Melee doesn't need fatigue or anything, it just needs to not be so powerful one person can knockback 10 zombies swarming over them. Limit the knockback per swing to 3 or 4 zombies max.
The problem here is that it's very easy to get a swarm of 10 zombies around you, and if you've suddenly got no means of defence, it will get very frustrating.
That's why you shoot them, and stay together.
If you're caught in open ground, more than 10 feet from any other survivor and get hit by a boomer and surrounded, you deserve to go down.
Meanwhile, a well coordinated team that stay together and take turns to alternate between melee and shooting come out unscathed as usual.
Rami on
Steam / Xbox Live: WSDX NNID: W-S-D-X 3DS FC: 2637-9461-8549
I admit I've not played online nearly as much as most other people here, but what I've seen has ultimately been quite balanced. I've seen my team annihilated straight out of the safe house, and then a few rounds later we've blasted through the level or utterly stomped the survivors.
Basically my problem whenever anyone complains that X is imbalanced, quite often it just means that it doesn't suit their playstyle and they want the game to be made easier for them. I'm not saying this is pointed at you or anyone else demanding changes in here, but let's face it, everyone wants to win.
edit: and yes I have been swarmed by a mass of zombies with no help around, and been unable to melee my way out of it.
I admit I've not played online nearly as much as most other people here, but what I've seen has ultimately been quite balanced. I've seen my team annihilated straight out of the safe house, and then a few rounds later we've blasted through the level or utterly stomped the survivors.
Basically my problem whenever anyone complains that X is imbalanced, quite often it just means that it doesn't suit their playstyle and they want the game to be made easier for them. I'm not saying this is pointed at you or anyone else demanding changes in here, but let's face it, everyone wants to win.
I play versus a lot, and rarely hear anyone complain about balance, and more about using cheap tactics or exploits. Both of which can warrant some bitching. But as far as mechanics go, the game is practically perfectly balanced.
I hate people who say 'this round is ruined, so now I'll use exploits'.
It's like deciding for everyone else what to do. If the game is ruined, bail, but don't make it even worse for everyone else.
Hockey Johnston on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
Even worse than the infinite spawn exploit:
At some point the survivor team will probably have less than 4 people on it. Switch over and run one off an edge, or just use your suicide keybind.
The last two days I've played a lot of VS, and one thing I ended up getting rather annoyed at is how easy it is to make the smoker just not dangerous at all. They die very fast, they do little to no damage, and their tongue choke is so easy to get out of, and once they get out of it, you're useless for 15 seconds or however long the cooldown is.
So I was thinking, I would sure like it if the tongue was changed to act more like a frog's tongue. It snaps out very fast, causing initial damage, and then there's 2-3 seconds of dead time where nothing happens, to give allies a chance to save him or to allow him to try and shoot you (same as it is now), but when the tongue pulls back, it pulls FAST. This gives the smoker a chance to actually harass the team, rather than have to stand around and either wait for a straggler to come, or wait for those 2 moments per map where you can hope to grab someone where the other team can't assist them. Even if you die just as fast as before, you've caused damage with the initial tongue, and you've pulled them back farther than you would have the way it is now, forcing them to have to recover the same ground again.
I kinda like that, as it sorta matches up with how I play the hunter VS good teams.
Sure, I know my pounce isnt going to do very much damage, but if the "ninja swipe" strategy isn't available, I dont have much choice. So I always go for the pounce damage bonus. That way, even if they do bash me as soon as I land, I still did some damage.
This proposed Smoker change would allow me to at least get some damage in as well as the smoker. Perhaps if the target is far away it does damage?
I kinda like that, as it sorta matches up with how I play the hunter VS good teams.
Sure, I know my pounce isnt going to do very much damage, but if the "ninja swipe" strategy isn't available, I dont have much choice. So I always go for the pounce damage bonus. That way, even if they do bash me as soon as I land, I still did some damage.
This proposed Smoker change would allow me to at least get some damage in as well as the smoker. Perhaps if the target is far away it does damage?
Yeah, like the hunter distance, the farther away more damage it does, nice. I was also thinking maybe the damage it does should be like 'poison' damage or something, so that instead of flat damage done, it converts some of your life to temporary health, so that you can't get instant killed on a tongue slap.
