. The healing “nerf” only stopped people from stacking multiple instant injectors - you still get to easily resupply these in FOB or simply take the ones that require 2 seconds to inject. And no, running back to fob for these doesnt matter, I dont remember the last time I ran out of meds to inject in the years since these injectors were added.
A relevant nerf to the supply situation would be disallowing marines from moving the med vendors in medbay and no longer letting marines fit shotgun shells in helmets, reducing shotgun shell belt size by 30% and webbing inventory slots to 2 and 4 respectively aswell as making ammo boxes slow down the person hauling them. You can imagine the cope this would cause though.
Barely a nerf, you still can buy injectors for free in your personal vendor. Probably most meaningful nerf is that large magpouch is gone, but it’s just -1 mag.
Last really huge nerfs are: burst timer from 20 minutes to 7.5 minutes (no one noticed because no one told marines actual scale) and IB from fracs (really bad, but kinda hidden since you can get IB regulary which means you never know if you got IB from fracs or just unlucky and got it from being damaged).
