youre a sad little man you know that

No its still pretty difficult. A good cara fade won't die. If you fade exactly the way you fade without cara except with cara, you'll have 200 more hp at any point in time. You're killing ability will be lower yeah(no focus), but you won't ever die because even if you run to where the ragged edge normally is, you can still take (practically speaking) a whole extra shotgun shell and make it out.

Carapace is broken because it makes it so one good fade can effectively dominate the game even on an otherwise quite lackluster team of aliens. If you want to kill it, you have to devote your whole team to doing it, which = no res = lose.

Again, if 200 hp is all that's needed, bring another buddy with a shotgun or two. Clanners and their one-man-army mentality sigh...

>_> you make some pretty rediculous comments sometimes.

a good, organised competative team will never have any marine moving alone unless maybe he is a capper. furthermore, most of the time a fade is up the marines will have atleast two shotguns moving together with another one or two lmgs. so think, a good fade can combat this without carapace with the support of his fellow aliens. a fade with carapace could do it with almost no risk of dieing.

"Carapace is broken because it makes it so one good fade can effectively dominate the game even on an otherwise quite lackluster team of aliens. If you want to kill it, you have to devote your whole team to doing it, which = no res = lose."

you cant dominate the game against a decent team without focus, sure you will be able to stay alive but your killing power will be lacking. there should always be a fade in the game after the aliens reach their 50 res click anyway. a good fade wont(shouldnt?) die(or atleast wont until he has enough res to refade).

ill say it once more for all of you people who lack attention skills:

what fades gain in survivability from carapace they lose in killing power from focus.

Just gtfo and uninstall you ###### idiot.

Here's my semi-n00b two cents about carapace.

As a marine, carapace definitely SEEMS overpowered. Once a good fade starts going around after a few minutes into the game, all the vanilla marines get mauled down and have a hard time securing res nodes and whatnot. If two good fades start roaming around, the marines need to make a major push or else they're most likely going to lose. If aliens have three l33t fades... game over. Hard to kill a nearly invulnerable fade, much less two or three with LMGs. Even with heavy weapons, it takes some luck and good teamwork to take a fade down (block the door, BLOCK THE DOOR!)

As an alien, carapace is something that I would never give up as a fade. I do not have the skill to blink into a room, take three swipes at a rine, blink out without hitting anything (or getting hit), blink back in, and finish off his partner with another three swipes before moving on, all with most of my HP and armor intact. It seems that most people forget that not everyone can fade like a pro; for us regular players, carapace is something essential so that we don't end up wasting 50 res if we accidentally blink into a room with 5 marines in it, or if we [gasp] [b]miss a swipe[/b on one of our hit-and-runs!

My verdict is that carapace is more or less fine as it is. The marines can take out a fade if they coordinate properly (with some heavy weaponry, of course). I suppose nerfing carapace slightly for a fade wouldn't be the end of the world. I think that I could live as a 300/220 fade. I won't die any easier because I'll have my team to back me up... right guys?

random siege cannon FTW

/mulls for a moment

Ok, I agree with all of that, even the random seige cannon.

And I would still tank you and your "pubstars" 9/10. gtfo

You want a medal?

sure pUbStAr

I remember spectating one match when Terror was facing some other clan (maybe Exigent?), and they were getting dominated as aliens because aliens were weak as hell during beta 5. Then, instead of the regen fade (this was when DC was the chamber of choice for the first hive), Mustang went cara fade instead since they were basically pinned in their starting hive. He would survive against 5 shotgunners simply because he would blink swipe one or two times, then get the ###### back to the hive. With hive healing, he was practically invincible. It was only after the hive died did Mustang's cara fade fell.

That sort of situation makes cara fades pretty ridiculous. But the thing is that it was right next to the hive, a constant 45 health/s for a fade.

In a more realistic situation, if he had cara and came across two or three shotgunners in some random hallway, he might get lucky and kill one of them and blink out heavily damaged, or most likely he'll swipe two times and get out heavily damaged. Then he has to blink back to the hive, or find a gorge to heal him, which would take twice as long and get back in the fight. If he had regen and knew there were three shotgunners in the room, I doubt the fade would even try that situation if he didn't have a deathwish.

