(continued from description) I have a theory that stalkers and stingtails both follow a U shape in their "effectiveness vs player skill" curves. To total noobs - they are death sentences. Then, you play a bit of hasard 4 with the coilgun or breach cutter and suddenly they're so easy: dying to these simple enemies when they're all alone is just so embarassing lmao get gud. But then you increase the difficulty a bit more to see these enemies more often when they're in larger packs while you're picking some loadouts that aren't overpowered, and hopefully you find that these enemies are so outrageously overtuned. It's one thing to die equally to stalkers vs other enemies and not feel that gap, but once you legitimately get good enough at the game to not die very often, that absolute cliff between the power level is so incredibly apparent. This stance against stalkers (and stingtails) is extremely common in the modded community, and for many people that aren't hopelessly addicted to making the game harder to feed our inflamed egos, that fact may sound surprising. Especially when you very often might hear things like "actually, stingtails shouldn't have been nerfed at all, and the current state is overnerfed" or "stalkers are just a skill issue, ur bad", which you might think are statements from "good" players that understand the game. But if you want to see actual good players pushing the game to its limits, get the hell off my solo focused channel and go check out what von or jpeg or waste or emc or any of the dozens of other real cracked players are cooking these days. I'm not saying these particular players are the ones saying that stalkers/stingtails have a frustratingly unfair aspect to them (I don't want to put words in people's mouths here - I know a few do based on past discussions, but I don't want to lie here and say they all said this because they absolutely didn't, and you'll have to ask them individually). I just think you'll find them amenable to the idea that even though we push the game to be harder and harder to find that ever retreating dopamine, there is something to be talked about in terms of what makes something "fun" while maintaining the challenge, and having an element of player agency and "fairness" contributes very highly to the end experience. Because it should be obvious that there are loads of ways to make the game challenging - hell, just make every enemy instakill you - but having challenge while maintaining fun is a lot more complicated (and varies between individual tastes). All I'm saying is I think stalkers are awful. Irredeemably so. Unlike stingtails (which I also think are extremely toxic), I don't think stalkers are redeemable personally. I don't even know where to BEGIN with a "balance" pass for them. I have thoughts on stingtails myself (they need to be less tanky / more visible for the level of danger they provide), but there are fundamental problems with how stalkers interact with high level play that no amount of me "improving" or overcoming "skill issue" will ever break this for me. They just don't work well with my idea of fun, and so I'm going to mod them out of my game and feel zero shame about it. --- Lame rant over, let's talk run/build stuff: Pump action is pretty good for a warthog OC, and I think it's potentially the best one maybe? It's quite potent at doing the warthog thing. Unfortunately I still think warthog has severe problems that extend up through high density h5a/modded, and it's not going to be as impactful as something like EM refire or executioner Lok-1. I personally don't hate the warthog as much as other modded players (I think it's fiiiine / passable), but I do feel the weakness at many points in this run. I think the blowthrough is an interesting gimmick but ultimately not super impactful compared to just flicking between heads, at least out in the open. The upped damage is really why it feels like top tier warthog for me at least, and it handles as a half decent sidegrade / minor upgrade to magnetic pellet alignment (my usual pick for the hog). It's worth noting that I'm tapping control between shots to animation cancel to slightly increase the fire rate. It's kinda annoying, but it's worth it. I definitely need a lot more practice to really conquer this OC, as I'm constantly running out of ammo in the clip and fudging things up because of it. I think if I improve that muscle memory and animation cancels it'd be a bit stronger than my current output with it, but I don't know where it lands in the engineer primary tierlist at the end of all things. Turret whip is neat and all, but requires a lot more turret maintenance than my fast and loose playstyle tends to enjoy. Rj250 is really worth discussing in the context of h5a, because "player vulnerability" hits like a truck to this self damage thing. And yet... call me crazy... but I think it's still pretty damn top tier? I picked up some lite TF2ing again recently (is this the source of my unhinged toxicity or just another symptom of my current mental state?) - and after playing a bit of soldier and some jump maps here and there (poorly, might I add. it's been too long i'm bad again), I'm appreciating the wonderful balance that is the rocket jump's "trade HP for positioning gains". Like, it hurts to hurt yourself so often, especially when the hurt hurts more than usual hurt. But you gain an absurd amount of spacing and effective output that the hurt really is worth it. At least here in solo land when you have resups to chug for HP. The equation definitely changes a bit in multiplayer, but at least in MP you won't need to reposition quite as aggressively all the time I don't think. Anyway, I think rj250 is more than takeable at h5a regardless of it being substantially nerfed in it. It combos real well with the enemy pool basically just being all grunts too, and the fire spread into a lure is quite potent wave clear. Speaking of lures, I do think lures might be best in slot at h5a. This nade really slaps into this particular difficulty, though they aren't perfect. I still enjoy plasma bursters more (for all their faults lol), but lures are quite decent here. In theory you can bait a stalker with a lure but good luck not dying first lmao. Lures were the key to winning the monkey pillar fight (well, lures and bosco). If I didn't have bosco I'd skip the core stone event on this build. The monkeys move too fast and hit too hard on h5a, and it's far above my skill level. On other difficulties, my true solos might rely on retreating to a bunker and killing the big waves so that I have space to destroy the pillar, but here the strat is just get bosco to do the bulk of the lifting while I run around and try to survive. FWIW, I've lost several monkey fights on h5a and don't think I've mastered them outside gunner/scout just yet (those two classes trivialize it, but engy/driller require a lot more thinking and prep and bunkering I think). --- I don't know what else to talk about so I'll leave it there. This was mostly just an excuse to rant about stalkers. Sorry for the negativity, I'll hush now.
You can use the "Slightly more visible stalker" Mod if you want the stalker back but less annoying. And mind if I ask what mod do you use to remove the stalker from the spawn pool?
@Kunnoc Sorry for the extremely late response (youtube studio UI doesn't update me on new replies and i have to accidentally scroll into these things manually to see them :/). I've been using Custom Difficulty 2, which is what I use for haz6x2 etc. It's currently in beta, and you can find the pak for it in the practical DRG discord server (the modded hangout). A json like: { "Name": "No Stalkers", "Pools": { "DisruptiveEnemies": { "Remove": [ "ED_Spider_Stalker" ] } } } will give you standard haz5 just without stalkers ever being around. This pool removal can be applied to any difficulty you want to play, and I've been attaching that to my usual difficulties.
Stalkers very much strike me as an enemy balanced around multiplayer, which is why I don't dislike them as much as I probably should. With friends they feel like a fun little challenge and the bursts of panic among the group trying to find the stalker gets the adrenaline going just right for me. They are MISERABLE in solo, though. I don't want to come across like one of those people who says shit like "its a multiplayer game so solo doesn't matter aaaauu" but I would be bummed if they significantly reworked/removed stalkers and I lost that kind of multiplayer interaction. Stingtails I definitely agree with, I've said from the beginning the tail should be easily severable and that would make fighting them a lot more dynamic, and its a shame they're as weird and obnoxious as they are gameplay-wise because I think their sound and visual design is a lot of fun.
A potential idea/compromise suggested elsewhere is perhaps putting the stalkers into the stationary pool to spawn with new rooms? Then you have the hide and seek / multiplayer aspect intact with no changes needed, and in singleplayer you can get away with the bad sound cues not revealing the exact location because it just means you have to be very careful stepping into the room. I don't *love* it, but it lets the enemies remain as is without compromising a single player mission as highly. Because in single player the appearance of a stalker can end the run instantly with nothing you can do about it sometimes (and then the danger is only frontloaded and not "ends a solidly played 20 minute run because one impossible enemy spawned gg")
I have been very tempted to replace Stalkers in all my difficulties with Beta Stalkers and the only thing holding me back is that I’d have to add yet another disclaimer to my difficulties that it would need another pak to make the difficulty function. So until I absolutely lose it, what I’ve been doing with Stalkers is making them stunnable and making their spawn rates rare. Yes, actually figuring out where the Stalker is when it starts making the not very useful sound cue is still annoying, but if you do find it and if you have stun, it’s going down and that significantly made them more tolerable. I found it absolutely annoying that you could find it, try to ignite it with Burning Hell and whip out VB, but the thing is just gone. The whole concept of the Stalker is cool. Sneaky enemy that chunks you if you aren’t aware. Beta Stalkers execute that idea pretty damn well. The only issue is that you had to turn up your effects to High to see them while cloaked and they had no sound cue, so you only had your eyes to look out. If the Beta Stalker did get close to you, it was almost a guaranteed hit that chunked you however because it didn’t burrow away so fast and was stunnable, you still had a chance to either outright kill it or at least chunk it in return. And it didn’t disable your shields too. Disabling shields is a fine idea, but I don’t think that works with current Stalkers.
> Sneaky enemy that chunks you if you aren’t aware. See, this is something I think I diverge from you guys a bit. I'll admit I was never a fan of the beta stalkers either (I ended up removing them from my Lx2's and ND's lol), but I think the fundamental problem I have is because I feel like I WAS aware of my surroundings and no matter how much aware I was, sometimes I just died instantly with nothing I could have done better. The lack of stun is annoying because it puts it in a loop where you have to find it before it kills you multiple times, widdling it down a little bit per cycle, but that's not my biggest issue with the enemy myself. It's less about the times I'm finding it and shooting it for it to burrow before confirming, and more the times where I'm dying instantly because I failed to find it with elderly, low graphics quality eyes. That is frustrating to insta lose to something I couldn't outskill, because no amount of practice is going to improve my eyesight.
Sure, but I think the necessity of those mods to make the encounter feel fair is a big neon warning sign that the vanilla game's implementation is very lacking and needs to change. I remember a reddit post (because it amused me greatly) of someone saying "stalkers are perfect, don't change them" and it was revealed in the comment section that the person who posted this take... used mods to make the stalkers less oppressive. Like, they went out of their way to make a big statement how wonderfully fair the enemies were - and it turns out that they used mods to fix them! I think having to use mods to fix a balance issue is less appealing to me than using mods to improve the general experience. I'm not really sure why it's a hangup for me, nor why it feels like such a big leap, but it definitely feels like it crosses some sort of line. For me, anyway. I'd rather just remove stalkers entirely than have to install a mod which still kinda keeps them annoying but more playable. If too many people are using these fixes that it lowers the rate of complaints, GSG will just never do a balance patch for them. I kinda need people to be as angry about it as I am? Lol. I've sorta given up on stalkers entirely and I have zero faith that they will ever be a fun enemy for me, and that's okay. Some people enjoy fighting them (because some people are very weird and have terrible taste in enemy design :D), and enough people play on lower difficulties where they don't one-shot PLUS aren't playing try hard solo like me, so there's just no way I'm going to win the fight for a balance patch. If they end up tweaking it, it will be like the stingtail nerf which doesn't hit the core of why the enemies are unfun to fight. So rather than stick around in an abusive relationship that is slightly less abusive because of visibility mods/whatever, I'll just make a clean break. I don't feel like I'm missing out on any enjoyment from it, and that's totally okay for me. It just makes me less willing to ever pub again because stalkers exist in pubs and they tilt me there too.
@@ojb_ I think their attack is bad game design, the massive damage plus removing shields plus slowdown is too punishing because it easily snowballs into being downed. They should instead e.g. tag the player to receive more damage from other bugs and disable shield regeneration, something that is avoidable entirely through skilled movement but is still annoying enough the make players hunt them down.
Personally I love Stalkers and think they're largely fine. They feature one of the loudest warning sounds in the game and never attack too quickly. That alone makes up for many shortcomings. They largely punish you for loitering too long in one small area, which I think is great. Their main issues are, for least to most alarming: 1. There can be more than one at a time, and that immediately makes things confusing 2. They're far too hard to see, their visibility needs to improved 3. Sometimes, they spawn far too quickly one after another. Perhaps they ought to be rarer. 4. They burrow underground far too quickly, it's impossible to kill them in a reasonable amount of time. Sometimes you'll be shooting the same Stalker three or four times before they die if your build doesn't allow for DPS-checking them (such as Breach Cutter, Warthog spam to the weakpoint, Clusters, Double Barrel, etc.) which is just unreasonable. 5. Their damage is far too great; if I'm not mistaken, it's enough to one-shot any dwarf on full health and shield on H5 with player vulnerability on maximum. If GSG implemented changes to fix these issues, I think they'd be one of the most interesting mechanics in the game.
I think those are solid points, and I can see where you're coming from. I don't know how much visibility they need to gain to feel fair for me personally however. I just don't like being punished for having poor(ish) eyesight and have something so dangerous be reliant on seeing something before it ends me. I just really enjoy the rest of the game's balance in being able to read a situation and react to it because there's alwaysa fun counterplay element. With stalkers needing to "get lucky and spot the danger", there's just something else at stake that maybe just isn't for me. I don't fault others for potentially liking that (everybody has their own tastes), but for me to have something that I'll NEVER be good at (because my eyes will only grow worse and worse as I get even older than I am now), it feels bad ya know.
As a mainly solo haz 5 player I haven’t struggled too much with Stalkers and think they’re a fun idea, though they definitely need tweaks. Here’s some situations I’ve disliked with Stalkers and what I think should be done 1) Multiple Stalkers: Nearly impossible to tell if there is more than one so you end up either getting comboed to death or getting hit even though you caught a Stalker. Solution: Only let one be alive at a time 2) Last Ditch Effort Dashes: If you find the Stalker too late it can often end up making a break for you and getting the hit off anyways, this highly favors builds with good self defense letting them ignore this situation while builds without get punished even if they find the Stalker sometimes. Solution: Make the laser pointer stun the Stalker in place for a few seconds, then force it to burrow 3) Late Chirps: The Stalker doesn’t automatically do a chirp when it spawns so VERY occasionally it will be on top of you before it can get a peep out thus warning you too late before it strikes. Solution: Force it to do a chirp when spawning and maybe force it to spawn farther away from the player 4) Stalker and Swarms: Stalkers can often end up being really frustrating when dealing with a swarm. Often they take alternate routes forcing you to turn your back on a SWARM, though their is some counter play like using a choke point, booking it to a teammate or just shielding. But it is really frustrating that they so much power during a swarm. Solution: Don’t let them spawn within a minute before a swarm (or at least not during one) so players get time to actually kill it These are my personal problems with the Stalker, let me know if you experienced the same or have completely different issues all together
Very much agree with 1 and 3, clear audio cue is vital to keeping the Stalker reasonably counterable. Grabbers have the same issue, the audio cues do not warn you about more than one being present. With 2 I do not agree entirely, its reaction to being pinged is fine, but I do think it should be vulnerable to stun, albeit with 50% resistance and 2s cooldown. Completely disagree with 4, Stalkers are supposed to split your attention, just like Grabbers. My personal issues with Stalkers: 1. Their blue shimmer is reasonably visible everywhere but in Glacial Strata. It just blends in with the reflective blue walls too well. 2. Stalkers spawn by popping out of the terrain just like grunts, which means they can spawn right next to you, most notoriously when you are waiting for the drop pod to open during extraction. This combined with your issue #3 can create some unpleasant situations.