I've played some expert online (both VS and Campaign) and I think I can hold my own now.
If anyone does see me on, feel free to send an invite.
This game is going to be in my 360's disc tray for a while me thinks.:^:
I'm a bit late to the party on the competitive discussion, but oh well.
The thing about the tank is that, although things like the forklift, cars, etc. help, a lot of players are simply NOT GOOD at being the tank. It's not because they are bad players. It's because being the tank seems to be completely random, so your practice as tank is limited to that. Hell, to be honest, if you can't get punched off of a roof or hit with some random object, a tank in versus isn't ALL that dangerous. In other words, tank/no tank and different tank spawns will affect a single map, but they shouldn't do too much as far as all of versus goes, especially when you factor in the finale. The "better" team will probably win the finale, which in most cases where I've played, is enough to still come out over the other team by a handful of points.
Another way to play competitively is a best 2 out of 3 sort of distinction. Play the campaign until a team has won twice. That ups the odds from 5 to at least 10 rounds, so that helps to even some stuff out.
The fact that Versus is on Normal makes it hard to complain too much because every god damn thing in the game is neutered at that point, except the hunter.
Regular infected don't do enough damage to be a threat except being a pain in the ass to move around. The boomer's horde is thus relatively ineffective, and that's assuming a good boomer. The smoker is more often than not just fucking useless and would probably be so on a competitive level. Hunters are pretty good, other than the melee thing. Witches can usually be flat out avoided or dealt with without much of a problem. Tanks, as mentioned above, are only REALLY dangerous if a team panics or is on a level where a tank doesn't need to be that good to kill a lot of people.
In other words, versus seems very balanced in favor of the survivors. I know I've beat this drum before, but essentially this means that with two equally matched teams and all things fairly equal, the scores at the end aren't going to be that far apart because for most of the infected players to be effective, even if attacking in coordination, the survivors have to fuck up pretty badly. Being separated as a survivor can be a death sentence REALLY fast, but without that, you should usually be okay.
Anyway, infinite infected is fun. Thanks for the fun with that yesterday, Mandalore, Butterfly, and iowa. It's especially fun when you tell the other team how to do it, they refuse, and they then try to say that you're weak. In the meantime, we proceed to continually rape them as survivors. If we hadn't been dicking around, we probably would have squashed them pretty badly.
TwistedFate on
thIs fOrUm dEsErvEs A bEttEr clAss Of OttEr, And I'm gOnnA gIvE It tO 'Em. yOU'll sEE, I'll shOw yA
There are indeed "random events" that happen, but I know many of us have played enough to come to expect certain things in certain areas, which further take away the randomness of it.
I guess there will be plenty of answers when the SDK is out.
I'm a bit late to the party on the competitive discussion, but oh well.
The thing about the tank is that, although things like the forklift, cars, etc. help, a lot of players are simply NOT GOOD at being the tank. It's not because they are bad players. It's because being the tank seems to be completely random, so your practice as tank is limited to that. Hell, to be honest, if you can't get punched off of a roof or hit with some random object, a tank in versus isn't ALL that dangerous. In other words, tank/no tank and different tank spawns will affect a single map, but they shouldn't do too much as far as all of versus goes, especially when you factor in the finale. The "better" team will probably win the finale, which in most cases where I've played, is enough to still come out over the other team by a handful of points.
Another way to play competitively is a best 2 out of 3 sort of distinction. Play the campaign until a team has won twice. That ups the odds from 5 to at least 10 rounds, so that helps to even some stuff out.
The fact that Versus is on Normal makes it hard to complain too much because every god damn thing in the game is neutered at that point, except the hunter.
Regular infected don't do enough damage to be a threat except being a pain in the ass to move around. The boomer's horde is thus relatively ineffective, and that's assuming a good boomer. The smoker is more often than not just fucking useless and would probably be so on a competitive level. Hunters are pretty good, other than the melee thing. Witches can usually be flat out avoided or dealt with without much of a problem. Tanks, as mentioned above, are only REALLY dangerous if a team panics or is on a level where a tank doesn't need to be that good to kill a lot of people.