Analyzing it from competitive play, the marines would have level 1 weapons when the first fade comes into play. That's 180 damage per shot for shotguns. Each shotgun, assuming perfect accuracy, would do 270 damage per second. Since nobody can ever shoot perfect, it would be around 50-60% accuracy. Maybe 150 damage per second for each shotgun. A cara fade is 800 hp at either hive 1 or 2. That's 5.33 seconds of continuous fire from one shotgun to kill a fade. Engagement time should be around 2 seconds, 3 tops.

It is impossible for one shotgunner to take out a cara fade in 2-3 seconds. It gets somewhat feasible for 2 shotgunners, assuming they don't block each other's shots. And it gets very likely once the number goes up to 3 (the classic pressure team size). This doesn't even take into account of the HMG, which spews out an incredible 330-430 damage per second.

The moral of the story is clear. If you want to kill cara fades, or even just regular fades, stick together and get good weapons. The problem is, people like Makaveli go on pubs where they go marines 90% of the time and go 26:4 because pub skulks (myself included) suck ######. Then, when fades roll around, they're frustrated because their ramboing effectiveness is drastically cut down because a fade should always win or at least draw with one marine.

Seriously dude, just stick together with NSPlayer(2) once fades roll around. He'll only block your shots half of the time.

Makavelli, your complaint is useless.
Do not expect to kill a fade alone, unless he is drop dead dumb, and you have the level 3 hmg.
That is what fades are designed to do. They are supposed to be able to single out a marine and kill him without much difficulty.

This is when a thing I call teamplay goes into effect. Fades are major obstacles in the game, and require major effort to get past. Don't give me any "I'm skilled" BS.

Sure, that fade's got 50 kills and 2 deaths on the scoreboard. But there's one fade, and a team of marines to plan against the fade.

If you can't outskill a fade, you outsmart it. Strategy. Tactics. Teamplay. That is what Natural Selection is about, and that is what it is designed to achieve in a gameplay environment.

Wait, your telling the competitive players to use more teamwork and strategy? Didn't expect that one.

Oh and don't do anything to carapace, it's more or so fun to play once a week, screw up 100% of the time and not die as a fade.

You realize you're the only one going on about "clanners" here right? No one else even brought up competitive vs public servers, except you. How about instead of invading threads that have nothing with your little crusade against competitive players you go do something constructive? No one cares about your anti-clan opinion, we're over it. People only respond once you troll the forum for 4 pages, Mak even responded in a civil manner to you several times, which is freaking unheard of for Mak. If you brought a constructive argument instead of "Competitive sucks, its dead, everyone pubs, 6v6 is dead, pubbers suck, balance for pubbers, ignore everyone else," which is what you have posted for about 6 weeks now, people might continue to respond constructively. Puzl even said some of your ideas were really bad, and that's why people dismissed them. It has very little to do with you being a pubber or whatever, hell Rapier7 was a pubber for the longest time and some of his ideas were still good (we just like to harass him). I really went out of my way to not flame you in this, took about 6 tries to get it right without pouring gas on the fire. I'd appreciate it if you could do the same to us, you'll be pleasantly surprised at the result.

On the issue at hand, I'm inclined to agree with Mak, but I won't. The problem Mak is talking about stems from seeing fades blink in, take some swipes, blink out, and you can be shooting them the entire time and not get a kill. It's pretty damn frustrating, more so on pubs when you can't get any support. It's pretty easy to solo early game on pubs, and once it's late game it's easy to solo again (JP/HMG or JP/SG in the right hands is a terror for aliens), but midgame when fades appear it's pretty hard to make headway without some help. For once I agree with Rapier7 (did I get drugged or something, two compliments in one post?), bring some other players with you, if nothing else they can take some damage while you shoot. Cara fades are why AA rushes + W3/A1 became popular in 3.0 betas, nothing shredded fades faster than a surprise HMG showing up and dominating a fade expecting some shotguns (If Arc reads this, he'll be laughing his ###### off). I found once I stopped soloing midgame (Until I had a gun or prototech), my frustration level on marines dropped a lot.

I dont normally post here, so immediatly my argument is ineffective but...


Spending res on guns and going round in groups, like alot of people here are suggesting, isnt an ideal choice this is because:

- The skilled(even an unskilled but intelligent) fade is smart enough to know not to dive into the pack of marines if it cant be effective.

- Because alot of the marines are grouped tightly together, Spores are more effective.

- Because marines are traversing the map together RT's become easy targets and the marines lose their ability to hold ground (excluding the ground the mini army of marines is currently standing on.)