@nightcapmain2699 Multiple stalkers is a problem just like multiple stingtails is a problem. The enemies are definitely very similar in their effectiveness once you get groups of them since they can ping pong you quite rapidly, but a lot of that is just because one enemy is so incredibly deadly that increasing the count means you're even more likely to get that insta loss fail state. I think I did a very poor job in my original writeup (I might go back and add some things to it), but my main issue with stalkers is just the occasions where I feel *completely* helpless to stop it from killing me. This run is a great example of this scenario I feel, because I knew it was a threat the INSTANT it spawned in due to the sound cue, but the sound was ineffective at letting me determine where the threat was from. I'm older than most players and have worse eyesight from years of abuse, but I don't think it's unreasonable that my experience here is something that could happen to anybody. Because I run into this a fair bit in every map I roll stalkers in. Sometimes I get lucky and see them randomly, but most times it's just stumble around and get nowhere and then oops dead. Like, if someone can point out any moments where you can easily see the stalker (outside of its appearances where it straight up kills me) such that I could have handled it, please link those timestamps. I was laser focused on finding this thing before it nuked me for several MINUTES and I could not find it once! My positioning choices and loops towards high ground with high visibility were specifically made to try and maximize the free time I had to look around without dying to anything else in the meantime, and I just couldn't figure it out. You could argue that the last fossil was greedy, but I thought I had the space to pull it off. Though of course I didn't because they move lightning fast and have absurd reach that even though I couldn't see a threat at the time it didn't mean anything. This is the main issue. This is why I despise these enemies so much - it didn't matter that I was full effort searching - the only time I found it was when it already killed me. That's so incredibly frustrating and different from every other enemy in the game (well, besides stingtails, who have very similar "you don't know it's there until it instakills you" mechanics); everything else that deals high burst damage is very visible or has distinct movement counters. These enemies don't. There's nothing to do but get lucky, and it's easier to get lucky on lower difficulties where the density is low enough that the danger of not finding it in time isn't as high. I think the sound is cool, but totally and completely worthless in tracking it down. I have a good pair of headphones too and a fair bit of experience with figuring out 3d spatial audio and shit like that - but this screech doesn't provide any sort of information other than "oh if I don't get lucky and find it, I will lose this run". I don't know if there's a way to improve that audio either, because stingtails have proven that an audio only cue isn't really enough when EVERYTHING is making audio cues at the times where a stingtail grab is most likely to kill you (i.e. mid swarm). You bring up an interesting point I haven't thought about - what if stalkers weren't in swarms / the regular spawn pools? It sounds blasphemous at first, but honestly if this was an enemy that was purely in the stationary enemy pool (i.e. spawns ONLY at the first entrance of a cave like a leech or spitballer), this might be more palatable? It's comparable then to a cave leech that wanders around and you have to spot it before committing into the room, and at least then you have some tunnel bunker support to lean on to make it easier. I think this is a solution I would honestly support, because once you handle the stalkers you won't risk insta losing the mission at any point in the future. And this lets the sound cues remain useless and not need any tweaks, because the audio just lets you know if one is alive but not really how to find it. I do worry about refinery hot drops, but this seems like a compromise that doesn't need to change mechanics at all and probably won't annoy the people who (for whatever inexplicable reason) might like the ability to lose the run instantly with zero counterplay, because at least it still exists unchanged. I doubt GSG would ever do that though :/
@cinex20 Grabbers are usually completely visible, even in cave madness difficulties with like 60+ mackies swarming you at once (trust me, I enjoy a good modded mactera mission and I have loads of experience fighting large waves of many many fliers with several grabbers at once inside of it). These enemies I have no problem with, and the audio is enough to alert you to the danger and give you time to be cautious of blind corners, while their flight path is unique in beelineing straight for you in comparison to other mackies widening out a firing line that it's easy to see one regardless of density. So what I'm saying is that the grabber audio cue may not let you know there are multiple at play nor be able to narrow down the incoming direction to worry about, but it doesn't matter too badly because you'll always be able to make visual contact before it actually gets to you, and it's easily scared off. Contrast to stalkers which appear to have a higher damage threshold before they burrow (sometimes if they're locked in you have no chance to halt it even on strong builds), and after they hide you're back into another eye-spy match with the same lack of visibility as before. Grabbers are allowed to have mediocre sound cues because you have the ability to see them before they get you (just like leeches, which also have terribly hard to hear sounds). I disagree entirely that stalker visibility is a problem only on glacial. I have this exact issue on every single biome, and often I just can't see it until I'm dead no matter how hard I look. Maybe it's ageism, maybe it's potato pc pay-to-win high graphics settings or something. But I don't think this is a biome specific problem for me. I'm not sure if I have strong opinions on the ping interaction myself, but I do know that the rate it burrows back into the ground (often before you can secure a kill) is complete rubbish on many builds. Menaces are an interesting comparison because they can be dangerous but are super handleable if hard focused and have enough counterplay when you don't have that luxury (i.e. strafing/stun/etc.). They're interesting because the counterplay of strafing brings up interesting sub problems like sometimes the forced strafe gets you into more trouble with the other enemies alive, and you have to make interesting decisions regarding how much chip to take and from which enemy. Stalkers don't have that nuance - you avoid it at all costs or you lose. (But I mean, how do you avoid a thing you can't see, and which moves super fast with maximum zoomies with very long reach?)
Don’t know if you noticed that during run but seems like the second stalker death occrued because according to sound you damaged it by PGL shot on 17:36 but not enough to burrow and sneaky guy started speeding trying to hit you Btw from my experience I may say that in multiplayer h5a stalkers are way less dangerous since you have up to 8 eyes in the team and stalker chases only 1/4 of the team, but in solo loosing about 75% of hp for not noticing blue shimmering especially in Glacial Strata doesn’t feel really fair)
nice, yeah i didn't notice that during the run nor during any of my rewatches until someone pointed it out :( having everybody being able to look is huge for how they feel in multiplayer. like, at that 17:36 timestamp i was scanning the wall i think to the upper right near the resup to see if i could spot it there, but because the stalker was uncloaked it blended in perfectly with the other grunts in that light level/distance that my frantic search for the impossible-to-see blue shimmer was not going to find anything. in MP maybe somebody else would be shooting the pile of bugs and notice it, but the attention cost in solo is crazy because there's only so much you can focus on at a time! i'm slightly worried now that this upload being on glacial weakens the argument because someone can say "oh, it's just blue on blue, it should be fine on any other biome", when really i have these same exact difficulties regardless of the color of the backdrop. even on something like sandblasted where blue on yellow might be a nice sharp contrast and easier to notice, i get stuck just the same and can't do it :( glacial wasn't an intentional choice or anything and i didn't even think about the biome maybe making it worse, but it probably does. that being said, it's hard to get worse than me already insta losing regardless of it getting buffed by blue terrain haha. this just makes glacial even harder than it already was lol :(
I’ve noticed that at 17:36 stalker uncloaked not because of PGL but for some reason nearby Bosco in the left bottom corner (probably got damaged by fire spread from ignited bug) and it feels ridiculous that in solo random damage source can force stalker to chase player aggressively XD
Honestly I have pretty much the same opinion as you on the stalker and stingtail and I mostly play regular haz5 or haz5+3, the most annoying factor for the stalker is their completely broken attack range as seen in your last death in this video. You either detect them or they hit you but they hit like a truck, their attack seems impossible to dodge. On the stingtails I always had the opinion to just remove it of the game as for today when I play regular haz5 95% of my death are caused by stingtails. I don’t understand how the community can be so blind to major design flaws in some ennemies like stingtails, they just are not fun to fight.
Very interesting insights from the ramblings as always, i practically just scroll through your channel to read them. However, one thing i will disagree on is that stalkers are NOT irredeemable. And i wanted an excuse to start talking about potential changes to these things ever since people started complaining about them anyways. Lol. See, you said stingtails have an inherently extreme ability that can effectively instakill you, and you think that they could be very fragile and/or easier to see to compensate. I will highlight the latter, because the thing that makes it a good idea is this; an enemy's kit INCLUDES it's visuals and audio and the impact those have on gameplay. You can see this clearly in other aspects of stingtail discourse: -Stingtails (and every other thing in the game for that matter) have clear and distinct audio cues. -The Stingtail's attack cue has 2 parts so that you know when the tail is launched, i assume this is because of the predictive aim gimmick making that info important. -Stingtail audio cue bugs and the enemy's low visibility were despised and shouted to the top of the priority list by almost everyone who wasn't satisfied by the enemy's current state. -GSG responded to the above, fixing the audio cue (or at least trying to, don't remember if it worked or not) and including a brightness increase in the November Maintenance blanket nerf to the enemy. Seemingly not enough judging by your opinion, but still, it shows the devs agree with you to some extent, and i think we can both agree they had a damn good reason to do so. PART ONE-SOUND CUES Now, let's see what we can do to stalkers. I won't be exclusively looking at audiovisual changes, but let's start with that now that we're talking about it. We could make the cloak material more visible, or make it uncloak when really close, but it's clear as day that they are supposed to be loud but hidden enemies-the devs explicitly stated so when showing it off on the S5 stream. The danger and unique strength of the enemy is that you get a warning and need to proactively search, so we should make that process less BS instead of altering the enemy's fundamental design. That means looking at the audio is our best bet. Idea 1: Stalkers have more frequent and consistent audio cues, (possibly walk distance based like webspitter AI?) and maybe are forced to do one a certain distance away from the stalked player as well. Simple as. Getting whammed out of nowhere 20s after you last heard the fucker is the main complaint, this is the simplest solution, occam's razor and all that. I'm pretty sure the cues come from an idle roar animation like other enemy screams, which means the stalker would be stopping more frequently too, but that may or may not actually be a bad thing. It can be another trick for players to find out-hear the sound and you have a moment to find the stalker more easily. Or maybe it would actually be harder because motion is generally easy for the brain to detect? Either way it goes it would be an interesting side effect. Not to mention it would slow the enemy down, which could be nice, and if it turns out to be a bad thing a small speed adjustment should be an easy fix. Idea 2: Loud Fucking Footsteps™ (and/or ambient noises) that get louder as the Stalker closes in. Something that's already done with bulks in the base game. This would be really good at building tension, give you a clear and constant warning of the encroaching threat, and if you're good enough you can tell approx. how far away it is as a clue on where to search for it instead of blindly flailing your eyes around; and on top of all that, it should hopefully help a lot with detecting and dealing with multiple stalkers and solo situations. Also probably simpler to code and balance than option one, it's just a simple SFX swap. I personally think the footstep idea is far better, but i presented multiple solutions for a reason so take your pick. PART ONE ADDENDUM-ACCESSIBILITY Spinning off of the first change, if i understand correctly the thing that cemented stalkers as toxic in your eyes was.... your eyes. The enemy simply is not suited to anyone with even minor vision problems, plus i'm pretty sure the vanilla camo texture is still god-awful on lower settings. I feel bad saying this, but you really shouldn't hold your breath for an increased visibility setting or anything like that. There's still no autoclicker or full auto for weapons that should have it, when tbh even the M1 and EPC could get one with the hold reload thing Scorching Tide and Cluster Missiles added. Just hold reload to charged shot and hold left mouse to use the autoclicker, it's that simple. TLDR; GSG is weird, just use Slightly More Visible Stalker, it's a verified mod anyway. Or keep them removed for solo if that's not enough, not like it's hurting anyone. PPART TWO-PUNISHMENT, AKA THE PART WHERE I NERF THE FUCKING DAMAGE!!! THIS IS THE PART WHERE I NERF THE FUCKING DAMAGE!!! ACHIEVEMENT COMPLETE: THE PART WHERE I NERF THE FUCKING DAMAGE!!! Okay, jokes aside, this shit is NOT okay. At all. And i'm shocked that from what i've seen people seem to think it IS okay. To show you why, let's take a peek at exactly what happens when you get hit by a Stalker. First, the shield disruption effect applies for 20 seconds. Then, on top of that, a slow effect is added-this is identical to the Slasher's, 50% slow for 1,5 seconds. Then you get hit, with a base damage of 18. A Slasher does 10. Yikes. Mind you, this value is multiplied by 3,4 on h5p4. That's 61,2 damage that applies AFTER your shield is disabled. Plus the two status effects. The shieldbusting gimmick doesn't even get to do it's thing and add anything interesting because you just fucking die. It's like they merged a reasonable version of a Stalker with an Elite Slasher and then forgot to undo it before releasing the damn thing. Just as with the audio changes i have two ideas for this as well. Idea 1: Massive damage nerf. Stalkers should tag you to assist other enemies, the main attack itself should do an absolute maximum of 10 base damage. More likely 8 or even lower. It should still oneshot from revive health in most scenarios anyway. Idea 2: Smaller damage nerf (14-15 should be good?) but no (or very little) stun. Instead of forcing it to be a big slasher, adding another annoying CC effect into the game and making the lethality of the attack circumstantial, you now get sucker punched and left in a vulnerable position, but retain 100% agency if you survive. Again, i like option 2 more but take your pick. CONCLUSION My final changelist would be the following: -Add loud ambient noises or footsteps emanating from the Stalker at all times. -Add an accessibility setting for better visibility. -Make the attack's effect and punishment reasonable. Remove either the stun or most of the damage and then tweak the damage numbers from there. -Change stun immunity to half duration (adjust this one as needed) and a 3s mercy window. I think making them stunnable is a good idea, but you should not be able to stunlock this thing. Also if you cook hard enough you can technically shoot it with something that doesn't stun and then follow up with something that does to make it burrow twice, not sure how useful that is though. -Maybe some of this isn't necessary if you change/remove them for solo? Idk Essay done. Hope you enjoyed reading it.