In other words, versus seems very balanced in favor of the survivors. I know I've beat this drum before, but essentially this means that with two equally matched teams and all things fairly equal, the scores at the end aren't going to be that far apart because for most of the infected players to be effective, even if attacking in coordination, the survivors have to fuck up pretty badly. Being separated as a survivor can be a death sentence REALLY fast, but without that, you should usually be okay.
Anyway, infinite infected is fun. Thanks for the fun with that yesterday, Mandalore, Butterfly, and iowa. It's especially fun when you tell the other team how to do it, they refuse, and they then try to say that you're weak. In the meantime, we proceed to continually rape them as survivors. If we hadn't been dicking around, we probably would have squashed them pretty badly.
The thing is, the survivors are supposed to have the advantage. The score is tallied up as who did better as survivors. So the infected aren't really getting points and thus are just there to hinder the progress of the survivors as much as they can. It isn't supposed to be either infected win or survivors, if it were, then special infected would have one life.
I'd have to agree that Smoker is probably the weakest infected, though it's important for coordinated attacks. Smoker into a Boomer puke is a good combo, or Smoker and then Hunter whoever goes back to save them. Smoker is weak, but probably the best initiator of coordinated hits. If the tongue either dragged faster, did more damage, or did damage while it dragged I'd be happy. Even if all there were done it wouldn't be overpowered. Additionally, the smokescreen from his death should obscure vision 5x as much as it does now.
UnknownSaint on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
I don't know about the Smoker doing instant damage, since giving the infected a ranged unblockable attack seems like it would be hard to balance. I think that if the tongue did damage the entire time the survivor was being dragged, then it would be fine.
edit: and something needs to happen with the smokescreen. Right now it feels useless and tacked on, since the tongue and the smokescreen really have nothing to do with one another, since you're not attacking on top of the survivors anyway.
Maybe have the smoker expel smoke after he's grabbed a survivor? It'd obscure the glow a bit and make it more difficult to find the survivor if you weren't paying attention when they got nabbed.
UnknownSaint on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Maybe have the smoker expel smoke after he's grabbed a survivor? It'd obscure the glow a bit and make it more difficult to find the survivor if you weren't paying attention when they got nabbed.
Yeah, although the cloud itself would be really easy to spot, obscuring the glow (maybe even totally) is a neat idea.
TL DR on
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FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
So wait... exploits are cool now as long as you tell the other team how to do it? When they refuse, you laugh at them and continue to exploit?
So wait... exploits are cool now as long as you tell the other team how to do it? When they refuse, you laugh at them and continue to exploit?
Dejavu, Twisted.
No, exploits are never cool. It bothers me to no end when someone on my team says: "We should do that ____ exploit!"
I was just prodding Twisted with that comment because I've had experiences with him before where he exploits and patronizes the other team while doing so.
"That's fucking lame. Don't do that"
"LAWLS!!!" *does it again*
I just found it funny that he came on here now and just described himself doing the exact same thing, I'm assuming this time to Pubs.
I'd like to see some small buffs to the smoker so he's more viable on his own, but you need to be careful with that or he'll get really powerful in a coordinated attack. Tricky balance, that.
My biggest hate right now: the stun after the tongue breaks. The survivors melee the tongue, you try to move away and take cover, but you're rooted to the ground for nearly two seconds and then you die.
I'd be happy if more than 50 % of my reticle'd tongues hit. Sure, if the survivor goes around a corner that's reasonable. But when a zombie runs infront and breaks it man. I mean why not be able to tongue someone who's being horded? It doesn't seem like it would be especially overpowered.
iowa on
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FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
Yeah, tongues going through other infected is a pretty good starting point for buffing him. I think that alone might increase his viability tenfold.
Yeah, tongues going through other infected is a pretty good starting point for buffing him. I think that alone might increase his viability tenfold.
Seriously. I tried and failed like four times at the bottom of the elevator on NM to snare a stationary Zoey, but kept getting the link broken by a regular infected who decided that getting in a hit for 2 damage was far better than letting me pull her off to her demise.
