Just increase the combat timer for regen to 5 seconds, I think that should do it.

It feels like the changes are coming in too quick. When the Third Iteration was released, nobody knew what will happen with the changes. There were just so many of them that changed a lot of teams gameplans and ideas.

Why not just change one thing at a time, see how it works out, and plan accordingly? We changed marine move speed, buffed aliens, included HMG, modified Muccous, changed biomass scaling, reduced cyst build time and maturation time, when we could've, for example, just changed marine move speed and checked the balance after. If the balance is still not anywhere near OK and marines are taking over 75% rounds, then we add something else, like biomass scaling, etc etc.
We don't need DRASTIC patches to change the way the game works.

I think a game that I can show as an example, that has good patches is Dota 2. They change a few heroes by a tiny bit, maybe adding 0.5 seconds extra stun on a spell or something along those lines, and people start thinking of possibilites of using the named hero in their lineups.

The Muccous shield idea in my opinion would work great with carapace, but it feels like if it stays on only 15% eHP then people will start going Shift hive after regen gets nerfed. no lifeform ever goes carapace anymore due to you literally getting more out of regen in a fight than carapace, exactly what Crazy said. You regen the +15% eHP from Muccous anyway with regen in a matter of seconds. Changing this would make the game more diverse, maybe some teams will want to start going shift hive with increased attack speed or other teams will want an extra res biter on the field and more eHP from carapace.

Plus when regen is used less I think teams with gorges will start using babblers more for even more eHP during fights on their lifeforms ontop of the extra carapace or movement speed.

tl;dr, my idea is to increase the amount of patches, but lower the amount of changes in 1 patch.

Edit: Changing the regen to only have 50% during fights will not fix anything in my opinion. I see the current problem as the lerk comes back too fast AFTER the fight, not because he regens too much DURING the fight. Dealing 180 damage to him will not matter, he will be back in around 10 seconds full hp and ready to go again. 10 seconds is not enough to get ground, you can maybe cap a power node to 50-70%

New changes to test! give feedback! yeah!

-Increase speed decay for lerk glide - you will now lose speed quicker while gliding. This is aimed at addressing "silent lerk".
-Remove Regen ticks during combat (combat timer is 3 seconds) - this will differentiates the role of regen from carapace
-Cyst growth time increased from 4-->5 sec
-Fixed metabolize and spores sounds (audio should play more reliably)

-Add 16% per 2 sec healing cap for aliens
This one is really important! this caps aliens at a maximum healing rate. The hive heals you at a rate of 16% per 2 seconds. Lifeforms will now never heal quicker than this, regardless of how many healing sources are stacked (excess heals will be ineffective). This cap is only in effect on players, structures do not have one. The most important thing to note here is that any excess healing in the hive (crag, gorge) will no longer be effective on players (we felt this is a necessary evil to reduce the effectiveness of heal stacking) - this is still somewhat experimental so we would really like feedback on it.

Here is a list of the healing sources in NS2 that will stack, you can now no longer exceed the 16% per 2 sec cap (which is about 13 seconds from 0%--100%hp).

(% healing per 2 seconds)
Hive: 16%
regen: 7%
gorge: 8hp + 3%
crag: 6% (clamped 10-60)
Healwave: approximately 8%
Improved Metab: 15hp (or 3.5%)

Please don't nerf regen to the ground, as a solution for the lerk, buff carapace, it's crap even on vanilla.

Its not nerfed into the ground, it makes it more sensible. Because it was bs op.

The lerk change doesn't feel like it changes much. Or maybe because I yolo lerk too much to notice.

I think the regen after a few quick games feels much more sensible. It's still useful maybe still more so than carapace for certain lifeforms. But you are forced out of fights for longer periods and even with regen find yourself looking fora crag if you're super low.

I think it will still be a favored hive unless shift changes somehow or people want to really try shade.

Although even with nerfed regen I still did 213 dmg and a lerk survived on 2hp, omg nerf biomass scaling!
Although i guess that is better than it surviving on 20hp and regening. time to l2aim.