Just wanted to start off saying thanks for this comment! I'm a huge fan of long nerdy essays myself, and I love being able to read other people's thoughts on things even if (especially if?) I don't agree with them fully :) It's a great writeup, but I will say I'm probably not going to be able to be swayed over entirely. I think one of my big hangups here is whether or not an enemy being audio cue only is something I enjoy playing, and while I know other people can have different preferences here, I think I've learned from my history of stingtails abusing me that I'm probably on the side of "I need visuals too, because it's too easy for it to feel unfair". One of the big problems is that the audio can only go so far, and as decent as my hearing / headphones are, there's a fundamental limitation in directional audio created by the unreal engine (or really, any digital audio source that doesn't do anything super complex like raytraced sound that simulates bounces and acoustics and whatever). This is a problem that really begins to rear its ugly head once bug density scales more - when the bug count is high and EVERYTHING wants its slot in the queue to play its little noise, it can be hard to pinpoint things you can't see. I'm no neuroscience smarty pants or anything (I'm a dumbcunt), and I'm speaking entirely out of my ass here based on a guess, but I suspect there's some correlation between human senses working better in tandem - like directional audio on its own can only do so much, but once you have visual cues to go alongside it your brain can process that information much better and suddenly a mediocre (and computationally cheap) audio system like you get from unreal does enough to fake it and seem super good, but that's entirely reliant on your eyes filling in the gaps of missing information. This sounds pretentious but it's probably a thing I'd reckon, and if I wasn't so lazy I'd probably look it up instead of just spitballing here. The sound changes from one of the later patches addressing the stingtail silent pulls is almost certainly just a tweak in their audio processing queue to give these priority enemies (like stingtails) the chance to be heard even if there's a LOT of audio clips that want processing. I've done a little bit of audio programming in the past, and the quickest thing you learn is that you can't just play things all at once or you get some real nasty feedback and signal amplication and it goes to shit real quick. So game engines typically solve this with a sound playback queue that audio events send themselves into, and the queue determines what actually gets heard (and only plays so much at a time). So this was a real great change, and I think it did (mostly) solve the problem of stingtails never once making a sound before they kill you, but there are definitely still some edge cases (especially noticeable if you have multiple stingtails alive at once). I don't really blame GSG for this because it's a pretty hard problem to solve, and you're really dealing with much more complicated signal processing at that point. Tangent aside - the problem isn't that I don't know the stingtail exists, the problem is that the limitations of the audio engine (especially when scaled up to high bug densities where LOTS of audio gets played all the time) means you're extremely reliant on making visual contact with the stingtail to actually pinpoint where it's coming from. And the tweaks to the slight glow on the stingtail really don't do anything if they're obscured by a wave of grunts or sitting behind a praetorian or something, and there are a dozen cases where I've died and reviewed footage and there was no way to see the stingtail before it killed me. I am aware of how the tail grab attack predicts your movement and so a sharp change in direction can throw it off (so in theory you "could" dodge this attack), but unfortunately this footwork is extremely dependent on your relative position to where the grab is coming from, and there's simply no way to know which way to move to avoid it if you've never seen it and couldn't pinpoint it with an audio cue buried in the audio muck of a torrent of bug sounds. It's just gambling and getting lucky to be able to choose correctly, especially when you account for height differences in terrain and things like that. The angles are quite tricky and less reasonable and this difficulty is amplified you're under pressure of a swarm (which is pretty much why you wouldn't see the stingtail anyway). Stalkers amplify these sound cue woes even further, because they share that same basic premise except the invisibility and lacking visual confirmation is basically the whole schtick. So where a stingtail does it 15% of the time (and just that 15% is enough to tilt me heavily), the stalker happens upwards of like 40-50% of stalker encounters, at least on some of the higher hazards I've been playing solo. That is really what ends up frustrating me so much. It's not the encounters where I do see things, but it's when I just haven't been able to react in time because I'm not given enough information to work with. Some of this is really just the impact of ground based enemies blending into crowds. Consider how VISIBLE a tri-jaw, an acid spitter, a bulk, or a web spitter are in comparison. All very dangerous enemies where the sound cues definitely do help out, but the primary method of positioning yourself against these things is almost entirely on the back of visually confirming where they are in relation to you and how you're standing on the piece of terrain. The sound cues (sorta like how stalkers and stingtails are now) just tell you one exists, but then you use that to quickly analyze your situation by looking around and because of how these enemies pathfind / their size / where they tend to be - it's quick and easy to spot the danger! In a run like this one I knew full well a stalker and a stingtail existed the instant they spawned once I entered my death spiral at the end, and this was on the back of a "successful" sound cue. I was about as alert as I'll ever really get, and you could argue I let the stingtail fall in priority because I was hyper fixated on trying to find the stalker (which is definitely a bit more dangerous), and maybe there was a mistake in that movement choice when I got stingtailed first. But the stalkers really felt like they came out of nowhere with not a lot of warning or time to react. Again, I keep dragging up tri-jaws as my go-to example of something that feels fair, but that's probably because I adore the design of tri-jaws and how they interact with basic mackies, and they feel so much more fair to move against. You can easily see the threat AND you get a brief second or two to react and choose how to dodge. Sometimes you purposely tank a hit so you don't get hit with a larger one, and the complexity is baked into the *reaction* of a player responding to a clear threat, rather than baked into a hide and seek game that ends the instant it does its attack that you couldn't find in time. For many, many stalker/stingtail interactions, you don't really get any time to respond to the final "i'm killing you now" sound cue. If you didn't spot it earlier, you're very unlikely to survive. This is really my (poorly explained) stance on the audio/visuals - it's less about what they actually are (because sound engine limitations can only do so much, and visuals are impacted by crowd density and nearby bugs a LOT more when bugs sit in crowds), and more about how it feels to react to one of these enemies and try and outplay it. I do like your roar idea for stalkers. Something it made me think about is how it feels to be in a map with exploders. These fuckers move fast and one shot you if you're caught unaware, but they have a distinct (and highly visual) SLOW attack animation. If a stalker appeared on top of me, I'd like rougly the same amount of time to respond as I get from exploders. Sorta like how the lacerator from the dread fight unburies beneath you and you get to see the dirt shaking to let you know it's time to move or get launched. I want a mandatory time frame to give a coordinated response is all. Like, with exploders they come in groups and there's a decent amount of interesting complexity there. Sometimes it's worth risking a pickaxe swing to try and get a headshot on it to stop it from exploding at all, sometimes you have to make split second decisions on which direction to flee into because there's always a lot at once, but that's just an example of all the additional complexity that you gain FOR FREE because it's a slower attack with counterplay. I'm not saying stalkers need to be as easy to counter as exploders are, but it's not like exploders are non threatening to begin with (they kill loads of people caught unawares, often indirectly because of how they decide to respond to an unexpected exploder on top of their original spot). Stalkers should probably be different in some way besides being another split second headshot, but give me some sort of last stand counterplay should I fail the eyesight game is all I ask.
Let me make a split second decision to save my shields / my life, and literally anything but an instant undodgeable attack could be super interesting. Maybe how you react could force the AI to do different things based on what you shoot. Like, exploders have that super simple "hit it in the head and it dies instantly without exploding" minigame, and it might be cool to have a stalker have like a glowing sac or something you shoot and it can't do its shield attack anymore perhaps and just hits you for a tiny amount of damage, or maybe destroying that weakpoint sac instead makes it do no damage but burrow instantly, or maybe it means it can't do damage and only hits shield. Idk. There's so many options and possibilities here but it just feels like a boring instant kill where you get punished for getting unlucky and never seeing it. Compare that to exploders which can still punish if you get unlucky and never saw the group until it's on top of you, there's just a world of much more interesting gameplay with exploders. Even if exploders are trivially easy most times, they're more interesting and fun, and can interact with other bugs in a very unique way that stalkers can't just because "oops you die, do not pass go, do not collect $200" doesn't bring any novel interactions. Briefly addressing loud footsteps: I think it would be an improvement, but wouldn't help my biggest issues. I've played enough 6x2 diablo (aka, bulk det city, where bulk dets spawn in packs and with large spread so they can surround you) to know that bulk footsteps often aren't enough if you're dealing with multiple things at once and overwhelmed with sound cues. Usually the thing that lets me know a bulk has snuck up on me from a blind ledge or tight corner or something (trust me, this happens in diablo a fair bit lol) is seeing the REAL visible particle sphere that surrounds them when you're close. That shit is great for identifying the danger instantly, and if there's something like that a stalker can bring I'm all for it. Give a load distinct hum with a screen overlay or something when it's close enough to attack and then some time for a last second response would do wonders. On accessibility settings - I'm for it, but as you say I'm not holding my breath. DRG lacks in a lot of ways probably because they're a smaller company and don't have a person dedicated to this sort of thing. There's some weird hangup in my head over installing mods like more visible stalkers and it just feels like I'm cheating lol. I'd rather just remove them from my game than play a different experience from most players who would never install the mod/can't. Something about an even playing field is important to me as someone who uploads runs in a case like this (but I'll admit I'm a hypocrite that has mods like weapon heat crosshair which are equal levels of cheaty). On damage - yes. TL;DR of my response: * I don't think audio cues are enough, no matter how talented and creative the sound designer is at making something clever. It feels more like a limitation of cheap directional audio from the engine, and seems like it also has a physical component that NEEDS visual clarification for the sound to be at its most impactful. * Give me visuals and time for counterplay. Let me react to these events at the time of my death via getting grabbed or the last second of a stalker coming for me - a small time window where I can prevent disaster when I fail the eye appointment hide and seek RNG check will do wonders for my frustration levels. There's so many great enemies in this game who have done it correctly - so many examples to learn from is all I'm saying. That's really just what I needed to add. I agree with pretty much everything else! Again, thank you for such an excellent and well thought out comment! Cheers mate.
@@ojb_ thanks for the response, i was hoping for something like this! I definitely get the "i like these, ESPECIALLY when someone disagrees with me?" thing. I think the reason for that is that we're basically playing pretend gamedev. I brought this up in the PDRG discord recently; every game with balance patches always has this stupid debate between "Stoopid devs can't play their own game, why are you balancing it when you have skill issue?" and then someone goes "Stfu you're a stinky proplayer, bAlAnCe BalAncE this bALaNcE that you just hate fun!1!!1" and it's INFURIATING because none of those people know what the fuck they're talking about. The real answer is actually very simple. Look at it this way, DRG's balancing is pretty bad but the devs do know how to do things most of the time. AB is bad so they make a threatening, heavily armored new enemy and you get Stingtails. Engi's poison resistance is weak so they add Septics as both a cool enemy in general AND another source of poison damage. Double Barrel, Roll Control, Guidance Cutoff/Rocket Barrage, all great reworks even if balancing is a little wack. But if you know the game well, you'll know how to BALANCE it even if you're not good at game DESIGN. And when you combine the two, you get something like this conversation or the VWA and VEA mod discussion threads on the PDRG server-people with that deep knowledge and experience bouncing ideas off of each other and discussing them like a dev team would. And wouldn't you know, VWA and VEA are easily the best balance mods i've ever seen for this game. The simplicity helps too, you're not going crazy with ideas and just getting the job done, something other balance mods forget only to turn into an idea soup instead of a reasonable attempt at balance. But enough yammering about that, back to Stalkers. The thing with Exploders is that they are, weirdly enough for something so violent, support units. Sure, dodging the damage might be easy, but that's not really what Exploders are for. Even if you're not getting blown up, you are forced to get the FUCK out of that spot, immediately and often suddenly compromising your position. Stalkers suck because they're basically exploders that just kill you instead. Invisible, reusable, burrowing, stunning, 400 health, no explosion falloff instant wind up exploders that also ignore and kill your shield because fuck you. Another thing to consider is that it's an exclusively proactive enemy, so the attack always hits you out of nowhere because if you did see it coming it wouldn't have hit you in the first place. You did give me an interesting idea though. What if stalkers had a two stage attack? Stage 0: Trying to catch you. Plays a distinct noise, with a visual effect that's only visible if it's close (pretty sure that's how bulk ash works already, though i might be wrong on that or it could be a low settings thing cause my pc is ass). Could be something like the sparks that float in the air on Shield Disruption missions, bonus points if it shows around you so you don't know the exact direction it's coming from. The directional audio could also work really well in general if the closeness to the enemy makes it always high priority in that player's sound queue, and if there's other Stalkers they would likely be farther away or trying to kill a teammate so maybe there would be less technical issues. Stage 1: Makes a shriek that does an inital, small amount of damage and busts your shield. Stage 2: Rushes you to attack, dealing the majority of the total damage and maybe also stunning you if it hits. This follows Exploder logic, where there's a first punishment for getting caught off guard (shriek/compromised position) and a second one if you screw up really bad (getting swiped/exploded). It's also possible the new cues work well enough by themselves, but we would have to see ourselves with testing and custom mods to be certain. P.S. I think it would also be funny to experiment with "rage stalkers" of some kind. If they "catch" their target they EMP everyone and go on a rampage with speed and damage resistance buffs until they either die or chainsaw through your whole team. Could also do something like this with an older enemy idea that inspired this one, that being a sort of mactera caterpillar that pupates into an extremely dangerous enemy if you don't kill it fast enough. Not really relevant, but i think they're interesting concepts.
Two stage stalker sounds great to me! I can see it being a bit like the warden shriek if the stalker gets within ~5m of the dwarves or something like that. The warden - if you fail to stun or fear it - spawns a wave of grunts which can be surprisingly brutal on h5a or modded hazards. There's that interesting counterplay with the warden where sometimes it's correct to ignore the shriek (letting the grunts spawn) to handle some other immediate threat instead. The player is allowed to make an interesting decision in the heat of the moment, and it just makes room for more varied and interesting encounters and synergies with other bugs in play. With a two stage stalker - perhaps one gets close and you have like a second or two to find the thing as it does its animation (if it's still invis, maybe a particle effect display and DEFINITELY a unique sound like the warden screech), and then you can shoot it to interrupt it from finishing the screech. If no one shoots it in time to stop it, all dwarves within like 10m or so gets their shield nuked - like an EMP pulse that effects the whole team rather than one unfortunate victim lol. This also offers an opportunity for repositioning (e.g. dashing away) if you're unable to shoot it to stop the pulse from completing. The EMP pulse could have gone a couple of ways and changed the AI depending on how it was handled. Whether it goes into a melee phase or burrows to try again later is something I'm not sure what fits best, but I think could probably be okay with whatever gets chosen. In either case you have some more flexibility for the encounter to make it more interesting and dynamic between different runs, where sometimes you have to take the shield pulse and sometimes you have to hard focus the thing to be able to maximize your own HP. I will say that the comparison to wardens is interesting because wardens themselves can't really kill you outside of the occasional hitbox jostle / wandering into you to kill you purely by interrupting your movement lol. So if stalkers are going to be an invisible form of that, they probably still shouldn't do the levels of damage they do in the full game now. By having the EMP shriek be a longer time period and giving players a last ditch window to react when they fail to succeed the initial hide and seek, you gain a lot of interesting counterplay and interactions with other bugs that the current stalker just doesn't bring in the slightest. I still think it's important that it's visible - I'd want those particle effects to be much more noticeable than the current invisible stalker at least, and to be able to see this thing if it does its screech in the middle of a crowd. Like, I'd rather the challenge to be a quick flick aim/loaded ammo skill check than an eyesight skill check, and perhaps I'd want the stalker to rear its head back and stand up on hind legs or something to really make it vertically apparent above a crowd of grunts lol. Idk, I think there are still ways that suggestions like this can be poorly implemented and I'd still have annoyances with the enemy. But there are ways where I can see myself appreciating the additional challenge (but only if there's a pretty substantial overhaul from the current implementation).
If you want proof that GSG spent too much time drinking coffee with Arrowhead look no further than the existence of Stalkers. Seriously minus the ragdoll they really took one of the most annoying and barely balanced piece of shit mobs in one video game, DRG'd it, and tossed in the game and told you to fuck yourself for not having massive amounts of fun against it. Either pray a spray-and-pray driller joins your lobby or enjoy video game induced schizophrenia for every wave of a mission with these things
And to add onto your Stingtail rant, you're absolutely right about the U-curve and Haz 4 herd mentality. Go look at the subreddit(lol) for DRG in any discussion about Stingtail balance and you'll find entire armies of Haz 3 players ego the shit out of you for thinking these aren't fun and lacking in meaningful counterplay "Dude just side step it lul" - guy who only ever has to kill 4 grunts per swarm to survive
@@qwertyq2884 The funny part about those players is that it doesn't even work consistently and you still eat shit in bulk when they spawn! GSG's overall Stingtail philosophy perplexes me doubly so considering that all the other enemies in DRG (even Stalkers, to some extent) all have something, some sort of weakness you can use to fight back. Stingtails, with their bullshit praetorian-esque stun immunity, nigh-undodgeable attack and nigh-unhittable weakpoint (which makes armor break almost mandatory), lack any counterplay beside circle strafing around them, jumping like a bunny and sitting with fingers behind your back, praying you don't get grabbed. Also, thank god I'm not the only one thinking Stalkers are bullshit to fight; they've actually become my #1 cause of downs in solos, surpassing Stingtails somehow (likely cuz I use VEA), and it amazes me how people either fail or refuse to acknowledge their faults. Same for Stingtails.
Maybe it's because I only ever solo with scout so light is never an issue for me, but I have no trouble spotting stalkers even at long range. I wonder if graphical settings make a difference (I'm maxed out as thankfully I don't have ojb's steampunk pc ). If so, that should probably be looked at. Even still, it sucks that they can't be stunned. They can be frozen, so why not stunned?
I've had issues seeing it with scout too :( It might be a low graphics thing, but it might just be my old age and bad eyes. Either way, I'm at a point where there's nothing I can theoretically do to improve these encounters by upping my game or outskilling it. I just lose if something like this happens and I get "unlucky", which is real frustrating.