- Ultimately if marines lose res control and area control, they will lose, 1 skulk can effectively cut off their res supply, and if the commander orders 1 or 2 marines to recap, the fade is on them.



ok so, in the right hands, a cara fade is TOTALLY dominant. but the sort of skill level required to be this dominant and force marines to group up just to kill it.... its rare.


It would be bad for the Pub scene definatly (where i hold all of my experience) if cara's effectiveness was to be reduced this is because:

- The learning curve of most lifeforms is difficult for beginners anyway. Cara at the moment flattens off this curve.

- We would only see the elite, or the moronic, volunteering to fade if they are "paper fades"

- less incentive for marines to work as a team and more incentive to rambo off if they arent affraid of being raped by a fade.


surely the competitive scene would suffer if there were less "pub players" aspiring to join the competitive scene due to the increased difficulty of mastering the fade.



in summary:

People who have gotten to the point where they are totally imballanced as a cara fade, should be proud. They have truly mastered a class. If they are looking for a challange, well... get regen


but at the end of the day, you represent a small percentile of the NS community, and the effects it would have on the rest of the community would be hazardous.

3 man pressure, 2 man cap. 2 people can easily fend off a fade with weapons. 3 can kill.

Marines only group up all together when they're about to crush some alien skulls (the hive), anyways. I don't see the problem.

Sarcasm noted, and thrown away. If it's ever occurred to you that clan strategy isn't exactly military, then now you know. Remember that Strategies in NS are usually made in a basic sense, and preplanned.

They deal usually with winning the game as a whole, and almost always change on the fly. Most of these strats do NOT deal with an entire coordination and synchronization of players' actions in order to trap and kill a skilled enemy capable of fighting the entire team by him/herself.

Who has res for 5 shotguns? People have the habit on here of ignoring the rest of the game when they analyze some point. 2 marine's can't hold off a fade early/mid-game if they want to accomplish anything else. All you have to do is wait until one of them does something, or until they start walking somewhere even, blink in using the marine your hitting as cover, two swipes (note: <1 second),or three if you dont get hurt, blink out, blink right back in again, 1-2 swipes and there's only one marine. Thats as an mc fade. Point being, in an ideal situation where the marines are all just camping waiting for the fade, yeah, you're all right. The thing is, if the game ever gets to the point where the marines can do that and win, something went fairly wrong a while ago. Fades don't even have to kill people to be effective, if all you can do is harass and delay the whole team (because they can't kill you without having 4 guys there) then your skulks can own their res in no time flat.

My point is that the amount of effort required to kill a cara fade often is DEVESTATING to the rest of the marine game(we're talking even ground here, not marines with 1000 res jp/hmg/3/2 at 7:00) because in order to enable themselves to kill you they have to abandon almost everything else, but then you don't even have to be there to die! You have the mobility advantage, you engage marines on your terms. Maybe on pubs you could get away as a commander having your whole(or almost) 5 marines group up for 1-2 minutes to kill a fade, but thats because the alien teamwork/situational awareness sucks, not because thats how it is supposed to work.

Believe it or not, fades are more important than kills.

I KNOW how to kill a cara fade, I'm not complaining that its completely impossible. I know also that its extremely hard to get the resources together to kill a cara fade without sacrificing the rest of the game.

Smood, thank you so much!!! I'll just remember to carry around a marine or two in my pants whenever I go anywhere, so that if me and the guys with me don't have enough firepower, we can just pull more marines out of our ######!

Please stop posting nonsense. I really don't believe in censoring anyone's voice, but you somehow seem to have such an overwhelmingly negative impact on the level of discussion in this community that I can't help wanting to ductape your hands to the ceiling.

Marines are all about early game dominance. You should have anywhere from 4-5 RTs by the time fades roll around. That's plenty of res for shotguns.

So if cara really is a bit too strong in the early game, what about nerfing it a little and then readding the hive armor bonus to this upgrade only. This would nerf early carapace without screwing late game aliens vs. (almost) fully teched marines.

I actually like that, if cara gave more hp per hive.

Blah. Sasuke kills Orochimaru.

Look at the lerk though, that got nerfed essentially for what a good player could do with it. Not that I agree that carapace fades are hard to kill either.