But then we got on the roof, were hiding from the Molotov rain, and then donhonk pushed me into the flame and didn't even make me a sammich :x
PeregrineFalcon on
Looking for a DX:HR OnLive code for my kid brother.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Also get rid of that period where if the survivors move behind something, even after you've fired on them, it misses. It makes it really annoying to try to pull people down hallways because they're past before you can do anything.
RandomEngy on
Profile -> Signature Settings -> Hide signatures always. Then you don't have to read this worthless text anymore.
i just find that, as the smoker, there's only been maybe a handful of times since the game came out where I've said 'damn that was a useful tongue drag.' Especially now since people are so fast at freeing people being smokered. But usually the only way they're useful is if you either use them to pull someone off the roof in NM3, or catch someone alone somewhere. There are moments when smokers can be useful, but the big problem is the other bosses generally can feel like they accomplished at least something, even if your boomer puke only got 1 person or you exploded and only caught one person, or if you're a hunter and you get in one swipe and then die, at least you did something. I'd say most of the time smokers die without even pulling anyone more than a total of 1 foot.
The smoker is probably the highest potential class, but that's reached in so few cases and in ways I don't think are intended. There are some amazing instant death pulls in Blood Harvest 1 if you're a bit creative and lucky, but I mean there's no way that it was intended for people to think 'okay here's a slight incline if I pull him here he should lose his footing once he's free and fall to his death'.
Nailbunny once pulled 2 people to their death and caused another to fall off in an effort to save the first pulled.
The smoker is probably the highest potential class, but that's reached in so few cases and in ways I don't think are intended. There are some amazing instant death pulls in Blood Harvest 1 if you're a bit creative and lucky, but I mean there's no way that it was intended for people to think 'okay here's a slight incline if I pull him here he should lose his footing once he's free and fall to his death'.
Nailbunny once pulled 2 people to their death and caused another to fall off in an effort to save the first pulled.
That cliff on BH1 is a bitch! (The instant death was unintended.)
Actually, Sladvan is the superior smoker, and I have worked hard to emulate his success.
I just wish people would use their head when playing Smoker and think about what they're actually accomplishing. You attacking by yourself is completely useless unless you can set them back for a long time by doing so, i.e. a place in the map where you can pull somebody down or when they're really split up and you pull back a straggler. If even in the best case scenario you're just going to stun them for 5 seconds before they're freed, don't bother attacking, just wait for your teammates to spawn. Even if you pull them to a stop you do shit for damage, you'll probably hit them once for 5 and then die. If everybody else on the team already attacked and is dead, you missed your chance, just wait for the next one(MAYBE throw off a tongue just to pester them if you know they can't kill you)
What you SHOULD be doing most of the time as a Smoker is trying to coordinate with the Hunters to create openings. Say, you wait until they're spawning and about to attack, and then you pull somebody back, thus distracting them enough that the Hunter lands an extra swing or two on his pounce. Or tongue somebody immediately afterwards before they can kill him. Or wait for the boomer horde and pull out somebody who didn't get biled so the rest are easier targets. Basically you are crap by yourself even if you do manage to tongue somebody, so don't even bother.
There's a lot of minor changes they could do for the smoker, but I'd settle for the survivor under my reticule getting snagged instead of some random person on the edge of my screen. I don't know if it loves searching for people further away or for certain survivors or what, but - as funny as it is to watch the tongue rocket out the side of the smoker's mouth at some obscene, awkward angle - that crap needs to stop.
Drag damage or faster dragging would help the smoker in last ditch efforts, but it's really not that hard to set up with your teammates. If your tongue grabs the person you're pointing at, that would help. The smoker's good with delaying actions (long delays are very rare, there are only a few places where you can pull survivors down somewhere where they need to go up (and the two big ones are in No Mercy)). You need to settle for pulling people back towards the way they came and delaying the survivors a few seconds at a time (preferably from somewhere you won't get easily shot).
A useful change might be lowering the tongue's 'reload' time unless the smoker actually damages a survivor. That way the 2-5 second delay every 20 seconds could be a bit more substantial if you're forced to pull.