To improve the stalker, one easy solution is to maybe make heightened senses work with stalkers, like if the stalkers are within a distance it goes off but that could be annoying to deal with the screen going white and would waste a perk slot. Another option could be to just not make them completely invisible. Maybe if every time they do there screaming sound effect they light up in that highlighted outline form when they get close. Removal of the disabling shield ability as that seems just unfair to be completely vulnerable to a slasher or stationery for 8 seconds or however long it is. Then removing the ability to burrow as well since if the stalker burrows there is no room for counter play and they could run away kind of how the huuli hoarder does and wont go back to being slightly invisible until they are out of the players sight for like 3 seconds. This could be irrelevant in some cave generations and in high haz could be impossible to maintain los if a praetorian is just sat there but it would mean if your not in the middle of a swarm and there is a stalker around it would be easier to punish the stalker instead of hitting it once and having to wait for it to re appear. Im not a game dev however and these could just be bad changes but i think its at least a start with some ideas.
I thought about that as well, i think higthened senses should definitely apply to them. And eventually stingtails as well, would seem kind of logical to me. Also maybe reducing a bit the health of stalkers while keeping the rest of their capacities would seem to be a fair trade to me. But yet on many non-meta builds, it can feel quite hard to get a chance of killing a stalker before it runs away, and that very stressful!
@@gaelracine5057 I think adding to heightened senses as well may add to the variety of the games perks, it will take a while for the iron will dash combo to be overthrown but if heightened senses could directly hurt a stingtail maybe whilst grabbed there is a period just after allowing you to activate it and kill/damage the stingtail and hopefully some way to intergrate it into a more impactful interaction, right now the perk seems quality of life over game saving and i think with the current most annoying enemies being sneaky/grabby enemies the potential for improvement is there. I do agree on the lower hp aswell but i feel the most annoying part is the burrowing. Its impossible to punish mid swarm so i feel removing or delaying the feature just allows the ability to deal with the stalker instead of running and praying.
I remember calls for heightened senses (HS) to work with stingtails too, but even back then I was super skeptical about how it ever might fit in because stingtails/stalkers work differently than grabbers/leeches in how they deal/don't deal damage to dwarves. I honestly believe HS is not an easy way out, and that's not just because I'm heavily biased against the perk. There is an element of "I would never unequip dash, so it's up against iron will" and iron will is one of those extremely flexible things that can help EVERY run vs. having a completely dead perk on the hopes of it saving me from an instant loss vs. a stalker (because that's all it does; I don't think HS has any value, personally). But hopefully that bias isn't the real reason I'm so hesistant. I'd much, much, much rather there be some sort of skill component to prevent it from being a loss condition, and as it stands I'm throwing my hands up and saying there's no way that will ever happen for me. The way this enemy has ended runs (and I sincerely believe this run right here is a perfect example of "no one could have survived this, because there's no other way to play this differently in which you can see the enemy to handle it") has ended them in a way that feels frustratingly uncounterable. I'm no stranger to losing to things that occasionally feel unfair - but often times I'm able to look back at the footage and say, well, maybe I should have terraformed that a bit more, or obviously not stood there, and then I'm able to learn from it. This run is pretty decently well played and yet I don't know what I could have done differently at all besides skip the fossil and just get lucky™ and reach the pod. And skipping the fossil only lets me get one more death, it doesn't mean the other stalker deaths are any less bullshit. I fear there's nothing to learn from this other than "oh, that wasn't my fault at all". I truly hope I have legs to stand on to say things like this based on my past history of play and my past stances on things. I feel like there's a part of me that's earned the right to be grumpy and throw my hands up / give up because I have put in a fair bit of work to improve and learn from mistakes. Here against stalkers though I've got nothing.
The pinned comment on this video has some more warthog thoughts (after the rant, there's build talk), if you haven't seen that yet. I think I can get a little bit better with my own animation cancels but I'm close enough to the limit of what's humanly possible that I'm honestly not sure how much more DPS you're gonna get than what you see here. With that in mind, I think pump action is "viable" depending on difficulty and only on the condition that you also consider magnetic pellet alignment viable. They seem extremely close in performance (I've found that PA might outperform slightly) that you're not gaining a noticeable power spike by equipping it instead of MPA. So really it comes down to whether or not warthog play is considered strong enough to handle the high hazards, and I think that's up in the air. You can use it and survive (I have a bunch of 6x2 wins with warthog, but none beyond 6x2 because I don't tend to play engy that much), but the other primaries are much stronger IMO. So it's already 6x2 viable but unsure about anything higher.
thoughts on crawlers, as they spawn in the corestone? i can’t tell if i just need to learn how to fight them or they’re genuinely poorly balanced and realistically impossible for many builds.
Initial thoughts: they're overtuned. If you have a gunner or a scout the event is free, but if you don't have gunner zips to cheese it with / can't rely on the scout to kite appropriately, then you're in a very dangerous situation. Personally, I don't know if I can commit to a full on rant and complain for nerfs just yet and may need more time. I have been able to beat the event a few different ways by falling back into bunkers and slow clearing until it's safe to attack the stone, but crawlers can be very very tricky and I've certainly not figured them out just yet. My biggest complaint currently is that my frame rate is hot garbo when the monkeys are out in numbers. And low framerate + fast moving enemies = very difficult aiming that exceptionally punishes non-spammy CC heavy builds. You'll see in this run the only way I was able to actually kill things on this loadout was just LUREs to distract them long enough - I wasn't really able to hit shotgun shots nor was it worth any ammo attempting to do so because it's too difficult for me at that fps. Soooo, honestly, I'm not sure yet. They're extremely difficult and I don't love that they encourage bunkers and cheese strats, but I'm not ready to condemn until I've put the effort in to learn them more. Unlike stalkers, which are very clearly problematic, crawlers have some skill components to learn before I go to war with them too. I wouldn't mind nerfs myself but I'm not calling for anything just yet.
:') i love spreaders! i think they are genuinely a great enemy and by far the best addition in ages personally. extremely tough at times, but fair and force you to reposition in a way that feels a lot more skilled based than something like the stingtail. my only complaints are the performance issues (they're still not great for my potato pc, and multiple septics tank my framerate) and the fact that they can be exceptionally punishing on certain escort layouts if you're on a build that can't shape the terrain or otherwise get to the blind ledges they spam over. i think it's okay to dislike them though, and i think that's a common sentiment among many players.
@@ojb_ I'm a driller main and i used to think that a driller was one of the most comfortable classes for solo play. until the gsc added spreaders. There were problems with them during the escort, but in the rescue operation I really got a post-traumatic experience. Since this was the 3rd stage of Edd and the cave resembled a cylinder at the bottom of which there was a black box in the middle, I summoned all possible suplays to the full nitra and used them to terraform the cylinder into a cone (so that the spreaders could not bomb me without direct visibility). Did not help . They found a place where I couldn’t see them and shot them. It was the same enemy who laughed at me and I felt helpless. And how “glad” I was when I learned that in season 5 the gsc changed the chance of spreaders appearing : if earlier I could meet 2-3 times per mission, now three spreaders appearing simultaneously is not a rare occurrence. I would like to know from an experienced player what to do with them during ecom operations and on a drillevator when you are a solo driller main.
Sounds like you're spending some time terraforming already, but that'd be the first major bit of advice. Investing a fair bit of effort shaving off blind ledges and maximizing visibility / forcing chokes IS worth it in many cases, and I think a fair number of my own losses have been on the back of simply not terraforming enough. It's very easy to get too lazy and stop early because a half assed job is often not punished in the average run (and terraforming is pretty boring IMO). But there are definitely times where you get ridiculously unlucky that the full effort terraforming matters, and there's just no way to know ahead of time unless you have some bad red modifiers (e.g. elite threat) or have an idea of the enemy pool (e.g. knowing bulks might spawn because you've seen one earlier already). My personal rule of thumb is to avoid terraforming too much and just accept the loss of winrate / know that sometimes I might lose because of those shortcuts, and only go crazy on it if I'm repeating the same challenge and just want it over and done with (like stage 3 of an EDD or something). Solo salvage is very hard and can be extraordinarily punishing. Any time you're forced to stand in a tiny bubble without leaving has the possiblility of losing due to RNG regardless of your skill level, and some of the swings due to bad spawns are pretty nuts. For context: I have more modded solo salvages under my belt than probably anyone in the whole world (yes, I have a problem), and that experience only solidifies my opinion that not every salvage hold is winnable. Any high level player who says otherwise probably doesn't have the solo experience to back that up, because sometimes you just will get rolled. Talking driller now: I honestly am at the point of my DRG career where I find driller to be the worst class when the difficulty ramps up. It has some strengths and the illusion of power on many map types (driller slaps in mining / point extract, for example), but in comparison to the other classes, the driller kit has some severe single target / burst damage / ranged weaknesses that are quite difficult to overcome when shit hits the fan. There were some polls in the modded community a while back about which class is the most difficult to play, and driller always topped those lists. It's a class that falls off very fast as the difficulty ramps up, and the reasons it becomes more challenging into modded are the exact same reasons it sometimes feels very tricky in vanilla. The best instant safety tools are stun c4 and impact axes, which while good, pale in comparison to what the other classes get to play with (stuff like breach cutter or grapple hook or coilgun, for example). Cold radiance cryo is busted, but doesn't solve every problem, especially not with long range septics nuking you down or a bulk getting up in your face, etc. I bring this up just to highlight that most (if not all) driller loadouts are going to have some noticeable flaws into a salvage op. The fact that you can struggle to septics is not just a you problem. I won't say every loss isn't your fault or anything extreme like that (because sometimes we lose things we could have won), because sometimes the correct plays are tricky to figure out in the heat of the moment. There are some things you can do to try and mitigate these difficulty spikes: 0. Terraform more (or do it better) [mostly explained earlier - just reiterating that the prep time is important to take advantage of] 1. Pay closer attention to your positioning inside rings Practice using highground / jumping off resups or the boxes themselves / position along the outer edge of a ring. The instant you become aware of a septic coming into play that you find yourself unable to handle - you know it will be lobbing in a barrage of red floor. So it's on you to position and move in a way that baits the shot to a spot that doesn't do maximal damage. Sometimes this means running outside the ring briefly to get the shot to land not where you need to stand, and sometimes this means intentionally running into prior red goo floors so that the mess stacks in one spot instead of spreading out to multiple areas (which would deny yourself even more ground). If you play on the edges of the ring during these moments, you have a much more workable floor space as half the goo'd area occurs outside the ring and doesn't matter. If you're abusing high ground and jumping a lot, those shots (even with their slight homing ability) might just sail over your head and land mostly outside the ring if you're positioned nicely against where the septic is coming from. These positioning tricks will require a bit of brain power to perform until you get comfortable doing them automatically, and just note that if you're putting active mental effort into moving purposely, you're going to be weaker against any other threat in the meantime, so you gotta juggle some things sometimes. 2. Don't be afraid to leave the ring if something serious happens. If you get that wave of triple spreader spawn... solve that problem ASAP. Don't stick around inside the ring until it gets worse if you can't shoot them from there. Leave, drop a c4 near them or whatever, and book it back. Get to a spot where you ping bosco on them at least, and spend the time investment to solve it early on. If this is impossible due to the ledge they're spamming from being too high up to get to in a reasonable amount of time (
Oh, I meant to say this too but forgot: if it's a black box (only in deep dives, NOT the salvage uplink/refuel, but the standalone box), you can actually run away and let it tick down to zero and fail it if things seem unwinnable. You'll burn some ammo doing it, but sometimes it can save the run and give you time to regroup and fix any problems you missed. So if you notice a real bad septic ledge while black boxing that would otherwise be unbeatable, you can just run away and wait it out! This is a strat I've used successfully in the past to push through rough black box locations that were very dependent on RNG to survive. Just note that a salvage bubble ticking down doesn't have the same result, and you just lose the run if it hits zero :(
I am a has 5+/6x2 player ( which is pretty much considered a casual by modded atp haha ) and I hate stalkers. I'm fine with their concept but the execution is just a bit off. The sound they are making is not accurate enough at all. Some of my solutions to fix them are: 1) Making the sound more accurate. Many times I heard them, used breach cutter in the right direction in a tight corridor and mfker wasn't there 2) In case you caught him aka damaged him make him staggered for longer time. It is annoying when you finally hit the stalker just for mfker to burrow and run away. Even menaces are not that annoying as you can usually kill them quick before they run if hit weakspot. Idk if Stalkers have weakspot to begin with 3) Make them less tanky. I haven't watched their HP in logs but from feelings they have equal or higher HP than Slasher. About the same as Guard. Which is a lot considering they are "assassins" with already inherited stealth and speed. But if you have those advantages you have to have to be squishy to compensate. For Stingtail I can at least understand why their prenerf version was so tanky. For stalker I unfortunately can't
It's interesting to compare stalker HP to a web spitter hp. Web spitters can also kill you with a single shot if you're facing a lot of enemies that can take advantage of your webbed state, but web spitters are VERY noticeable on walls away from things and it's impossible to miss seeing them. And they die in a single hipfired m1k shot. Compare this to stalkers which survive several focus shots... it's just so wild how much the power creep has come into play here. I will say stalkers do have a weakpoint in the head (I noticed this in a crit weakness mission where they died to simple headshots), but that doesn't excuse the fact they're a huge slot machine roll to find them in the first place, and boy am I bad at slots.
R.I.P brother, that was some smooth gameplay right there, very entertaining to watch for a gamepad scrub like me :D Also i read description, and it was'nt a very fair lose, but i guess this stalker was'nt impossible to handle, but still very hard for sure! Also at this difficulty lvl i guess you should just accept your fate ^^ Very nice try tho, you were fucking close to end this! Next time i'm sure you'll get the ultra instinct it needs to counter this sneaky bastard! ;)
fwiw I think this stalker WAS impossible to handle and not a matter of it being "hard". looking back at my own footage there's nothing i could do to avoid those stalker deaths because there is no point in the video where I was able to even see the threat before it killed me (and trust me, i was looking very hard!). with the exception of the very last death (which you can argue is greed and i should have just booked it to the extract pod and skipped the secondary), i think my movement when i died was more than high skilled enough to survive, and i just rolled the dice poorly and lost to sheer chance that was out of my control. and that's what's unfun for me and bore the whole rant. i don't think a next time gains me anything else than another roll of the dice, because there's nothing i can learn from this to stop it from happening again. (and trust me, i want to learn, but here i'm throwing my hands up and don't think there's a way out).
@@ojb_greed aside, the last death looks the least fair to me - hits you at an angle and distance I think it shouldn't - but I did see the stalker multiple times throughout the video and I do think you could've killed it. Regardless - mechanically, I love it, but I do think there's a desperate need for adjustments. It digs too quickly after being shot, has too much health, does too much damage (I think either disabling shields OR being a big damage dealer would work, but not both) and often the sound cues just don't play. I'm not saying all of these need to be adjusted at once, but I do think changes are needed.
(continued from description)
I have a theory that stalkers and stingtails both follow a U shape in their "effectiveness vs player skill" curves. To total noobs - they are death sentences. Then, you play a bit of hasard 4 with the coilgun or breach cutter and suddenly they're so easy: dying to these simple enemies when they're all alone is just so embarassing lmao get gud. But then you increase the difficulty a bit more to see these enemies more often when they're in larger packs while you're picking some loadouts that aren't overpowered, and hopefully you find that these enemies are so outrageously overtuned. It's one thing to die equally to stalkers vs other enemies and not feel that gap, but once you legitimately get good enough at the game to not die very often, that absolute cliff between the power level is so incredibly apparent.