Smood be careful, if you frustrate people TOO much they'll realize you're a troll, then it's just not as fun on this forum is it?

am I the only one NOT worried about lerk?

I actually play lerk these days. since it IS like paper it forces the hummingbirds of doom to do what they are supposed to do. Sit in vents and gas/umbra and fly to positions to gas/umbra.

They now again gas armor away, umbra heavies for in inblinking fades and oni.. whats the prob with lerks really.

I had a good amount of matches already where when I finally did die it was important enought to tell around cause I gave em such a hard time with gas.

Ok.. if you do get ambushed its basicly over now, and there matches I die a min after I went lerk but still..

I don't see a prob with it.



ow and MrMakaveli..

LIES.. they haven't got that far in the anime yet. (perhaps manga, I don't read that)

I haven't read the manga that far either but someone already spoiled it for me. I was ###### at first but then realized how funny it really is to spoil ish like that. So yeah, Sasuke kills Orochimaru!
Almost forgot.












































Naruto dies in movie 4

Hijacking mak's thread because I think he's done with it anyway.

1) "supposed to do" seems entirely subjective to me, which leads me to ask you why you would actually prefer the lerk's role forced to be "sit in vents and gas". I'll never understand what part of that or dropping mass oc's is fun. I like to challenge myself and shoot leaping skulks and pancaking lerks, but when I pub I feel like my style is a dying minority. Just feels like you're reducing an otherwise fun gaming experience to "INPUT A; OUTPUT A". It's almost like there's a majority that wants this game dumbed down so far it plays like a 4 unit 2 race StarCraft. I can only play checkers so many times, but I can play this game every day for hours.

2) Gaara becomes the eighth hokage and Itachi kills Sakura eh eh eh bdropped

Well, lerk need +10 base armor... so he can't die from a pistol powered by a script.

From some other thread in response to a similar post by Splinter Steve

The roles are quite fine now.
3.2 clanning is more fun than 3.1 mostly because its

1. Balanced. No longer 10 alien ties in a row.
2. Less lifeform carryfest. Even I could carry with 3.1 fade sometimes. It gets boring after a few matches.

If some class is forced to play passive and boring it could use a tweak, but at least the team effort works now.

Unfortunately your role as giving "an edge on the resource game" is -boring-. The biting you're talking about just involves baiting, and you might as well be a +forward +attack walker skulk. You've eliminated the only fun role unique to the lerk. Any marine "team" that is getting beat specifically by one or two players needs to desperately learn how to position and shoot without standing directly in front of each other. A fade by himself cannot do anything against more than one shotgun unless some extraneous force causes shots to be missed or fired elsewhere, which is your basic premise of an ambush, with the chaos that other lifeforms are supposed to cause. It's a pretty big target I hope we'd agree, one shotgun against a fade can get off at least two shots up close which you really need to be bad to miss for any reason other than hitreg. The score might indicate otherwise, but your standard 50/1 fade is hardly doing it by himself. The only class that can actually do this is the onos (barring jetpacks), which noone plays at a carry level anyway. The lerk can take advantage of marines who don't cover, and I guess instead of learning to shoot or to keep your teammates in sight, the game needed to be dumbed down and is now less fun than it was before in this regard. Natural Selection my ######.

supposed to as in lerks are there for support, not killing machines. Every other alien minus the gorge is there for killing. Let the lerk handle support.

This has nothing to do with "dumbing the game down". It's got to do with evening out the possible impact the different life forms can have to improve the meta-game.

Something with 125/30 can only be as much of a killing machine as the marine team is dumb enough to let it. Bait your teammate with a shotgun if you can't aim. Not hard. Nor can a lerk carry against any type of real pressure (3 lmg , even 1 lmg 1 shotgun) team by itself. Elaborate on what you mean by "support", frankly I think being able to handle an uncovered lmg is support. So all I'm getting from you is "the lerk ought to be boring".

To tjo, you're removing a skill role that further diversifies a game that is fun because it's diverse. It should be reconciled instead of removed; which the 3.2 final climb rate increase suggests that the devs agree with, but fails to do the trick because as said in the other thread the climb rate affects those who are worse at the lerk (or even average at it) MUCH more than it affects those who are the best at it. Taking away diversity that ought to be reconciled (say by making the climb rate restored to full but the top speeds nerfed) to me is dumbing the game down, plain and simple.

