Lerkflight Costing No Energy

[X-S-Z]

Ahh, no more mandatory adrenaline. With the energy cost for flapping gone, us l0rk lovers can consider using silence and celerity with almost gleeful abandon, while still being able to spore or umbra without too much trouble.

There isn't much to add besides what's already been stated, marines'll just have to aim that much harder to take down the flyboys.

[SaltzBad]

Silence is cute, but at 750 airspeed you can cross a whole lot of ground fast enough that audible warnings and/or motion tracking are fairly irrelevant. And that airspeed helps with almost anything, from getting away to attackin, accelerating etc. as opposed to the base 525.

Theres really no good reason to not use Celerity atm. And honestly, this is the dumbest change I've seen in a while - I can putup with bunnyhopping for aliens, crackjumping for marines, crouch blinking and vertical use for fades and what not. But infinite Lerk energy aka "Move mouse up and down and constantly spam jump" is the lamest, dumbest thing I've ever seen.

Not to mention the removal of any sort of thought in using a Lerk, as energy efficient takeoff/bite/glide patterns now are worthless and simply repeatedly hitting jump has the best effect.

[Grillkohle]

Actually, I like this change. It is one more step towards making the lerk worth its 30 res, and one step away from making it being support unit only. The next step would be to combine umbra and spores and to give it spikes back, it might happen, but probably not.
Of course, the lerk flap spamming is another thing, if you play the lerk like the beta 3 one its fine, but if you spam the flaps that really sucks, which is why I think that there should be a limit of flaps per time, say 1 flap/second.

Adrenaline is still useful for the lerk, however, since umbra, spores and primal scream all use alot of stamina and thus cannot be spammed easily without adrenaline.

[Legionnaired]

IMO, the lerk is simply harder to kill. It's basicly a durable skulk with weak ranged attacks now, and annoying as hell to kill, as Saltz can testify to. (I had a full heavy train with shotguns and HMGs take at least 2 minutes to kill him during a game on hera.)

Their lethality has not gone up, though. They can still easily take one marine, using spore to weaken him while they flap in for the kill, but cannot take out a full group of marines like a fade can, for lack of much armor or hitpoints. They can flap like a hummingbird on crack in the marine spawn and not get taken down, but they won't do more than spore a handful of marines to 1/2 health.

Bottom line, it's still a very specialized unit, but can now hold up marines in an area while more aliens show up to finish them off.

[SaltzBad]

@Legionaired:
Yeah, and 2 Skulks + my Lerk were pretty much everyone making an effort to stop your heavys at all (Gold Leader was being useful by attacking base, but we had 3 or 4 active Gorges screwing around at the same time). The whole time the best I had was 2 DCs/1 MC (which went down fairly early) - so keep in mind, it could have been alot faster.

@Grill:
Eh, once you have the 2nd Hive, you can take on Fade-sized groups of marines without too much trouble. You have Umbra, whose use has no drawback since durr hurr hurr you won't stop flapping if you drain yourself, and Celerity/Regen which makes you nigh invincible. Hence Adrenaline is almost entirely useless unless you want to be a pure support unit, because there is no reason to not run out of energy.

Sure, you'll die occasionally to bad luck or misjudgement because you fly into a group a bit too large, or a space a bit too tight, but by then you usually have another 30 res.

Anyway, previously the Lerk was just fine - it had both a support and offense role, with the small drawback that it couldn't attack more than 2 marines safely (in melee) at Hive 1. It was an early unit though, and extremely strong for one. You saw them underused on pubs because they don't allow for blatant mistakes like Fades do - but they made a frequent appearance in pugs, either as an early lerk to stop SG rushes or as a Hive 2 lerk to remove the last few options from marines (JPs, hiverushes, ninjaphasing - all pretty much countered by a decent Lerk).

In their current state, they'll probably become the main Kharaa fighting unit - meaning new ressources models will still allow for 1/2 fades to break static defenses mostly, but will emphasize a constant income to pump out superlerks (Or on a team of 6, after the 8th minute that'd be 1 Gorge, 3 Lerks, 2 Fades).

So why do I have a problem with that? I really don't. I do have a problem with how stupidly easy it is to use the current Lerk - they removed all depth involved in using a Lerk, and a flap-limit isn't going to solve that either. Before it had as mentioned, a flight model, and you had to give thought to the way you were going to manuever - conserve energy, conserve speed et cetera. Instead of removing that from the Lerk, they could have bloody tweaked the numbers if they felt he wasn't aggressive enough.

Moreover, similiar Stamina management should be a part of most units in NS - it adds alot of depth when used in the right places, and stops the stupid arcady feel. If marines had to for example, you could exploit KB jumps - you just would have to give thought as to when you jump, instead of simply never touching the ground whenever somethings near you.

Oh well, now they just put the same 'hit jump whenever in combat' routine to the Lerk.

[Sancho]

Ok, I want to know, how in the hell do you do that vertical jazz with the lerk??  You look like you're on a freaking pogo stick from hell. :huh:

[Bogglesteinsky]

Pressing jump makes you fly up (if you have no movement keys pressed) and pressing crouch will make you fall like a skulk.

or you could just look up and jump, then look down and jump, but you will not be able to see where you are going.

[SaltzBad]

Ok, I want to know, how in the hell do you do that vertical jazz with the lerk??  You look like you're on a freaking pogo stick from hell. :huh:

Depress forward, aim up. Use quick, repeat flaps. Aim downward again - its vital that you keep forward depressed, for your flap to propell you down as well. Rinse and repeat as you hear the Lerks touchdown groan (standard alien falldamage groan). Bite randomly for kills, or go in on people reloading. Or just manuever yourself near a desired victim while hopping up and down like that.