This stance against stalkers (and stingtails) is extremely common in the modded community, and for many people that aren't hopelessly addicted to making the game harder to feed our inflamed egos, that fact may sound surprising. Especially when you very often might hear things like "actually, stingtails shouldn't have been nerfed at all, and the current state is overnerfed" or "stalkers are just a skill issue, ur bad", which you might think are statements from "good" players that understand the game. But if you want to see actual good players pushing the game to its limits, get the hell off my solo focused channel and go check out what von or jpeg or waste or emc or any of the dozens of other real cracked players are cooking these days.
I'm not saying these particular players are the ones saying that stalkers/stingtails have a frustratingly unfair aspect to them (I don't want to put words in people's mouths here - I know a few do based on past discussions, but I don't want to lie here and say they all said this because they absolutely didn't, and you'll have to ask them individually). I just think you'll find them amenable to the idea that even though we push the game to be harder and harder to find that ever retreating dopamine, there is something to be talked about in terms of what makes something "fun" while maintaining the challenge, and having an element of player agency and "fairness" contributes very highly to the end experience. Because it should be obvious that there are loads of ways to make the game challenging - hell, just make every enemy instakill you - but having challenge while maintaining fun is a lot more complicated (and varies between individual tastes).
All I'm saying is I think stalkers are awful. Irredeemably so. Unlike stingtails (which I also think are extremely toxic), I don't think stalkers are redeemable personally. I don't even know where to BEGIN with a "balance" pass for them. I have thoughts on stingtails myself (they need to be less tanky / more visible for the level of danger they provide), but there are fundamental problems with how stalkers interact with high level play that no amount of me "improving" or overcoming "skill issue" will ever break this for me. They just don't work well with my idea of fun, and so I'm going to mod them out of my game and feel zero shame about it.
---
Lame rant over, let's talk run/build stuff:
Pump action is pretty good for a warthog OC, and I think it's potentially the best one maybe? It's quite potent at doing the warthog thing. Unfortunately I still think warthog has severe problems that extend up through high density h5a/modded, and it's not going to be as impactful as something like EM refire or executioner Lok-1. I personally don't hate the warthog as much as other modded players (I think it's fiiiine / passable), but I do feel the weakness at many points in this run. I think the blowthrough is an interesting gimmick but ultimately not super impactful compared to just flicking between heads, at least out in the open. The upped damage is really why it feels like top tier warthog for me at least, and it handles as a half decent sidegrade / minor upgrade to magnetic pellet alignment (my usual pick for the hog).
It's worth noting that I'm tapping control between shots to animation cancel to slightly increase the fire rate. It's kinda annoying, but it's worth it. I definitely need a lot more practice to really conquer this OC, as I'm constantly running out of ammo in the clip and fudging things up because of it. I think if I improve that muscle memory and animation cancels it'd be a bit stronger than my current output with it, but I don't know where it lands in the engineer primary tierlist at the end of all things. Turret whip is neat and all, but requires a lot more turret maintenance than my fast and loose playstyle tends to enjoy.
Rj250 is really worth discussing in the context of h5a, because "player vulnerability" hits like a truck to this self damage thing. And yet... call me crazy... but I think it's still pretty damn top tier? I picked up some lite TF2ing again recently (is this the source of my unhinged toxicity or just another symptom of my current mental state?) - and after playing a bit of soldier and some jump maps here and there (poorly, might I add. it's been too long i'm bad again), I'm appreciating the wonderful balance that is the rocket jump's "trade HP for positioning gains". Like, it hurts to hurt yourself so often, especially when the hurt hurts more than usual hurt. But you gain an absurd amount of spacing and effective output that the hurt really is worth it. At least here in solo land when you have resups to chug for HP. The equation definitely changes a bit in multiplayer, but at least in MP you won't need to reposition quite as aggressively all the time I don't think.
Anyway, I think rj250 is more than takeable at h5a regardless of it being substantially nerfed in it. It combos real well with the enemy pool basically just being all grunts too, and the fire spread into a lure is quite potent wave clear.
Speaking of lures, I do think lures might be best in slot at h5a. This nade really slaps into this particular difficulty, though they aren't perfect. I still enjoy plasma bursters more (for all their faults lol), but lures are quite decent here. In theory you can bait a stalker with a lure but good luck not dying first lmao.
Lures were the key to winning the monkey pillar fight (well, lures and bosco). If I didn't have bosco I'd skip the core stone event on this build. The monkeys move too fast and hit too hard on h5a, and it's far above my skill level. On other difficulties, my true solos might rely on retreating to a bunker and killing the big waves so that I have space to destroy the pillar, but here the strat is just get bosco to do the bulk of the lifting while I run around and try to survive. FWIW, I've lost several monkey fights on h5a and don't think I've mastered them outside gunner/scout just yet (those two classes trivialize it, but engy/driller require a lot more thinking and prep and bunkering I think).
---
I don't know what else to talk about so I'll leave it there. This was mostly just an excuse to rant about stalkers. Sorry for the negativity, I'll hush now.
Honestly I've been having lots of fun with stalker espesely in Haz 5+ where the don't die In an instant but I do see where people are coming from
You can use the "Slightly more visible stalker" Mod if you want the stalker back but less annoying.
And mind if I ask what mod do you use to remove the stalker from the spawn pool?
@Kunnoc
Sorry for the extremely late response (youtube studio UI doesn't update me on new replies and i have to accidentally scroll into these things manually to see them :/). I've been using Custom Difficulty 2, which is what I use for haz6x2 etc. It's currently in beta, and you can find the pak for it in the practical DRG discord server (the modded hangout). A json like:
{
"Name": "No Stalkers",
"Pools": {
"DisruptiveEnemies": {
"Remove": [
"ED_Spider_Stalker"
]
}
}
}
will give you standard haz5 just without stalkers ever being around. This pool removal can be applied to any difficulty you want to play, and I've been attaching that to my usual difficulties.
Stalkers very much strike me as an enemy balanced around multiplayer, which is why I don't dislike them as much as I probably should. With friends they feel like a fun little challenge and the bursts of panic among the group trying to find the stalker gets the adrenaline going just right for me. They are MISERABLE in solo, though. I don't want to come across like one of those people who says shit like "its a multiplayer game so solo doesn't matter aaaauu" but I would be bummed if they significantly reworked/removed stalkers and I lost that kind of multiplayer interaction. Stingtails I definitely agree with, I've said from the beginning the tail should be easily severable and that would make fighting them a lot more dynamic, and its a shame they're as weird and obnoxious as they are gameplay-wise because I think their sound and visual design is a lot of fun.
Im so with you on stingtails, cause its legit the same as the caveleaches "tail"
A potential idea/compromise suggested elsewhere is perhaps putting the stalkers into the stationary pool to spawn with new rooms? Then you have the hide and seek / multiplayer aspect intact with no changes needed, and in singleplayer you can get away with the bad sound cues not revealing the exact location because it just means you have to be very careful stepping into the room. I don't *love* it, but it lets the enemies remain as is without compromising a single player mission as highly. Because in single player the appearance of a stalker can end the run instantly with nothing you can do about it sometimes (and then the danger is only frontloaded and not "ends a solidly played 20 minute run because one impossible enemy spawned gg")
I have been very tempted to replace Stalkers in all my difficulties with Beta Stalkers and the only thing holding me back is that I’d have to add yet another disclaimer to my difficulties that it would need another pak to make the difficulty function.
So until I absolutely lose it, what I’ve been doing with Stalkers is making them stunnable and making their spawn rates rare. Yes, actually figuring out where the Stalker is when it starts making the not very useful sound cue is still annoying, but if you do find it and if you have stun, it’s going down and that significantly made them more tolerable. I found it absolutely annoying that you could find it, try to ignite it with Burning Hell and whip out VB, but the thing is just gone. The whole concept of the Stalker is cool. Sneaky enemy that chunks you if you aren’t aware. Beta Stalkers execute that idea pretty damn well. The only issue is that you had to turn up your effects to High to see them while cloaked and they had no sound cue, so you only had your eyes to look out. If the Beta Stalker did get close to you, it was almost a guaranteed hit that chunked you however because it didn’t burrow away so fast and was stunnable, you still had a chance to either outright kill it or at least chunk it in return. And it didn’t disable your shields too. Disabling shields is a fine idea, but I don’t think that works with current Stalkers.
> Sneaky enemy that chunks you if you aren’t aware.
See, this is something I think I diverge from you guys a bit. I'll admit I was never a fan of the beta stalkers either (I ended up removing them from my Lx2's and ND's lol), but I think the fundamental problem I have is because I feel like I WAS aware of my surroundings and no matter how much aware I was, sometimes I just died instantly with nothing I could have done better.
The lack of stun is annoying because it puts it in a loop where you have to find it before it kills you multiple times, widdling it down a little bit per cycle, but that's not my biggest issue with the enemy myself. It's less about the times I'm finding it and shooting it for it to burrow before confirming, and more the times where I'm dying instantly because I failed to find it with elderly, low graphics quality eyes. That is frustrating to insta lose to something I couldn't outskill, because no amount of practice is going to improve my eyesight.
This is how I feel about naedocyte shockers
There's a mod that adds a visual warning about the direction of explorers and stalkers, it makes the encounters more fair.
Sure, but I think the necessity of those mods to make the encounter feel fair is a big neon warning sign that the vanilla game's implementation is very lacking and needs to change. I remember a reddit post (because it amused me greatly) of someone saying "stalkers are perfect, don't change them" and it was revealed in the comment section that the person who posted this take... used mods to make the stalkers less oppressive. Like, they went out of their way to make a big statement how wonderfully fair the enemies were - and it turns out that they used mods to fix them!
I think having to use mods to fix a balance issue is less appealing to me than using mods to improve the general experience. I'm not really sure why it's a hangup for me, nor why it feels like such a big leap, but it definitely feels like it crosses some sort of line. For me, anyway. I'd rather just remove stalkers entirely than have to install a mod which still kinda keeps them annoying but more playable.
If too many people are using these fixes that it lowers the rate of complaints, GSG will just never do a balance patch for them. I kinda need people to be as angry about it as I am? Lol.
I've sorta given up on stalkers entirely and I have zero faith that they will ever be a fun enemy for me, and that's okay. Some people enjoy fighting them (because some people are very weird and have terrible taste in enemy design :D), and enough people play on lower difficulties where they don't one-shot PLUS aren't playing try hard solo like me, so there's just no way I'm going to win the fight for a balance patch. If they end up tweaking it, it will be like the stingtail nerf which doesn't hit the core of why the enemies are unfun to fight. So rather than stick around in an abusive relationship that is slightly less abusive because of visibility mods/whatever, I'll just make a clean break. I don't feel like I'm missing out on any enjoyment from it, and that's totally okay for me. It just makes me less willing to ever pub again because stalkers exist in pubs and they tilt me there too.
@@ojb_ I think their attack is bad game design, the massive damage plus removing shields plus slowdown is too punishing because it easily snowballs into being downed.
They should instead e.g. tag the player to receive more damage from other bugs and disable shield regeneration, something that is avoidable entirely through skilled movement but is still annoying enough the make players hunt them down.
Another reason why bullet hell is the best OC in the game
Personally I love Stalkers and think they're largely fine. They feature one of the loudest warning sounds in the game and never attack too quickly. That alone makes up for many shortcomings. They largely punish you for loitering too long in one small area, which I think is great. Their main issues are, for least to most alarming:
1. There can be more than one at a time, and that immediately makes things confusing
2. They're far too hard to see, their visibility needs to improved
3. Sometimes, they spawn far too quickly one after another. Perhaps they ought to be rarer.
4. They burrow underground far too quickly, it's impossible to kill them in a reasonable amount of time. Sometimes you'll be shooting the same Stalker three or four times before they die if your build doesn't allow for DPS-checking them (such as Breach Cutter, Warthog spam to the weakpoint, Clusters, Double Barrel, etc.) which is just unreasonable.
5. Their damage is far too great; if I'm not mistaken, it's enough to one-shot any dwarf on full health and shield on H5 with player vulnerability on maximum.
If GSG implemented changes to fix these issues, I think they'd be one of the most interesting mechanics in the game.
I think those are solid points, and I can see where you're coming from. I don't know how much visibility they need to gain to feel fair for me personally however. I just don't like being punished for having poor(ish) eyesight and have something so dangerous be reliant on seeing something before it ends me. I just really enjoy the rest of the game's balance in being able to read a situation and react to it because there's alwaysa fun counterplay element. With stalkers needing to "get lucky and spot the danger", there's just something else at stake that maybe just isn't for me.
I don't fault others for potentially liking that (everybody has their own tastes), but for me to have something that I'll NEVER be good at (because my eyes will only grow worse and worse as I get even older than I am now), it feels bad ya know.
As a mainly solo haz 5 player I haven’t struggled too much with Stalkers and think they’re a fun idea, though they definitely need tweaks. Here’s some situations I’ve disliked with Stalkers and what I think should be done
1) Multiple Stalkers: Nearly impossible to tell if there is more than one so you end up either getting comboed to death or getting hit even though you caught a Stalker. Solution: Only let one be alive at a time
2) Last Ditch Effort Dashes: If you find the Stalker too late it can often end up making a break for you and getting the hit off anyways, this highly favors builds with good self defense letting them ignore this situation while builds without get punished even if they find the Stalker sometimes. Solution: Make the laser pointer stun the Stalker in place for a few seconds, then force it to burrow
3) Late Chirps: The Stalker doesn’t automatically do a chirp when it spawns so VERY occasionally it will be on top of you before it can get a peep out thus warning you too late before it strikes. Solution: Force it to do a chirp when spawning and maybe force it to spawn farther away from the player
4) Stalker and Swarms: Stalkers can often end up being really frustrating when dealing with a swarm. Often they take alternate routes forcing you to turn your back on a SWARM, though their is some counter play like using a choke point, booking it to a teammate or just shielding. But it is really frustrating that they so much power during a swarm. Solution: Don’t let them spawn within a minute before a swarm (or at least not during one) so players get time to actually kill it
These are my personal problems with the Stalker, let me know if you experienced the same or have completely different issues all together
Very much agree with 1 and 3, clear audio cue is vital to keeping the Stalker reasonably counterable. Grabbers have the same issue, the audio cues do not warn you about more than one being present. With 2 I do not agree entirely, its reaction to being pinged is fine, but I do think it should be vulnerable to stun, albeit with 50% resistance and 2s cooldown. Completely disagree with 4, Stalkers are supposed to split your attention, just like Grabbers.
My personal issues with Stalkers:
1. Their blue shimmer is reasonably visible everywhere but in Glacial Strata. It just blends in with the reflective blue walls too well.
2. Stalkers spawn by popping out of the terrain just like grunts, which means they can spawn right next to you, most notoriously when you are waiting for the drop pod to open during extraction. This combined with your issue #3 can create some unpleasant situations.
Your 4th point is just stupid, that literally the main reason why stalkers exists. Just ask to remove them from the game then...
@@Stefanonimo Proof?
@nightcapmain2699
Multiple stalkers is a problem just like multiple stingtails is a problem. The enemies are definitely very similar in their effectiveness once you get groups of them since they can ping pong you quite rapidly, but a lot of that is just because one enemy is so incredibly deadly that increasing the count means you're even more likely to get that insta loss fail state.