UltimaGecko on
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Play on Easy, with friends? I don't think getting barfed on counts as "damage" - but if you get hit by the resulting horde it does.
And don't forget to factor in that achievements are buggy as hell and you probably won't get it anyhow.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
That's why you shoot them, and stay together.
If you're caught in open ground, more than 10 feet from any other survivor and get hit by a boomer and surrounded, you deserve to go down.
Meanwhile, a well coordinated team that stay together and take turns to alternate between melee and shooting come out unscathed as usual.
Basically my problem whenever anyone complains that X is imbalanced, quite often it just means that it doesn't suit their playstyle and they want the game to be made easier for them. I'm not saying this is pointed at you or anyone else demanding changes in here, but let's face it, everyone wants to win.
edit: and yes I have been swarmed by a mass of zombies with no help around, and been unable to melee my way out of it.
I play versus a lot, and rarely hear anyone complain about balance, and more about using cheap tactics or exploits. Both of which can warrant some bitching. But as far as mechanics go, the game is practically perfectly balanced.
Got 2/4 so far so feel free to join in
It's like deciding for everyone else what to do. If the game is ruined, bail, but don't make it even worse for everyone else.
At some point the survivor team will probably have less than 4 people on it. Switch over and run one off an edge, or just use your suicide keybind.
The last two days I've played a lot of VS, and one thing I ended up getting rather annoyed at is how easy it is to make the smoker just not dangerous at all. They die very fast, they do little to no damage, and their tongue choke is so easy to get out of, and once they get out of it, you're useless for 15 seconds or however long the cooldown is.
So I was thinking, I would sure like it if the tongue was changed to act more like a frog's tongue. It snaps out very fast, causing initial damage, and then there's 2-3 seconds of dead time where nothing happens, to give allies a chance to save him or to allow him to try and shoot you (same as it is now), but when the tongue pulls back, it pulls FAST. This gives the smoker a chance to actually harass the team, rather than have to stand around and either wait for a straggler to come, or wait for those 2 moments per map where you can hope to grab someone where the other team can't assist them. Even if you die just as fast as before, you've caused damage with the initial tongue, and you've pulled them back farther than you would have the way it is now, forcing them to have to recover the same ground again.
Sure, I know my pounce isnt going to do very much damage, but if the "ninja swipe" strategy isn't available, I dont have much choice. So I always go for the pounce damage bonus. That way, even if they do bash me as soon as I land, I still did some damage.
This proposed Smoker change would allow me to at least get some damage in as well as the smoker. Perhaps if the target is far away it does damage?
Yeah, like the hunter distance, the farther away more damage it does, nice. I was also thinking maybe the damage it does should be like 'poison' damage or something, so that instead of flat damage done, it converts some of your life to temporary health, so that you can't get instant killed on a tongue slap.
If anyone does see me on, feel free to send an invite.
This game is going to be in my 360's disc tray for a while me thinks.:^:
The thing about the tank is that, although things like the forklift, cars, etc. help, a lot of players are simply NOT GOOD at being the tank. It's not because they are bad players. It's because being the tank seems to be completely random, so your practice as tank is limited to that. Hell, to be honest, if you can't get punched off of a roof or hit with some random object, a tank in versus isn't ALL that dangerous. In other words, tank/no tank and different tank spawns will affect a single map, but they shouldn't do too much as far as all of versus goes, especially when you factor in the finale. The "better" team will probably win the finale, which in most cases where I've played, is enough to still come out over the other team by a handful of points.
Another way to play competitively is a best 2 out of 3 sort of distinction. Play the campaign until a team has won twice. That ups the odds from 5 to at least 10 rounds, so that helps to even some stuff out.
The fact that Versus is on Normal makes it hard to complain too much because every god damn thing in the game is neutered at that point, except the hunter.
Regular infected don't do enough damage to be a threat except being a pain in the ass to move around. The boomer's horde is thus relatively ineffective, and that's assuming a good boomer. The smoker is more often than not just fucking useless and would probably be so on a competitive level. Hunters are pretty good, other than the melee thing. Witches can usually be flat out avoided or dealt with without much of a problem. Tanks, as mentioned above, are only REALLY dangerous if a team panics or is on a level where a tank doesn't need to be that good to kill a lot of people.