Load up co_kestrel on a listenserver with cheats on, get yourself a Lerk and stand in marine spawn to practice it. You'll have it down within a minute or two - just needs enough sensitivity to stare at the ceiling and ground quickly. Its a bit reactive to how you move your mouse, bad movements can leave you stalling for an instant - but really, not only is that not that horrible a mistake, its also fairly easy to avoid.

Also, bind an alternate key to mwheel or so or use a script to help flapping. Since my mwheel sucks, I just have Q and Mouse2 as additional jump buttons.

Edit :
Can't make demos with Beta 4 for some reason, but I have a demo from Beta 3, done with a no Celerity Lerk I think. I'll DCC it on IRC to you.

[Mr.Ben]

I've seen more lerks in beta 4 than i've ever seen in the history of NS and the number of fades has dramatically reduced. It's quite crazy, sure lerks are bloody hard to kill but they're not like a fade and totally stop you from getting any map control. I'll give you the example of a round i just got off on ns_metal (this map is totally ownage now) There was one good lerk and a few others who were pretty sux. The lerks were killing a lot and generally being a nuisance and hitting base a lot (particulary the good lerk). They even forced me to build a tfac which anyone who knows my comming style will know i never do that unless 100% nesscary.

Despite this though i had total map control and EVERY node (i did actually have every node but the node in their hive wasn't built, i just dropped it so they couldn't get a node up). There were no fades at all so i could just expand accross the entire map pretty much unchecked. We took out every node they had and either dropped it and left it unbuilt or dropped it, built if everyone didn't die and then just electrified it.

A fade would have stopped all this but everyone kept going lerk and pretty much gave me the round on a plate, i hope this trend continues.

[Doobie Dan]

Sure, you'll die occasionally to bad luck or misjudgement because you fly into a group a bit too large, or a space a bit too tight, but by then you usually have another 30 res.
 

I've never had the problem with the space too tight - that only seems to kill me as fade.  Usually with lerk it's spotting two guys from a vent, thinking they have LMGs and dying when they actually have shotguns.  Or it's civ with a shotgun and he's by himself.  

I'd be ok with the no-energy flight if they actually went through with the spumbra change.  I've heard that if they did implement this, they would do it at second hive but remove the ranged-attack element from it.  So basically you use it and a cloud appears around you like you just farted.  This would support the dive-bomb model - to support an Onos, you'd be flying circles above him, diving every now and then to drop some gas and maybe bite a marine.  This would definitely make the celerity lerks pure ownage in large open spaces, like Lost marine start.

[SaltzBad]

A fade would have stopped all this but everyone kept going lerk and pretty much gave me the round on a plate, i hope this trend continues.

Uh, we kicked alien ass all across the map in a countless number of ways during that round before the first 2 minutes - and I don't remember seeing any Lerks except pancake. Maybe there was a shortlived one or too, but most of the Alien res went to trying to recover from 0 nodes.

And effectively, until pancake left/ran out of res 95% mapcontrol marines were unable to finish 1 Hive/0 RT aliens.

So I dare predict, if the marine starting game doesn't involve complete rape, the early lerk will grind marine expansion to a halt even more than the previous model did and both necessitate shotgun-squadding 2 minutes earlier, reliance on static defenses to gain breathing room from lerks and of course a fairly serious strain on the ressource pool via meds.

And then we've got the 2nd hive, at which point Lerks are pretty much up to par with HA.

[Satiagraha]

I believe that the perfect solution to the endless lerk flying capabilities is not to have a rate limit imposed, or to have the flap consume energy.  I actually think that it is progress to have flapping not affect your abilities.  I think that the way to fix up the lerk would be to have 2 seperate energy reserves, one which is like the current one, used for abilities with no flapping penalties. The other energy reserve would contain energy to be used for flapping.  Granted that the amount of energy that flapping uses would have to increase from the b3 amount or that the flapping reserve would have to be smaller than the ability reserve, the system would preserve the need for flapping conservation and tactics, yet still encouraging lerk abilities like Flayra is trying to do.

[JHunz]

Please note that up/down spam is now considered an exploit on Lunixmonster.  This is due to the fact that the NS bug database contains an entry stating that up/down flight speeds should be capped, but aren't.

[SaltzBad]

So how are you going to enforce it? Break designated airspeed for a Lerk and you get bant?

[Decimator]

I say that lerk collision damage should go in.  Fly too fast and smack a wall, you'll feel it.  It's not as big a problem as it used to be because gliding makes the lerk very easy to control.

[Diablus]

Lerks die so much easier with the fixed hitboxes, I dont see any "bad" done in it, if anything something good... even though 2 SG blasts lvl 1-3 kills it.

[SaltzBad]

Get a Shotgun and a Heavy, and 5 bucks says you can't take down a Hive 2 Lerk unless you get crazy lucky. Probably not a Hive 1 one either. :p

[Dark]

Get a Shotgun and a Heavy, and 5 bucks says you can't take down a Hive 2 Lerk unless you get crazy lucky. Probably not a Hive 1 one either. :p

ya well if said lerk is you then i give up  <_<  v_v      :help:

[JHunz]

So how are you going to enforce it? Break designated airspeed for a Lerk and you get bant?

You think it isn't obvious who's doing it on purpose and constantly?

[BigD]

So how are you going to enforce it? Break designated airspeed for a Lerk and you get bant?

You think it isn't obvious who's doing it on purpose and constantly?

I was on a random pub server..And it was on co...6 ppl went lerk and exploited this...They just went up and down sporing..They did this for 4mins..We managed to kill 1 i think..Then they all stopped and went fade and kill the cc...Its really :p...