I think I did a very poor job in my original writeup (I might go back and add some things to it), but my main issue with stalkers is just the occasions where I feel *completely* helpless to stop it from killing me. This run is a great example of this scenario I feel, because I knew it was a threat the INSTANT it spawned in due to the sound cue, but the sound was ineffective at letting me determine where the threat was from. I'm older than most players and have worse eyesight from years of abuse, but I don't think it's unreasonable that my experience here is something that could happen to anybody. Because I run into this a fair bit in every map I roll stalkers in. Sometimes I get lucky and see them randomly, but most times it's just stumble around and get nowhere and then oops dead.
Like, if someone can point out any moments where you can easily see the stalker (outside of its appearances where it straight up kills me) such that I could have handled it, please link those timestamps. I was laser focused on finding this thing before it nuked me for several MINUTES and I could not find it once! My positioning choices and loops towards high ground with high visibility were specifically made to try and maximize the free time I had to look around without dying to anything else in the meantime, and I just couldn't figure it out. You could argue that the last fossil was greedy, but I thought I had the space to pull it off. Though of course I didn't because they move lightning fast and have absurd reach that even though I couldn't see a threat at the time it didn't mean anything.
This is the main issue. This is why I despise these enemies so much - it didn't matter that I was full effort searching - the only time I found it was when it already killed me. That's so incredibly frustrating and different from every other enemy in the game (well, besides stingtails, who have very similar "you don't know it's there until it instakills you" mechanics); everything else that deals high burst damage is very visible or has distinct movement counters. These enemies don't. There's nothing to do but get lucky, and it's easier to get lucky on lower difficulties where the density is low enough that the danger of not finding it in time isn't as high.
I think the sound is cool, but totally and completely worthless in tracking it down. I have a good pair of headphones too and a fair bit of experience with figuring out 3d spatial audio and shit like that - but this screech doesn't provide any sort of information other than "oh if I don't get lucky and find it, I will lose this run". I don't know if there's a way to improve that audio either, because stingtails have proven that an audio only cue isn't really enough when EVERYTHING is making audio cues at the times where a stingtail grab is most likely to kill you (i.e. mid swarm).
You bring up an interesting point I haven't thought about - what if stalkers weren't in swarms / the regular spawn pools? It sounds blasphemous at first, but honestly if this was an enemy that was purely in the stationary enemy pool (i.e. spawns ONLY at the first entrance of a cave like a leech or spitballer), this might be more palatable? It's comparable then to a cave leech that wanders around and you have to spot it before committing into the room, and at least then you have some tunnel bunker support to lean on to make it easier. I think this is a solution I would honestly support, because once you handle the stalkers you won't risk insta losing the mission at any point in the future. And this lets the sound cues remain useless and not need any tweaks, because the audio just lets you know if one is alive but not really how to find it.
I do worry about refinery hot drops, but this seems like a compromise that doesn't need to change mechanics at all and probably won't annoy the people who (for whatever inexplicable reason) might like the ability to lose the run instantly with zero counterplay, because at least it still exists unchanged.
I doubt GSG would ever do that though :/
@cinex20
Grabbers are usually completely visible, even in cave madness difficulties with like 60+ mackies swarming you at once (trust me, I enjoy a good modded mactera mission and I have loads of experience fighting large waves of many many fliers with several grabbers at once inside of it). These enemies I have no problem with, and the audio is enough to alert you to the danger and give you time to be cautious of blind corners, while their flight path is unique in beelineing straight for you in comparison to other mackies widening out a firing line that it's easy to see one regardless of density. So what I'm saying is that the grabber audio cue may not let you know there are multiple at play nor be able to narrow down the incoming direction to worry about, but it doesn't matter too badly because you'll always be able to make visual contact before it actually gets to you, and it's easily scared off.
Contrast to stalkers which appear to have a higher damage threshold before they burrow (sometimes if they're locked in you have no chance to halt it even on strong builds), and after they hide you're back into another eye-spy match with the same lack of visibility as before. Grabbers are allowed to have mediocre sound cues because you have the ability to see them before they get you (just like leeches, which also have terribly hard to hear sounds).
I disagree entirely that stalker visibility is a problem only on glacial. I have this exact issue on every single biome, and often I just can't see it until I'm dead no matter how hard I look. Maybe it's ageism, maybe it's potato pc pay-to-win high graphics settings or something. But I don't think this is a biome specific problem for me.
I'm not sure if I have strong opinions on the ping interaction myself, but I do know that the rate it burrows back into the ground (often before you can secure a kill) is complete rubbish on many builds. Menaces are an interesting comparison because they can be dangerous but are super handleable if hard focused and have enough counterplay when you don't have that luxury (i.e. strafing/stun/etc.). They're interesting because the counterplay of strafing brings up interesting sub problems like sometimes the forced strafe gets you into more trouble with the other enemies alive, and you have to make interesting decisions regarding how much chip to take and from which enemy. Stalkers don't have that nuance - you avoid it at all costs or you lose. (But I mean, how do you avoid a thing you can't see, and which moves super fast with maximum zoomies with very long reach?)
Don’t know if you noticed that during run but seems like the second stalker death occrued because according to sound you damaged it by PGL shot on 17:36 but not enough to burrow and sneaky guy started speeding trying to hit you
Btw from my experience I may say that in multiplayer h5a stalkers are way less dangerous since you have up to 8 eyes in the team and stalker chases only 1/4 of the team, but in solo loosing about 75% of hp for not noticing blue shimmering especially in Glacial Strata doesn’t feel really fair)
nice, yeah i didn't notice that during the run nor during any of my rewatches until someone pointed it out :(
having everybody being able to look is huge for how they feel in multiplayer. like, at that 17:36 timestamp i was scanning the wall i think to the upper right near the resup to see if i could spot it there, but because the stalker was uncloaked it blended in perfectly with the other grunts in that light level/distance that my frantic search for the impossible-to-see blue shimmer was not going to find anything. in MP maybe somebody else would be shooting the pile of bugs and notice it, but the attention cost in solo is crazy because there's only so much you can focus on at a time!
i'm slightly worried now that this upload being on glacial weakens the argument because someone can say "oh, it's just blue on blue, it should be fine on any other biome", when really i have these same exact difficulties regardless of the color of the backdrop. even on something like sandblasted where blue on yellow might be a nice sharp contrast and easier to notice, i get stuck just the same and can't do it :(
glacial wasn't an intentional choice or anything and i didn't even think about the biome maybe making it worse, but it probably does. that being said, it's hard to get worse than me already insta losing regardless of it getting buffed by blue terrain haha. this just makes glacial even harder than it already was lol :(
I’ve noticed that at 17:36 stalker uncloaked not because of PGL but for some reason nearby Bosco in the left bottom corner (probably got damaged by fire spread from ignited bug) and it feels ridiculous that in solo random damage source can force stalker to chase player aggressively XD
Honestly I have pretty much the same opinion as you on the stalker and stingtail and I mostly play regular haz5 or haz5+3, the most annoying factor for the stalker is their completely broken attack range as seen in your last death in this video. You either detect them or they hit you but they hit like a truck, their attack seems impossible to dodge. On the stingtails I always had the opinion to just remove it of the game as for today when I play regular haz5 95% of my death are caused by stingtails. I don’t understand how the community can be so blind to major design flaws in some ennemies like stingtails, they just are not fun to fight.
Very interesting insights from the ramblings as always, i practically just scroll through your channel to read them.
However, one thing i will disagree on is that stalkers are NOT irredeemable. And i wanted an excuse to start talking about potential changes to these things ever since people started complaining about them anyways. Lol.
See, you said stingtails have an inherently extreme ability that can effectively instakill you, and you think that they could be very fragile and/or easier to see to compensate. I will highlight the latter, because the thing that makes it a good idea is this; an enemy's kit INCLUDES it's visuals and audio and the impact those have on gameplay. You can see this clearly in other aspects of stingtail discourse:
-Stingtails (and every other thing in the game for that matter) have clear and distinct audio cues.
-The Stingtail's attack cue has 2 parts so that you know when the tail is launched, i assume this is because of the predictive aim gimmick making that info important.
-Stingtail audio cue bugs and the enemy's low visibility were despised and shouted to the top of the priority list by almost everyone who wasn't satisfied by the enemy's current state.
-GSG responded to the above, fixing the audio cue (or at least trying to, don't remember if it worked or not) and including a brightness increase in the November Maintenance blanket nerf to the enemy. Seemingly not enough judging by your opinion, but still, it shows the devs agree with you to some extent, and i think we can both agree they had a damn good reason to do so.
PART ONE-SOUND CUES
Now, let's see what we can do to stalkers.
I won't be exclusively looking at audiovisual changes, but let's start with that now that we're talking about it.
We could make the cloak material more visible, or make it uncloak when really close, but it's clear as day that they are supposed to be loud but hidden enemies-the devs explicitly stated so when showing it off on the S5 stream. The danger and unique strength of the enemy is that you get a warning and need to proactively search, so we should make that process less BS instead of altering the enemy's fundamental design. That means looking at the audio is our best bet.
Idea 1: Stalkers have more frequent and consistent audio cues, (possibly walk distance based like webspitter AI?) and maybe are forced to do one a certain distance away from the stalked player as well. Simple as. Getting whammed out of nowhere 20s after you last heard the fucker is the main complaint, this is the simplest solution, occam's razor and all that. I'm pretty sure the cues come from an idle roar animation like other enemy screams, which means the stalker would be stopping more frequently too, but that may or may not actually be a bad thing. It can be another trick for players to find out-hear the sound and you have a moment to find the stalker more easily. Or maybe it would actually be harder because motion is generally easy for the brain to detect? Either way it goes it would be an interesting side effect. Not to mention it would slow the enemy down, which could be nice, and if it turns out to be a bad thing a small speed adjustment should be an easy fix.
Idea 2: Loud Fucking Footsteps™ (and/or ambient noises) that get louder as the Stalker closes in. Something that's already done with bulks in the base game. This would be really good at building tension, give you a clear and constant warning of the encroaching threat, and if you're good enough you can tell approx. how far away it is as a clue on where to search for it instead of blindly flailing your eyes around; and on top of all that, it should hopefully help a lot with detecting and dealing with multiple stalkers and solo situations. Also probably simpler to code and balance than option one, it's just a simple SFX swap.
I personally think the footstep idea is far better, but i presented multiple solutions for a reason so take your pick.
PART ONE ADDENDUM-ACCESSIBILITY
Spinning off of the first change, if i understand correctly the thing that cemented stalkers as toxic in your eyes was.... your eyes. The enemy simply is not suited to anyone with even minor vision problems, plus i'm pretty sure the vanilla camo texture is still god-awful on lower settings.
I feel bad saying this, but you really shouldn't hold your breath for an increased visibility setting or anything like that. There's still no autoclicker or full auto for weapons that should have it, when tbh even the M1 and EPC could get one with the hold reload thing Scorching Tide and Cluster Missiles added. Just hold reload to charged shot and hold left mouse to use the autoclicker, it's that simple.
TLDR; GSG is weird, just use Slightly More Visible Stalker, it's a verified mod anyway. Or keep them removed for solo if that's not enough, not like it's hurting anyone.
PPART TWO-PUNISHMENT, AKA THE PART WHERE I NERF THE FUCKING DAMAGE!!!
THIS IS THE PART WHERE I NERF THE FUCKING DAMAGE!!!
ACHIEVEMENT COMPLETE: THE PART WHERE I NERF THE FUCKING DAMAGE!!!
Okay, jokes aside, this shit is NOT okay. At all. And i'm shocked that from what i've seen people seem to think it IS okay. To show you why, let's take a peek at exactly what happens when you get hit by a Stalker.
First, the shield disruption effect applies for 20 seconds.
Then, on top of that, a slow effect is added-this is identical to the Slasher's, 50% slow for 1,5 seconds.
Then you get hit, with a base damage of 18. A Slasher does 10. Yikes. Mind you, this value is multiplied by 3,4 on h5p4. That's 61,2 damage that applies AFTER your shield is disabled. Plus the two status effects.
The shieldbusting gimmick doesn't even get to do it's thing and add anything interesting because you just fucking die. It's like they merged a reasonable version of a Stalker with an Elite Slasher and then forgot to undo it before releasing the damn thing.
Just as with the audio changes i have two ideas for this as well.
Idea 1: Massive damage nerf. Stalkers should tag you to assist other enemies, the main attack itself should do an absolute maximum of 10 base damage. More likely 8 or even lower. It should still oneshot from revive health in most scenarios anyway.
Idea 2: Smaller damage nerf (14-15 should be good?) but no (or very little) stun. Instead of forcing it to be a big slasher, adding another annoying CC effect into the game and making the lethality of the attack circumstantial, you now get sucker punched and left in a vulnerable position, but retain 100% agency if you survive.
Again, i like option 2 more but take your pick.
CONCLUSION
My final changelist would be the following:
-Add loud ambient noises or footsteps emanating from the Stalker at all times.
-Add an accessibility setting for better visibility.
-Make the attack's effect and punishment reasonable. Remove either the stun or most of the damage and then tweak the damage numbers from there.
-Change stun immunity to half duration (adjust this one as needed) and a 3s mercy window. I think making them stunnable is a good idea, but you should not be able to stunlock this thing. Also if you cook hard enough you can technically shoot it with something that doesn't stun and then follow up with something that does to make it burrow twice, not sure how useful that is though.
-Maybe some of this isn't necessary if you change/remove them for solo? Idk
Essay done. Hope you enjoyed reading it.
Just wanted to start off saying thanks for this comment! I'm a huge fan of long nerdy essays myself, and I love being able to read other people's thoughts on things even if (especially if?) I don't agree with them fully :)
It's a great writeup, but I will say I'm probably not going to be able to be swayed over entirely. I think one of my big hangups here is whether or not an enemy being audio cue only is something I enjoy playing, and while I know other people can have different preferences here, I think I've learned from my history of stingtails abusing me that I'm probably on the side of "I need visuals too, because it's too easy for it to feel unfair".
One of the big problems is that the audio can only go so far, and as decent as my hearing / headphones are, there's a fundamental limitation in directional audio created by the unreal engine (or really, any digital audio source that doesn't do anything super complex like raytraced sound that simulates bounces and acoustics and whatever). This is a problem that really begins to rear its ugly head once bug density scales more - when the bug count is high and EVERYTHING wants its slot in the queue to play its little noise, it can be hard to pinpoint things you can't see.
I'm no neuroscience smarty pants or anything (I'm a dumbcunt), and I'm speaking entirely out of my ass here based on a guess, but I suspect there's some correlation between human senses working better in tandem - like directional audio on its own can only do so much, but once you have visual cues to go alongside it your brain can process that information much better and suddenly a mediocre (and computationally cheap) audio system like you get from unreal does enough to fake it and seem super good, but that's entirely reliant on your eyes filling in the gaps of missing information. This sounds pretentious but it's probably a thing I'd reckon, and if I wasn't so lazy I'd probably look it up instead of just spitballing here.
The sound changes from one of the later patches addressing the stingtail silent pulls is almost certainly just a tweak in their audio processing queue to give these priority enemies (like stingtails) the chance to be heard even if there's a LOT of audio clips that want processing. I've done a little bit of audio programming in the past, and the quickest thing you learn is that you can't just play things all at once or you get some real nasty feedback and signal amplication and it goes to shit real quick. So game engines typically solve this with a sound playback queue that audio events send themselves into, and the queue determines what actually gets heard (and only plays so much at a time). So this was a real great change, and I think it did (mostly) solve the problem of stingtails never once making a sound before they kill you, but there are definitely still some edge cases (especially noticeable if you have multiple stingtails alive at once). I don't really blame GSG for this because it's a pretty hard problem to solve, and you're really dealing with much more complicated signal processing at that point.