In other words, versus seems very balanced in favor of the survivors. I know I've beat this drum before, but essentially this means that with two equally matched teams and all things fairly equal, the scores at the end aren't going to be that far apart because for most of the infected players to be effective, even if attacking in coordination, the survivors have to fuck up pretty badly. Being separated as a survivor can be a death sentence REALLY fast, but without that, you should usually be okay.
Anyway, infinite infected is fun. Thanks for the fun with that yesterday, Mandalore, Butterfly, and iowa. It's especially fun when you tell the other team how to do it, they refuse, and they then try to say that you're weak. In the meantime, we proceed to continually rape them as survivors. If we hadn't been dicking around, we probably would have squashed them pretty badly.
I guess there will be plenty of answers when the SDK is out.
The thing is, the survivors are supposed to have the advantage. The score is tallied up as who did better as survivors. So the infected aren't really getting points and thus are just there to hinder the progress of the survivors as much as they can. It isn't supposed to be either infected win or survivors, if it were, then special infected would have one life.
edit: and something needs to happen with the smokescreen. Right now it feels useless and tacked on, since the tongue and the smokescreen really have nothing to do with one another, since you're not attacking on top of the survivors anyway.
Yeah, although the cloud itself would be really easy to spot, obscuring the glow (maybe even totally) is a neat idea.
Dejavu, Twisted.
No, exploits are never cool. It bothers me to no end when someone on my team says: "We should do that ____ exploit!"
Where are the fixes already?
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
I was just prodding Twisted with that comment because I've had experiences with him before where he exploits and patronizes the other team while doing so.
"That's fucking lame. Don't do that"
"LAWLS!!!" *does it again*
I just found it funny that he came on here now and just described himself doing the exact same thing, I'm assuming this time to Pubs.
I'm laughing over here, not complaining. I find it easier to just leave a round populated by dickwads than cry about it, and that's what I do.
My biggest hate right now: the stun after the tongue breaks. The survivors melee the tongue, you try to move away and take cover, but you're rooted to the ground for nearly two seconds and then you die.
Seriously. I tried and failed like four times at the bottom of the elevator on NM to snare a stationary Zoey, but kept getting the link broken by a regular infected who decided that getting in a hit for 2 damage was far better than letting me pull her off to her demise.
But then we got on the roof, were hiding from the Molotov rain, and then donhonk pushed me into the flame and didn't even make me a sammich :x
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Nailbunny once pulled 2 people to their death and caused another to fall off in an effort to save the first pulled.
You know what they used to write on the report cards of stupid kids?
"Has great potential."
Not written: To bag groceries, to pump gas, to spit in your burger.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
That cliff on BH1 is a bitch! (The instant death was unintended.)
Actually, Sladvan is the superior smoker, and I have worked hard to emulate his success.
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
There's also a pull spot right next to the survivor spawn on BH1, i got cryo with it once.
The smoker is actually a metaphor for my college career?
What you SHOULD be doing most of the time as a Smoker is trying to coordinate with the Hunters to create openings. Say, you wait until they're spawning and about to attack, and then you pull somebody back, thus distracting them enough that the Hunter lands an extra swing or two on his pounce. Or tongue somebody immediately afterwards before they can kill him. Or wait for the boomer horde and pull out somebody who didn't get biled so the rest are easier targets. Basically you are crap by yourself even if you do manage to tongue somebody, so don't even bother.
Drag damage or faster dragging would help the smoker in last ditch efforts, but it's really not that hard to set up with your teammates. If your tongue grabs the person you're pointing at, that would help. The smoker's good with delaying actions (long delays are very rare, there are only a few places where you can pull survivors down somewhere where they need to go up (and the two big ones are in No Mercy)). You need to settle for pulling people back towards the way they came and delaying the survivors a few seconds at a time (preferably from somewhere you won't get easily shot).
A useful change might be lowering the tongue's 'reload' time unless the smoker actually damages a survivor. That way the 2-5 second delay every 20 seconds could be a bit more substantial if you're forced to pull.