AWESOME changes - Changes like these have been expected and will cause much rejoice! :D

As a commander - I hate medpacking 1-3 times for a lerks poison to go away, and in that time keep the marine in shape to fight, My suggestion: Medpacks works as an antidote. If a marine is poisoned by a lerkbite and recieves a medpack, he no longer takes damage from the lerk poison. A lerk bite feels too costly in T-res right now, if you want to keep the marines ready for combat and not at 48 HP(?), no matter the armor level.

----Alternative balancing of this feature. If this shuts down the lerks damage output toop hard, Increase lerk poison damage, forcing the medpack from the commander, if he wants to keep that marines alive at all - we have after all been introducing skilldependant abilities such as metabolise, and this will add to the game in the same spirit.
The lerk could also be balanced in this facion to have a higher flat damage and less poison damage (with numbers akin to. 40->50 flat damage and 6->3 poison damage/tick.)

There is an serverside error within the compmod wich end in nonstop rubberbanding:

http://pastebin.com/f3HkrSG3

And some one should take a look why people are rubberbanding in the moment new players joining a server @ NSL rates.
This could be an issue if spectators are joining and its going on my nerves on the HBZ pub :D

dePARA says

There is an serverside error within the compmod wich end in nonstop rubberbanding:

http://pastebin.com/f3HkrSG3

And some one should take a look why people are rubberbanding in the moment new players joining a server @ NSL rates.
This could be an issue if spectators are joining and its going on my nerves on the HBZ pub :D

I was carrying as Aliens...

maybe reduce regen combat timer to maybe ( 2seconds or 1.5 seconds) ?

3 Seconds it seems that you are out of a fight and its already over. Like if your lerking and you fly in the air you would have to find a safe place to regen at and that would take like 3 seconds to wait + the amount of time you are healing. I think 3 seconds is too much, waiting to regen, i think you might as well go carapace and go to a crag or hive.

Ixian says

As a commander - I hate medpacking 1-3 times for a lerks poison to go away, and in that time keep the marine in shape to fight, My suggestion: Medpacks works as an antidote. If a marine is poisoned by a lerkbite and recieves a medpack, he no longer takes damage from the lerk poison. A lerk bite feels too costly in T-res right now, if you want to keep the marines ready for combat and not at 48 HP(?), no matter the armor level.

----Alternative balancing of this feature. If this shuts down the lerks damage output toop hard, Increase lerk poison damage, forcing the medpack from the commander, if he wants to keep that marines alive at all - we have after all been introducing skilldependant abilities such as metabolise, and this will add to the game in the same spirit.
The lerk could also be balanced in this facion to have a higher flat damage and less poison damage (with numbers akin to. 40->50 flat damage and 6->3 poison damage/tick.)

Except this would make bite lerks pointless. The whole idea of this is so you can bite, retreat, spike and use your poison to deal additional damage. If a marine is still in a fight with a lerk/other lifeforms while taking poision damage, you will not need to med him for the poision but for the fac he will die to other spikes/swipes/bites.

If a marine is out of combat and taking poison damage it will never kill him so you don't have to med every 6hp tick.

If you try to balance that with buffed medkits and higher poison damage, the second you cant afford a med or miss medding someone, they're going to be royally fucked and we only just made lerks sensible again.

Also lerks do 60 damage so unless you feel like making them do 70dmg per bite making them flying skulks 3 biting a2 marines/4 bite a3 + poison + spikes that's going to make them so op because most comms are not going to get meds on those marines in time unless they're a3.

I think you'll be considerably more annoyed at that than the current system which works fine.

I really don't like the idea of no regen in combat. It used to be like that pre 250 and it sucked.
Using regen with efficiency in combat should make you play diffenrently than playing with carapace tho.
It's more hit and dodge or hit and run, where cara is just hit and hit.
Hit a marine once, dodge, hide behind a wall, don't let him time to reload, comeback. It also puts pressure on a marine, if you are dodging and hiding behind a wall or a pillar or anything, he has to rush you or every damage he has done have been for nothing.
Regen only out of combat will make you play in combat like if you had no upgrades at all. This sounds bad to me.

To balance the regen issue, you could reduce the amount healed, or put the no regen in combat delay really low (I wouldn't go further than 0,2s, but i'd rather see 0,1s). That way regen still has an effect in combat.

