Gameplay Preview Phase 2 Results

[bob0]

Once I realized that starting a pounce mid-air cancels the previous one, I was able to pounce pretty well; but the cancel is really annoying.  Its previous range made pouncing over-powered.

I'm really happy for the range nerfs, especially tyrant's.  If anybody's open to convincing, I can try to show you how good aliens can be even with the new range in a 1vs1; you can find me on irc.  Of course, many players are better than me.  imo,  Aliens' range is lenient enough.

Also humans can dodge all day, and sprint across the whole map now without ever slowing down

If you look at tremulous.h, you'll realize that sprinting takes as much stamina as it did with larmour in 1.1.  It used to take even more stamina.  When I play, I often use up about half of my stamina before I run into aliens, which leaves me with only two dodges left, if I still have at least half left, since "dodge" takes as much stamina as jumping.

[phungus420]

The pounce being canceled may be what is causing me to think that (and I agree the old pounce was OP, but the new one just never seems to land, at all against a decent dodger).  Basically I just always assumed my aim must be off.  Regardless, while I can't put my finger on any specific change that is causing it, the current 1.2 gpp rewards the specific skill of aiming way more then 1.1 (or even previous gpps), where smart play seemed to have a more drastic effect, and perfect aim just wasn't as important.  Like I said that's a design decision by the devs that's not necessarily a negative or a positive one, but a noteworthy change I personally dislike and want to point out.

[Silver]

I noticed the pounce cancel thing and that improved my pounce A ton.  I still, however, think the chomp nerf is a ton.  I would pounce people into corners and if I was even slightly off it was a complete miss.  I do agree it was way to easy to hop through hall nabbing hs's in 1.1.  This is just too much though, it seems to me the people who suck, suck even worse at aliens now because they miss twice as much.  I think the aiming needs to be a little bit easier.  Let me clarify on pounce range too, since I got a little sloppy description on that.  I don't mean how far you can go, I still find I can get up to high places and go quite a distance, but its also a little easier to chase down running goons.  So I like the distance better.  I mean, when I'm pouncing to a human, a lot of times, I even collide with them and am mostly aimed at them(a little to the side) and the pounce misses and I just slide against them and off.  That's bad, the whole idea of pounce is your giant goon body slamming them, it shouldn't have to do anything with biting, so it shouldn't require complete forward aim, as long as your body hits them thats all that should matter imo.  Since thats what causes the damage/knockback.  Besides if you hit them with you're side, it's way harder for you to land a following hit, so that alone is more than enough encouragement to be aimed as straight as possible when pouncing someone. 

I just don't like pouncing into a flamer, to find that even though I slammed into them, nothing happened, and now I've got this small delay of movement as I'm landing where I'm getting roasted to death unable to defend myself, fall back, or damage them.

[Norfenstein]

Besides the flamer, the pounce range is the only thing I'm still thinking about tweaking for the next phase. It does feel a little too short to me, though yesterday I saw someone still dominating with it like before, so I'm still not sure. But I'm leaning towards bumping it 48 (is 40 now, was 56 in GPP phase 2).

[Silver]

Can I ask something?  I haven't tested it out yet fully, but do you have to full charge a pounce to do same damage, or is it like in 1.1 when a quick pounce still did the same damage you just didn't go as far.

[kevlarman]

Can I ask something?  I haven't tested it out yet fully, but do you have to full charge a pounce to do same damage, or is it like in 1.1 when a quick pounce still did the same damage you just didn't go as far.

in 1.1 a quick pounce did less damage, and it still does.

[Silver]

Can I ask something?  I haven't tested it out yet fully, but do you have to full charge a pounce to do same damage, or is it like in 1.1 when a quick pounce still did the same damage you just didn't go as far.

in 1.1 a quick pounce did less damage, and it still does.

Really, is it in the same ratio?  I can't believe I never noticed that, but I almost always did full pounces in 1.1

It seemed 1.1 quick pounces were a lot more effective for me in 1.1 than 1.2 though.

[kevlarman]

in 1.1 adv goons charged pounce a lot faster than they do now (this only changed a couple months ago)

[phungus420]

Besides the flamer, the pounce range is the only thing I'm still thinking about tweaking for the next phase. It does feel a little too short to me, though yesterday I saw someone still dominating with it like before, so I'm still not sure. But I'm leaning towards bumping it 48 (is 40 now, was 56 in GPP phase 2).