Tangent aside - the problem isn't that I don't know the stingtail exists, the problem is that the limitations of the audio engine (especially when scaled up to high bug densities where LOTS of audio gets played all the time) means you're extremely reliant on making visual contact with the stingtail to actually pinpoint where it's coming from. And the tweaks to the slight glow on the stingtail really don't do anything if they're obscured by a wave of grunts or sitting behind a praetorian or something, and there are a dozen cases where I've died and reviewed footage and there was no way to see the stingtail before it killed me.
I am aware of how the tail grab attack predicts your movement and so a sharp change in direction can throw it off (so in theory you "could" dodge this attack), but unfortunately this footwork is extremely dependent on your relative position to where the grab is coming from, and there's simply no way to know which way to move to avoid it if you've never seen it and couldn't pinpoint it with an audio cue buried in the audio muck of a torrent of bug sounds. It's just gambling and getting lucky to be able to choose correctly, especially when you account for height differences in terrain and things like that. The angles are quite tricky and less reasonable and this difficulty is amplified you're under pressure of a swarm (which is pretty much why you wouldn't see the stingtail anyway).
Stalkers amplify these sound cue woes even further, because they share that same basic premise except the invisibility and lacking visual confirmation is basically the whole schtick. So where a stingtail does it 15% of the time (and just that 15% is enough to tilt me heavily), the stalker happens upwards of like 40-50% of stalker encounters, at least on some of the higher hazards I've been playing solo. That is really what ends up frustrating me so much. It's not the encounters where I do see things, but it's when I just haven't been able to react in time because I'm not given enough information to work with. Some of this is really just the impact of ground based enemies blending into crowds. Consider how VISIBLE a tri-jaw, an acid spitter, a bulk, or a web spitter are in comparison. All very dangerous enemies where the sound cues definitely do help out, but the primary method of positioning yourself against these things is almost entirely on the back of visually confirming where they are in relation to you and how you're standing on the piece of terrain. The sound cues (sorta like how stalkers and stingtails are now) just tell you one exists, but then you use that to quickly analyze your situation by looking around and because of how these enemies pathfind / their size / where they tend to be - it's quick and easy to spot the danger!
In a run like this one I knew full well a stalker and a stingtail existed the instant they spawned once I entered my death spiral at the end, and this was on the back of a "successful" sound cue. I was about as alert as I'll ever really get, and you could argue I let the stingtail fall in priority because I was hyper fixated on trying to find the stalker (which is definitely a bit more dangerous), and maybe there was a mistake in that movement choice when I got stingtailed first. But the stalkers really felt like they came out of nowhere with not a lot of warning or time to react. Again, I keep dragging up tri-jaws as my go-to example of something that feels fair, but that's probably because I adore the design of tri-jaws and how they interact with basic mackies, and they feel so much more fair to move against. You can easily see the threat AND you get a brief second or two to react and choose how to dodge. Sometimes you purposely tank a hit so you don't get hit with a larger one, and the complexity is baked into the *reaction* of a player responding to a clear threat, rather than baked into a hide and seek game that ends the instant it does its attack that you couldn't find in time. For many, many stalker/stingtail interactions, you don't really get any time to respond to the final "i'm killing you now" sound cue. If you didn't spot it earlier, you're very unlikely to survive.
This is really my (poorly explained) stance on the audio/visuals - it's less about what they actually are (because sound engine limitations can only do so much, and visuals are impacted by crowd density and nearby bugs a LOT more when bugs sit in crowds), and more about how it feels to react to one of these enemies and try and outplay it.
I do like your roar idea for stalkers. Something it made me think about is how it feels to be in a map with exploders. These fuckers move fast and one shot you if you're caught unaware, but they have a distinct (and highly visual) SLOW attack animation. If a stalker appeared on top of me, I'd like rougly the same amount of time to respond as I get from exploders. Sorta like how the lacerator from the dread fight unburies beneath you and you get to see the dirt shaking to let you know it's time to move or get launched. I want a mandatory time frame to give a coordinated response is all.
Like, with exploders they come in groups and there's a decent amount of interesting complexity there. Sometimes it's worth risking a pickaxe swing to try and get a headshot on it to stop it from exploding at all, sometimes you have to make split second decisions on which direction to flee into because there's always a lot at once, but that's just an example of all the additional complexity that you gain FOR FREE because it's a slower attack with counterplay. I'm not saying stalkers need to be as easy to counter as exploders are, but it's not like exploders are non threatening to begin with (they kill loads of people caught unawares, often indirectly because of how they decide to respond to an unexpected exploder on top of their original spot). Stalkers should probably be different in some way besides being another split second headshot, but give me some sort of last stand counterplay should I fail the eyesight game is all I ask.
Let me make a split second decision to save my shields / my life, and literally anything but an instant undodgeable attack could be super interesting. Maybe how you react could force the AI to do different things based on what you shoot. Like, exploders have that super simple "hit it in the head and it dies instantly without exploding" minigame, and it might be cool to have a stalker have like a glowing sac or something you shoot and it can't do its shield attack anymore perhaps and just hits you for a tiny amount of damage, or maybe destroying that weakpoint sac instead makes it do no damage but burrow instantly, or maybe it means it can't do damage and only hits shield. Idk. There's so many options and possibilities here but it just feels like a boring instant kill where you get punished for getting unlucky and never seeing it. Compare that to exploders which can still punish if you get unlucky and never saw the group until it's on top of you, there's just a world of much more interesting gameplay with exploders. Even if exploders are trivially easy most times, they're more interesting and fun, and can interact with other bugs in a very unique way that stalkers can't just because "oops you die, do not pass go, do not collect $200" doesn't bring any novel interactions.
Briefly addressing loud footsteps: I think it would be an improvement, but wouldn't help my biggest issues. I've played enough 6x2 diablo (aka, bulk det city, where bulk dets spawn in packs and with large spread so they can surround you) to know that bulk footsteps often aren't enough if you're dealing with multiple things at once and overwhelmed with sound cues. Usually the thing that lets me know a bulk has snuck up on me from a blind ledge or tight corner or something (trust me, this happens in diablo a fair bit lol) is seeing the REAL visible particle sphere that surrounds them when you're close. That shit is great for identifying the danger instantly, and if there's something like that a stalker can bring I'm all for it. Give a load distinct hum with a screen overlay or something when it's close enough to attack and then some time for a last second response would do wonders.
On accessibility settings - I'm for it, but as you say I'm not holding my breath. DRG lacks in a lot of ways probably because they're a smaller company and don't have a person dedicated to this sort of thing. There's some weird hangup in my head over installing mods like more visible stalkers and it just feels like I'm cheating lol. I'd rather just remove them from my game than play a different experience from most players who would never install the mod/can't. Something about an even playing field is important to me as someone who uploads runs in a case like this (but I'll admit I'm a hypocrite that has mods like weapon heat crosshair which are equal levels of cheaty).
On damage - yes.
TL;DR of my response:
* I don't think audio cues are enough, no matter how talented and creative the sound designer is at making something clever. It feels more like a limitation of cheap directional audio from the engine, and seems like it also has a physical component that NEEDS visual clarification for the sound to be at its most impactful.
* Give me visuals and time for counterplay. Let me react to these events at the time of my death via getting grabbed or the last second of a stalker coming for me - a small time window where I can prevent disaster when I fail the eye appointment hide and seek RNG check will do wonders for my frustration levels. There's so many great enemies in this game who have done it correctly - so many examples to learn from is all I'm saying.
That's really just what I needed to add. I agree with pretty much everything else! Again, thank you for such an excellent and well thought out comment! Cheers mate.
@@ojb_ thanks for the response, i was hoping for something like this! I definitely get the "i like these, ESPECIALLY when someone disagrees with me?" thing. I think the reason for that is that we're basically playing pretend gamedev.
I brought this up in the PDRG discord recently; every game with balance patches always has this stupid debate between "Stoopid devs can't play their own game, why are you balancing it when you have skill issue?" and then someone goes "Stfu you're a stinky proplayer, bAlAnCe BalAncE this bALaNcE that you just hate fun!1!!1" and it's INFURIATING because none of those people know what the fuck they're talking about. The real answer is actually very simple.
Look at it this way, DRG's balancing is pretty bad but the devs do know how to do things most of the time. AB is bad so they make a threatening, heavily armored new enemy and you get Stingtails. Engi's poison resistance is weak so they add Septics as both a cool enemy in general AND another source of poison damage. Double Barrel, Roll Control, Guidance Cutoff/Rocket Barrage, all great reworks even if balancing is a little wack.
But if you know the game well, you'll know how to BALANCE it even if you're not good at game DESIGN. And when you combine the two, you get something like this conversation or the VWA and VEA mod discussion threads on the PDRG server-people with that deep knowledge and experience bouncing ideas off of each other and discussing them like a dev team would. And wouldn't you know, VWA and VEA are easily the best balance mods i've ever seen for this game. The simplicity helps too, you're not going crazy with ideas and just getting the job done, something other balance mods forget only to turn into an idea soup instead of a reasonable attempt at balance.
But enough yammering about that, back to Stalkers. The thing with Exploders is that they are, weirdly enough for something so violent, support units. Sure, dodging the damage might be easy, but that's not really what Exploders are for. Even if you're not getting blown up, you are forced to get the FUCK out of that spot, immediately and often suddenly compromising your position. Stalkers suck because they're basically exploders that just kill you instead. Invisible, reusable, burrowing, stunning, 400 health, no explosion falloff instant wind up exploders that also ignore and kill your shield because fuck you. Another thing to consider is that it's an exclusively proactive enemy, so the attack always hits you out of nowhere because if you did see it coming it wouldn't have hit you in the first place.
You did give me an interesting idea though. What if stalkers had a two stage attack?
Stage 0: Trying to catch you. Plays a distinct noise, with a visual effect that's only visible if it's close (pretty sure that's how bulk ash works already, though i might be wrong on that or it could be a low settings thing cause my pc is ass). Could be something like the sparks that float in the air on Shield Disruption missions, bonus points if it shows around you so you don't know the exact direction it's coming from. The directional audio could also work really well in general if the closeness to the enemy makes it always high priority in that player's sound queue, and if there's other Stalkers they would likely be farther away or trying to kill a teammate so maybe there would be less technical issues.
Stage 1: Makes a shriek that does an inital, small amount of damage and busts your shield.
Stage 2: Rushes you to attack, dealing the majority of the total damage and maybe also stunning you if it hits.
This follows Exploder logic, where there's a first punishment for getting caught off guard (shriek/compromised position) and a second one if you screw up really bad (getting swiped/exploded). It's also possible the new cues work well enough by themselves, but we would have to see ourselves with testing and custom mods to be certain.
P.S. I think it would also be funny to experiment with "rage stalkers" of some kind. If they "catch" their target they EMP everyone and go on a rampage with speed and damage resistance buffs until they either die or chainsaw through your whole team.
Could also do something like this with an older enemy idea that inspired this one, that being a sort of mactera caterpillar that pupates into an extremely dangerous enemy if you don't kill it fast enough.
Not really relevant, but i think they're interesting concepts.
Two stage stalker sounds great to me! I can see it being a bit like the warden shriek if the stalker gets within ~5m of the dwarves or something like that. The warden - if you fail to stun or fear it - spawns a wave of grunts which can be surprisingly brutal on h5a or modded hazards. There's that interesting counterplay with the warden where sometimes it's correct to ignore the shriek (letting the grunts spawn) to handle some other immediate threat instead. The player is allowed to make an interesting decision in the heat of the moment, and it just makes room for more varied and interesting encounters and synergies with other bugs in play.
With a two stage stalker - perhaps one gets close and you have like a second or two to find the thing as it does its animation (if it's still invis, maybe a particle effect display and DEFINITELY a unique sound like the warden screech), and then you can shoot it to interrupt it from finishing the screech. If no one shoots it in time to stop it, all dwarves within like 10m or so gets their shield nuked - like an EMP pulse that effects the whole team rather than one unfortunate victim lol. This also offers an opportunity for repositioning (e.g. dashing away) if you're unable to shoot it to stop the pulse from completing.
The EMP pulse could have gone a couple of ways and changed the AI depending on how it was handled. Whether it goes into a melee phase or burrows to try again later is something I'm not sure what fits best, but I think could probably be okay with whatever gets chosen. In either case you have some more flexibility for the encounter to make it more interesting and dynamic between different runs, where sometimes you have to take the shield pulse and sometimes you have to hard focus the thing to be able to maximize your own HP.
I will say that the comparison to wardens is interesting because wardens themselves can't really kill you outside of the occasional hitbox jostle / wandering into you to kill you purely by interrupting your movement lol. So if stalkers are going to be an invisible form of that, they probably still shouldn't do the levels of damage they do in the full game now.
By having the EMP shriek be a longer time period and giving players a last ditch window to react when they fail to succeed the initial hide and seek, you gain a lot of interesting counterplay and interactions with other bugs that the current stalker just doesn't bring in the slightest. I still think it's important that it's visible - I'd want those particle effects to be much more noticeable than the current invisible stalker at least, and to be able to see this thing if it does its screech in the middle of a crowd. Like, I'd rather the challenge to be a quick flick aim/loaded ammo skill check than an eyesight skill check, and perhaps I'd want the stalker to rear its head back and stand up on hind legs or something to really make it vertically apparent above a crowd of grunts lol. Idk, I think there are still ways that suggestions like this can be poorly implemented and I'd still have annoyances with the enemy. But there are ways where I can see myself appreciating the additional challenge (but only if there's a pretty substantial overhaul from the current implementation).
If you want proof that GSG spent too much time drinking coffee with Arrowhead look no further than the existence of Stalkers. Seriously minus the ragdoll they really took one of the most annoying and barely balanced piece of shit mobs in one video game, DRG'd it, and tossed in the game and told you to fuck yourself for not having massive amounts of fun against it.
Either pray a spray-and-pray driller joins your lobby or enjoy video game induced schizophrenia for every wave of a mission with these things
And to add onto your Stingtail rant, you're absolutely right about the U-curve and Haz 4 herd mentality. Go look at the subreddit(lol) for DRG in any discussion about Stingtail balance and you'll find entire armies of Haz 3 players ego the shit out of you for thinking these aren't fun and lacking in meaningful counterplay
"Dude just side step it lul" - guy who only ever has to kill 4 grunts per swarm to survive
@@qwertyq2884 The funny part about those players is that it doesn't even work consistently and you still eat shit in bulk when they spawn! GSG's overall Stingtail philosophy perplexes me doubly so considering that all the other enemies in DRG (even Stalkers, to some extent) all have something, some sort of weakness you can use to fight back. Stingtails, with their bullshit praetorian-esque stun immunity, nigh-undodgeable attack and nigh-unhittable weakpoint (which makes armor break almost mandatory), lack any counterplay beside circle strafing around them, jumping like a bunny and sitting with fingers behind your back, praying you don't get grabbed.
Also, thank god I'm not the only one thinking Stalkers are bullshit to fight; they've actually become my #1 cause of downs in solos, surpassing Stingtails somehow (likely cuz I use VEA), and it amazes me how people either fail or refuse to acknowledge their faults. Same for Stingtails.
Maybe it's because I only ever solo with scout so light is never an issue for me, but I have no trouble spotting stalkers even at long range. I wonder if graphical settings make a difference (I'm maxed out as thankfully I don't have ojb's steampunk pc ). If so, that should probably be looked at.