Also I like the cap on the regen stack, but around the hive it should be more than just the hive. It feels dumb to have somehting healing you in the hive for nothing. And more importantly, the hive regen alone is usually not enough to keep you alive when marines push in the hive. Make the cap at 1.5*hive_healing next to the hive.

Just delete this post.
I thought i found another error, but it was the same like above.

Memo to me: dont read serverlogs if you are super tired :D

+1 king_yo

I second the '+1 king_yo'.

That error doesn't really make sense dePara, its thrown in a vanilla function that I pass the same arguments as normal.

And I think that the hitching when players initially connect is known, that has been around in vanilla for a long time.

The healing cap is still kind of experimental. 16% is full HP in 13 seconds... the jury is still out here. Personally I would like to try the 16% cap out for a little bit longer before increasing it- removing the ability to near-instantly jump up to full HP for lifeforms puts a lot more importance on the quality of engagements instead of the quantity.

I do agree with king_yo about how it doesn't really make sense to have nothing else able to heal you in the hive. This was the worst part about the change but it felt sort of necessary....If people really don't like this perhaps increasing the cap to ~18% would be an alternative... that way you would be able to receive a little extra healing on top of the hive heals. imo I would not like to see it raised much more than that though.


Nothing is set in stone though, all of this is still a bit experimental so feedback would be great!

2 more changenotes from today:

-Regen - The combat timer now only initiates when the player takes damage (you can now bite structures while regen’ing). Combat timer lowered from 3sec → 2sec.

-Lerk Glide - Marines should now be able to hear the sound when lerks are gliding (should address ‘silent lerks’ [for real this time])

Hi,

The glide sound is annoying as fuck "in my opinion". Maybe lerk can make noise just when they press space.

Thanks, bye.

MY EARS

Please fix first person sound for lerks, its imposibru to hear anything while you are flying

THIS LERK SOUND

WHY DO I HAVE A HAIRDRYER ON

I CANT HEAR THINGS

HELLO?

/uselessfeedback

ok so in all seriousness, silent lerks are annoying as hell. I agree.

But can we not have a constant super loud, really annoying sound all of the time?!

Here's my stream from PCW with this change Playing with the hairdryer


Also it's bugged, because here is me breaking it in the first game and no longer having the lerk sound ^^
breaking the hairdryer

Agreed with Tinki, make flapping loud as f*ck, and gliding silent.

WTF! U GUYS RUINED LERKS! Make fapping loud and gliding silent, there is already an increase in decay so why make sound that sounds like crazy's hairdryer. Make fapping loud +1 but please remove that shit from gliding.

The client-side glide sound is currently too loud... should be getting fixed soon (it is not this loud for marines, only for the lerk =P).

Gliding needs a sound so that you don't get the benefit of maximum speed with 0 noise. This is an issue we've seen in ns2 many times with fade and skulk.. it's long over due to be fixed on the lerk.

zebroe says

Make fapping loud

..flapping is already loud? the flapping sound is not the issue. the issue is that you can glide through 3 rooms at 9-11 speed while making no noise.

I honestly like the changes to glide but it may need to be toned down just a little. From the middle of Falls in bio i can hear the lerk gliding in alley.

Anyone else think its a little too loud?

Just remove the gliding sound please. "Silent lerks" were NEVER an issue and they never will be, it's a feature that needs to stay.

to whom it may concern regarding constant replugging -

"We have fixed a number of issues to do with crashing in 268, however the issue stated with the 'red plug' seems to mostly come from playing compmod. This particular issue doesn't seem to be affecting Public play, which means NS2+ is probably also OK.

268 is close to being finished, it'll be worth trying that ASAP WITHOUT compmod and seeing if you have the same issue.

If the issue is with Compmod, their authors will need to address this themselves." -Obraxis


and lerk sound wtf, thought i was tripping out last night.