I just don't agree with you that changing the climb rate has the effect you describe.

k.. let me clarify.

lerks should eat nodes of course, aswell as any marine they can take on there own. If that means taking out that LMG go right ahead. I know lerks can be baited, another reason why they should not be everywhere flying around corners like madmen since it increases the risk of getting shot.

I know lerks had some changes in flight, which makes it even easier to hit. Also my main point is..

* What would benefit your team more? Another kharaa flying around doing 70 dmg?
* Gassing & umbraing a group of marines while every other alien on the map is rampaging them instead every alien and you as lerk. Dunno about you but if I am skulk (or even a higher lifeform) I prefer to jump in a group who's armor already got a good beating by gas, and whos bullets have less effect due to umbra, then in a group where I got another one biting the same target.

Thats what I ment with 'sitting in vents'. If you can gas and fly around, do so. I myself prefer gassing from a few fixed points so the likelyhood of ambush is lower. (its still there, just lower then if you fly around x corner into a shotgun)

Again of course.. if there, for the moment, is no battlefield and you can handle a few LMG on your own.. pls do. That indeed also qualifies as support, I just think in big battlezones a lerk has other tasks. (A lerk not using umbra on a hive when its rushed is a useless lerk to be honest, unless there is noone around to kill the rines. but then the team is bloody useless)

Why not just slow the lerk down some more, decrease its climb rate even further to the point where it just hovers, and then give it a tail, some more legs and some claws... finally, somewhere, for someone, a long-lost dream is at last coming true...

even though you are sarcastic I wonder if there really is someone who would want a lerk to be messed up that bad

It's "hovar", not "hover".

hahaha

wait, what?

Lerks top priority is support, I said that alot.

But there aint a fight on the whole bloody time. A line rine does not need lerk support to be killed. Instead of flying around being useless it might as well eat nodes. Sure.. its the skulks job, and in perfect situations lerks never need to eat nodes. But I am talking pubs here

At the point when your eating RTs as a lerk, you really need consider picking up that Dojo thing people advertise on the general forum.

If there is no direct action to take part in, the lerk should scout for marine rts etc. Lerks should only very seldom eat nodes.

That Dojo thing seems nifty.

I still am not entirely sure what you mean by support.

In rare occasions I kill nodes because the impending 7 minute w2 scares the hell out of me, but this is in the competitive scene. In pubs where there's 12 marines scattered all over the map it's almost insane to kill a node. You just don't have the energy to do it, and some nodes leave you incredibly vulnerable to any pubstar who can bind pistol to mousewheel. Besides not having the energy to even KILL the node most of the time, even if you start, chances are by the time you're halfway done you have 1/5 of your energy left and need to escape past 3 marines who could have any set of upgrades imaginable. Like in a west access on tanith situation, forget it. You're probably gonna die.

Even though there are more alien biased nodes, the lerk class is almost always better spent scouting around the map when it's not stalking marines. If you can catch the marine team early when they are heading to a hive going up, you can really put a damper on their plans, sometimes eliminate the possibility for a siege altogether if you delay them enough. Really only in times of serious skulk frustration should the lerk ever be used to kill nodes with its low energy and bite damage.

I do encourage you participate in the dojo thing, with NS it's not just about winning. When classes and strategies execute correctly it really can be pretty neat to play and watch when compared to a lot of other games.

So...what was that about carapace again? Oh yea, they say to nerf it. What do you guys think?

he means that the lerk is there to spore the marines from a vent

I use adren always so thats why I don't run out. Sorry bout the node thingy.. been playing on pubs lately where noone ate nodes. :'( my brain got a bit wasted I guess. I know the only thing ever eating nodes has to be skulk.

Ya right, lerks should scout if nothing is to be killed.

Also I ment gassing in general, however with current health that usually means from the safety of a vent or another place. Its quite possible in most situations to gas any location from a hideout, with a way out of course.


No time to anything like a dojo or clan, said it years ago when some (lower clans probably) asked and say it again.

Carapace Fade is for those that want to solo a team. Non-cara Fades do fine with a bit of support...like UMBRA! You know...aliens can use teamwork too, and I see no problem with a non-cara Fade surviving at hive 2 if there is a lerk following. A lerk and a Fade can probably take on 3 shotgunners.

So, I wouldn't mind nerfing Fade carapce a bit, and perhaps buffing lerk cara and skulk cara a bit at hive 2.