Could you keep the range the same, but get rid of the cancellation so that goons can still reflexively charge pounce when attacking?  I think that would have the desired effect.  Like I said old pounce was OP, and now that I know about the cancellation it's probably not the range that's the problem, it's the fact that pro alien players are trained to constantly recharge pounce, so they are getting the damage cancelled mid flight.


Edit:
Also I'd like to add I think dodge is crazy strong, and will end up making humans overpowered once people start realizing it's there.  I still see very few players use it.  This conclusion is based on my own experiences.  In 1.1 I've played abut 2/3rds of my time on aliens, so I have much more experience and am just better with them.  In 1.2 after experimenting with dodge I've found playing humans to be equally good, and for my case this shouldn't happen, I should still be much better with aliens.  Granted this is only subjective, but I've found dodge to be too effective and too easy, and very few players use it yet, which I think are skewing the game balance results (though maybe people will never learn to use it, so it's not).  Perhaps in the next gpp humans could have a notification (like how aliens see "press q to evolve") for dodge, so they see a "press v to dodge" notification somewhere, similar to aliens notifications.  This would get more players to use it in this balancing stage so it's effects would be more visible.

[David]

If you don't want to allow mid-flight charge, make pressing it not cancel but just queue the next charge, so it starts as soon as it can, preventing wasted time.

[bob0]

If you don't want to allow mid-flight charge, make pressing it not cancel but just queue the next charge, so it starts as soon as it can, preventing wasted time.

Why not just allow charging mid-flight without cancelling the previous charge?

[David]

Because that would lower the effective repeat rate, altering balance.

[Silver]

I agree with phungus.

In 1.1 I could get 5-1 kill ratios on aliens on AA all the time.  I was lucky, however, to manage 2:1 with humans.  Thats playing against all noobs too.

In 1.2 I barely manage 2:1 on aliens at my best, and I get 2:1 sometimes 3:1 on humans and I don't play it all right yet(don't utilize dodge or forward bases well on H). Humans are so much OP now it's not even funny.  Base wise, it seems if you don't have an excellent builder, one adv mara wins, so that could explain why the humans seem to lose equal to more actual matches.  But kill-wise, it's not contest.  I care about the balance for when scrimming comes around.  So once standard bases pop up and everyone starts using them, I have a feeling scrims will no long be fun as humans will clearly over-dominate.

[Plague Bringer]

I think a big issue with these gameplay tests is that the majority of the testers (us, the community, the oldfags) are way too used to 1.1 to effectively play 1.2. A newcomer, yes, would suck, but after getting over the learning curve would begin his path to clan level gaming. Us, on the other hand, basically have to unlearn 1.1 just to start learning 1.2. It'll be a lot easier to build well and play well if we didn't have these old habits hardcoded into our systems. Not sure how games are going to go once 1.2 gets it's large influx of the dreaded Release: Day/Week/Month One Newbies, but I think that'll be the true test of balance (post final version, unfortunately [barring, obviously, the common 1.2.x bug fixes & minor patches]).

[Norfenstein]

Once I realized that starting a pounce mid-air cancels the previous one, I was able to pounce pretty well; but the cancel is really annoying.

I don't know what you guys are talking about. The payload for a pounce is saved at the start of a pounce and is thereafter separate from the charge. So whatever your charge is when you leave the ground is what determines how much damage you do, regardless of whether you begin charging again in the air or not.

[Silver]

Once I realized that starting a pounce mid-air cancels the previous one, I was able to pounce pretty well; but the cancel is really annoying.

I don't know what you guys are talking about. The payload for a pounce is saved at the start of a pounce and is thereafter separate from the charge. So whatever your charge is when you leave the ground is what determines how much damage you do, regardless of whether you begin charging again in the air or not.

It seems to me if you start another charge in mid-air the damage from the previous charge is cancelled.

[bob0]

Once I realized that starting a pounce mid-air cancels the previous one, I was able to pounce pretty well; but the cancel is really annoying.

I don't know what you guys are talking about. The payload for a pounce is saved at the start of a pounce and is thereafter separate from the charge. So whatever your charge is when you leave the ground is what determines how much damage you do, regardless of whether you begin charging again in the air or not.

It seems to me if you start another charge in mid-air the damage from the previous charge is cancelled.

Strangely, I was unable to reproduce that when I last tried it.  The code straightforwardly copies STAT_MISC.

For some reason, I was unable to do any damage when I pounced during one game, even to buildables.  When I didn't recharge my pounce immediately after I pounced, I was able to deal damage.  Perhaps the server was running a QVM with a bug in it.