Cr4zy_: I agree with Ixian about medpacks and lerk poison, but agree with you that his suggestion would be a pretty big nerf to the ability. However, if poison acted to increase the damage done to the poisoned target for a short time (maybe +15%, non-stacking), you wouldn't have the annoying medpack issue and you'd still make the bite followed by spikes effective. Bites would also be useful in group engagements for focusing down particular targets.


king_yo: I think you're thinking about regen vs carapace the wrong way. Carapace is useful in combat and useless out of combat. Regen is being made to be useless in combat and useful out of combat. In that way, they're opposites and each provides a useful benefit. Lifeforms with carapace have more survivability when fighting, while lifeforms with regen can return to combat faster and regain health faster when trapped. People have gotten used to regen being the only trait worth using for lifeforms because it works so well in all situations, and that should probably change. Giving the two traits useful, separate focuses should make them both appealing to people.


rantology: I like that 'combat' has been redefined as 'taking damage.' This seems like a good compromise while nerfing regen and keeping the traits distinctly useful.

I dislike the lerk changes. Why has glide been double-nerfed, and in such a short period of time? Increasing glide deceleration should give marines a greater opportunity to notice the lerk coming in for a silent kill, but it's unnecessary if they make noise when gliding. At the very least, I think these two changes shouldn't coexist. Alternatively, if flapping is loud, gliding is quiet, and gliding decelerates quickly, a lerk either has to spend a long time approaching the marine to avoid tipping him off, or flap to accelerate and thus clue in the marine that he needs to be watching his back. This should largely achieve what you want without destroying a method of play people enjoy. The current change is also making it easier for silent marines to hunt lerks, completely changing the lerk dynamic. I think it would be more enjoyable to rely on flapping as the audio cue and allow lerks to avoid that if they sacrifice significant time and speed, increasing the odds they'll be seen.


As a more general comment, I really wish a few things would change about how comp mod is being handled. First, I think feedback generally isn't getting enough consideration or response from the comp mod team. When people post suggestions or point out problems and those aren't addressed in changes to the mod or a reply from a developer, they're left wondering why. It discourages feedback, stifles discussion, and makes it harder for people to provide better feedback in the future. It also gives people a sense that their opinions don't matter, perhaps because they're not in a high enough division. This mod is supposed to make competitive play more enjoyable for the community as a whole, so what they say should be incredibly important. It's worth noting that design sense and game skill are not inherently related traits, so lesser skilled players can still have good insights.

Second, I think changes need to be more incremental and released more regularly. We get patches that are so big that many of the changes never get feedback, or never even get tried (exos?). How are we supposed to gauge whether a particular change was beneficial for balance if it's lumped in with 20 other changes? We also get changes that seem to try to solve the same problem in different ways at the same time, like adding HMGs and balancing exos to solve the problem of the shotgun monopoly. If things are more incremental, it's easier to make decisions about what's needed and what's not working. It would make playing the mod more painless because people wouldn't have to learn so many changes all at once. If the mod got a weekly release with a few changes at a time, people could adapt to them better and more easily provide feedback, and the overall quality of the changes would probably be higher.

Finally, being told we should live with changes we dislike for a while before they're tweaked further is very frustrating. It wouldn't be much of an issue if changes were small, but when it's decided by the team that something is a problem and the mod then includes changes to the opposite extreme, waiting for it to be reigned back a little bit is often worse than if the changes had not gone far enough and then needed to be taken further. We also have no idea how long we need to live with those changes before it's been 'long enough.' Making changes more incremental and the release schedule more regular would go a long way.

Hopefully this doesn't come across too negatively, and I do appreciate the work that's being put into making the game more enjoyable at the competitive level. Keep it coming.

15 August 2014 -
-Increase speed decay for lerk glide - you will now lose speed quicker while gliding. This is aimed at addressing "silent lerk".

17 August 2014 -
-Lerk Glide - Marines should now be able to hear the sound when lerks are gliding (should address ‘silent lerks’ [for real this time])

2 fucking days, can you keep your panties on and let others who actually have things to do test this shit out too? i really don't want to play compmod that only specific people have a chance to give input on.

And no, i don't want silent gliding to be removed completely,

Scale glide volume with speed.

Slow speed = no sound
High speed = louder sound (not deafening)

Slow speed should probably be equal as marine walk speed this allows you to follow a marine silently but not get close to him unless he crouches/stops.