Even still, it sucks that they can't be stunned. They can be frozen, so why not stunned?
I've had issues seeing it with scout too :(
It might be a low graphics thing, but it might just be my old age and bad eyes. Either way, I'm at a point where there's nothing I can theoretically do to improve these encounters by upping my game or outskilling it. I just lose if something like this happens and I get "unlucky", which is real frustrating.
To improve the stalker, one easy solution is to maybe make heightened senses work with stalkers, like if the stalkers are within a distance it goes off but that could be annoying to deal with the screen going white and would waste a perk slot. Another option could be to just not make them completely invisible. Maybe if every time they do there screaming sound effect they light up in that highlighted outline form when they get close. Removal of the disabling shield ability as that seems just unfair to be completely vulnerable to a slasher or stationery for 8 seconds or however long it is. Then removing the ability to burrow as well since if the stalker burrows there is no room for counter play and they could run away kind of how the huuli hoarder does and wont go back to being slightly invisible until they are out of the players sight for like 3 seconds. This could be irrelevant in some cave generations and in high haz could be impossible to maintain los if a praetorian is just sat there but it would mean if your not in the middle of a swarm and there is a stalker around it would be easier to punish the stalker instead of hitting it once and having to wait for it to re appear. Im not a game dev however and these could just be bad changes but i think its at least a start with some ideas.
I thought about that as well, i think higthened senses should definitely apply to them. And eventually stingtails as well, would seem kind of logical to me. Also maybe reducing a bit the health of stalkers while keeping the rest of their capacities would seem to be a fair trade to me. But yet on many non-meta builds, it can feel quite hard to get a chance of killing a stalker before it runs away, and that very stressful!
@@gaelracine5057 I think adding to heightened senses as well may add to the variety of the games perks, it will take a while for the iron will dash combo to be overthrown but if heightened senses could directly hurt a stingtail maybe whilst grabbed there is a period just after allowing you to activate it and kill/damage the stingtail and hopefully some way to intergrate it into a more impactful interaction, right now the perk seems quality of life over game saving and i think with the current most annoying enemies being sneaky/grabby enemies the potential for improvement is there. I do agree on the lower hp aswell but i feel the most annoying part is the burrowing. Its impossible to punish mid swarm so i feel removing or delaying the feature just allows the ability to deal with the stalker instead of running and praying.
I remember calls for heightened senses (HS) to work with stingtails too, but even back then I was super skeptical about how it ever might fit in because stingtails/stalkers work differently than grabbers/leeches in how they deal/don't deal damage to dwarves.
I honestly believe HS is not an easy way out, and that's not just because I'm heavily biased against the perk. There is an element of "I would never unequip dash, so it's up against iron will" and iron will is one of those extremely flexible things that can help EVERY run vs. having a completely dead perk on the hopes of it saving me from an instant loss vs. a stalker (because that's all it does; I don't think HS has any value, personally). But hopefully that bias isn't the real reason I'm so hesistant.
I'd much, much, much rather there be some sort of skill component to prevent it from being a loss condition, and as it stands I'm throwing my hands up and saying there's no way that will ever happen for me. The way this enemy has ended runs (and I sincerely believe this run right here is a perfect example of "no one could have survived this, because there's no other way to play this differently in which you can see the enemy to handle it") has ended them in a way that feels frustratingly uncounterable. I'm no stranger to losing to things that occasionally feel unfair - but often times I'm able to look back at the footage and say, well, maybe I should have terraformed that a bit more, or obviously not stood there, and then I'm able to learn from it.
This run is pretty decently well played and yet I don't know what I could have done differently at all besides skip the fossil and just get lucky™ and reach the pod. And skipping the fossil only lets me get one more death, it doesn't mean the other stalker deaths are any less bullshit. I fear there's nothing to learn from this other than "oh, that wasn't my fault at all". I truly hope I have legs to stand on to say things like this based on my past history of play and my past stances on things. I feel like there's a part of me that's earned the right to be grumpy and throw my hands up / give up because I have put in a fair bit of work to improve and learn from mistakes. Here against stalkers though I've got nothing.
monsoon was saying last night that anim cancel could make pump action viable/really good, whats your thoughts on it?
The pinned comment on this video has some more warthog thoughts (after the rant, there's build talk), if you haven't seen that yet.
I think I can get a little bit better with my own animation cancels but I'm close enough to the limit of what's humanly possible that I'm honestly not sure how much more DPS you're gonna get than what you see here. With that in mind, I think pump action is "viable" depending on difficulty and only on the condition that you also consider magnetic pellet alignment viable. They seem extremely close in performance (I've found that PA might outperform slightly) that you're not gaining a noticeable power spike by equipping it instead of MPA. So really it comes down to whether or not warthog play is considered strong enough to handle the high hazards, and I think that's up in the air. You can use it and survive (I have a bunch of 6x2 wins with warthog, but none beyond 6x2 because I don't tend to play engy that much), but the other primaries are much stronger IMO. So it's already 6x2 viable but unsure about anything higher.
thoughts on crawlers, as they spawn in the corestone? i can’t tell if i just need to learn how to fight them or they’re genuinely poorly balanced and realistically impossible for many builds.
Initial thoughts: they're overtuned. If you have a gunner or a scout the event is free, but if you don't have gunner zips to cheese it with / can't rely on the scout to kite appropriately, then you're in a very dangerous situation.
Personally, I don't know if I can commit to a full on rant and complain for nerfs just yet and may need more time. I have been able to beat the event a few different ways by falling back into bunkers and slow clearing until it's safe to attack the stone, but crawlers can be very very tricky and I've certainly not figured them out just yet.
My biggest complaint currently is that my frame rate is hot garbo when the monkeys are out in numbers. And low framerate + fast moving enemies = very difficult aiming that exceptionally punishes non-spammy CC heavy builds. You'll see in this run the only way I was able to actually kill things on this loadout was just LUREs to distract them long enough - I wasn't really able to hit shotgun shots nor was it worth any ammo attempting to do so because it's too difficult for me at that fps.
Soooo, honestly, I'm not sure yet. They're extremely difficult and I don't love that they encourage bunkers and cheese strats, but I'm not ready to condemn until I've put the effort in to learn them more. Unlike stalkers, which are very clearly problematic, crawlers have some skill components to learn before I go to war with them too.
I wouldn't mind nerfs myself but I'm not calling for anything just yet.
I hate spreaders more then stalkers
:') i love spreaders! i think they are genuinely a great enemy and by far the best addition in ages personally. extremely tough at times, but fair and force you to reposition in a way that feels a lot more skilled based than something like the stingtail. my only complaints are the performance issues (they're still not great for my potato pc, and multiple septics tank my framerate) and the fact that they can be exceptionally punishing on certain escort layouts if you're on a build that can't shape the terrain or otherwise get to the blind ledges they spam over.
i think it's okay to dislike them though, and i think that's a common sentiment among many players.
@@ojb_ I'm a driller main and i used to think that a driller was one of the most comfortable classes for solo play. until the gsc added spreaders. There were problems with them during the escort, but in the rescue operation I really got a post-traumatic experience. Since this was the 3rd stage of Edd and the cave resembled a cylinder at the bottom of which there was a black box in the middle, I summoned all possible suplays to the full nitra and used them to terraform the cylinder into a cone (so that the spreaders could not bomb me without direct visibility). Did not help . They found a place where I couldn’t see them and shot them. It was the same enemy who laughed at me and I felt helpless. And how “glad” I was when I learned that in season 5 the gsc changed the chance of spreaders appearing : if earlier I could meet 2-3 times per mission, now three spreaders appearing simultaneously is not a rare occurrence. I would like to know from an experienced player what to do with them during ecom operations and on a drillevator when you are a solo driller main.
Sounds like you're spending some time terraforming already, but that'd be the first major bit of advice. Investing a fair bit of effort shaving off blind ledges and maximizing visibility / forcing chokes IS worth it in many cases, and I think a fair number of my own losses have been on the back of simply not terraforming enough. It's very easy to get too lazy and stop early because a half assed job is often not punished in the average run (and terraforming is pretty boring IMO). But there are definitely times where you get ridiculously unlucky that the full effort terraforming matters, and there's just no way to know ahead of time unless you have some bad red modifiers (e.g. elite threat) or have an idea of the enemy pool (e.g. knowing bulks might spawn because you've seen one earlier already). My personal rule of thumb is to avoid terraforming too much and just accept the loss of winrate / know that sometimes I might lose because of those shortcuts, and only go crazy on it if I'm repeating the same challenge and just want it over and done with (like stage 3 of an EDD or something).
Solo salvage is very hard and can be extraordinarily punishing. Any time you're forced to stand in a tiny bubble without leaving has the possiblility of losing due to RNG regardless of your skill level, and some of the swings due to bad spawns are pretty nuts. For context: I have more modded solo salvages under my belt than probably anyone in the whole world (yes, I have a problem), and that experience only solidifies my opinion that not every salvage hold is winnable. Any high level player who says otherwise probably doesn't have the solo experience to back that up, because sometimes you just will get rolled.
Talking driller now: I honestly am at the point of my DRG career where I find driller to be the worst class when the difficulty ramps up. It has some strengths and the illusion of power on many map types (driller slaps in mining / point extract, for example), but in comparison to the other classes, the driller kit has some severe single target / burst damage / ranged weaknesses that are quite difficult to overcome when shit hits the fan. There were some polls in the modded community a while back about which class is the most difficult to play, and driller always topped those lists. It's a class that falls off very fast as the difficulty ramps up, and the reasons it becomes more challenging into modded are the exact same reasons it sometimes feels very tricky in vanilla.
The best instant safety tools are stun c4 and impact axes, which while good, pale in comparison to what the other classes get to play with (stuff like breach cutter or grapple hook or coilgun, for example). Cold radiance cryo is busted, but doesn't solve every problem, especially not with long range septics nuking you down or a bulk getting up in your face, etc.
I bring this up just to highlight that most (if not all) driller loadouts are going to have some noticeable flaws into a salvage op. The fact that you can struggle to septics is not just a you problem. I won't say every loss isn't your fault or anything extreme like that (because sometimes we lose things we could have won), because sometimes the correct plays are tricky to figure out in the heat of the moment. There are some things you can do to try and mitigate these difficulty spikes:
0. Terraform more (or do it better)
[mostly explained earlier - just reiterating that the prep time is important to take advantage of]
1. Pay closer attention to your positioning inside rings
Practice using highground / jumping off resups or the boxes themselves / position along the outer edge of a ring. The instant you become aware of a septic coming into play that you find yourself unable to handle - you know it will be lobbing in a barrage of red floor. So it's on you to position and move in a way that baits the shot to a spot that doesn't do maximal damage. Sometimes this means running outside the ring briefly to get the shot to land not where you need to stand, and sometimes this means intentionally running into prior red goo floors so that the mess stacks in one spot instead of spreading out to multiple areas (which would deny yourself even more ground).
If you play on the edges of the ring during these moments, you have a much more workable floor space as half the goo'd area occurs outside the ring and doesn't matter. If you're abusing high ground and jumping a lot, those shots (even with their slight homing ability) might just sail over your head and land mostly outside the ring if you're positioned nicely against where the septic is coming from.
These positioning tricks will require a bit of brain power to perform until you get comfortable doing them automatically, and just note that if you're putting active mental effort into moving purposely, you're going to be weaker against any other threat in the meantime, so you gotta juggle some things sometimes.
2. Don't be afraid to leave the ring if something serious happens.
If you get that wave of triple spreader spawn... solve that problem ASAP. Don't stick around inside the ring until it gets worse if you can't shoot them from there. Leave, drop a c4 near them or whatever, and book it back. Get to a spot where you ping bosco on them at least, and spend the time investment to solve it early on. If this is impossible due to the ledge they're spamming from being too high up to get to in a reasonable amount of time (
Oh, I meant to say this too but forgot: if it's a black box (only in deep dives, NOT the salvage uplink/refuel, but the standalone box), you can actually run away and let it tick down to zero and fail it if things seem unwinnable. You'll burn some ammo doing it, but sometimes it can save the run and give you time to regroup and fix any problems you missed.
So if you notice a real bad septic ledge while black boxing that would otherwise be unbeatable, you can just run away and wait it out! This is a strat I've used successfully in the past to push through rough black box locations that were very dependent on RNG to survive. Just note that a salvage bubble ticking down doesn't have the same result, and you just lose the run if it hits zero :(
I am a has 5+/6x2 player ( which is pretty much considered a casual by modded atp haha ) and I hate stalkers. I'm fine with their concept but the execution is just a bit off. The sound they are making is not accurate enough at all. Some of my solutions to fix them are:
1) Making the sound more accurate. Many times I heard them, used breach cutter in the right direction in a tight corridor and mfker wasn't there
2) In case you caught him aka damaged him make him staggered for longer time. It is annoying when you finally hit the stalker just for mfker to burrow and run away. Even menaces are not that annoying as you can usually kill them quick before they run if hit weakspot. Idk if Stalkers have weakspot to begin with
3) Make them less tanky. I haven't watched their HP in logs but from feelings they have equal or higher HP than Slasher. About the same as Guard. Which is a lot considering they are "assassins" with already inherited stealth and speed. But if you have those advantages you have to have to be squishy to compensate. For Stingtail I can at least understand why their prenerf version was so tanky. For stalker I unfortunately can't
It's interesting to compare stalker HP to a web spitter hp. Web spitters can also kill you with a single shot if you're facing a lot of enemies that can take advantage of your webbed state, but web spitters are VERY noticeable on walls away from things and it's impossible to miss seeing them. And they die in a single hipfired m1k shot. Compare this to stalkers which survive several focus shots... it's just so wild how much the power creep has come into play here.
I will say stalkers do have a weakpoint in the head (I noticed this in a crit weakness mission where they died to simple headshots), but that doesn't excuse the fact they're a huge slot machine roll to find them in the first place, and boy am I bad at slots.
Pssshhhh just git gud br0
R.I.P brother, that was some smooth gameplay right there, very entertaining to watch for a gamepad scrub like me :D Also i read description, and it was'nt a very fair lose, but i guess this stalker was'nt impossible to handle, but still very hard for sure! Also at this difficulty lvl i guess you should just accept your fate ^^ Very nice try tho, you were fucking close to end this! Next time i'm sure you'll get the ultra instinct it needs to counter this sneaky bastard! ;)
fwiw I think this stalker WAS impossible to handle and not a matter of it being "hard". looking back at my own footage there's nothing i could do to avoid those stalker deaths because there is no point in the video where I was able to even see the threat before it killed me (and trust me, i was looking very hard!).
with the exception of the very last death (which you can argue is greed and i should have just booked it to the extract pod and skipped the secondary), i think my movement when i died was more than high skilled enough to survive, and i just rolled the dice poorly and lost to sheer chance that was out of my control. and that's what's unfun for me and bore the whole rant.
i don't think a next time gains me anything else than another roll of the dice, because there's nothing i can learn from this to stop it from happening again. (and trust me, i want to learn, but here i'm throwing my hands up and don't think there's a way out).
@@ojb_greed aside, the last death looks the least fair to me - hits you at an angle and distance I think it shouldn't - but I did see the stalker multiple times throughout the video and I do think you could've killed it.
Regardless - mechanically, I love it, but I do think there's a desperate need for adjustments.
It digs too quickly after being shot, has too much health, does too much damage (I think either disabling shields OR being a big damage dealer would work, but not both) and often the sound cues just don't play.
I'm not saying all of these need to be adjusted at once, but I do think changes are needed.