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Man, reading the thread after an evening playing is kind of crazy because I almost wonder if we got the same game. I mean we did, and I can see all the complaints, but I went in with low expectations and came out pumped. I completely agree that the atmosphere is completely different (and far worse), pipebombs feel lackluster, and the special infected suck in every single way compared to L4D(2). I still had a blast playing; I actually like the design changes around weapons and melee balance. Moving in a coordinated, tactical fashion is super important. It felt like (non-deathrace) Expert L4D, where you've absolutely got to move in coordinated fashion and cover each other carefully.
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Aug 14, 2021 17:21
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:Did you play in a 4-stack and on what difficulty? Veteran is doable if you've got a competent team but if you're playing with pubbies it's way way harder, and if with bots it's basically not doable. Nightmare is also functionally impossible unless you've got a 4-stack on comms and high-end cards Full team of L4D vets, yeah. That's what makes me think they're designing/balancing around that specific audience. Which is ironic, since the L4D vets are also calling out all the places where it's lackluster compared to the originals.
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Aug 14, 2021 18:03
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I like the card system a lot less now that I know it isn't random draws but a set order in which you get them. Still can't work out how I feel about the game. The level design doesn't feel remotely close to L4D with enormous difficulty spikes in a few places (like the god damned church). After more play with the corruption cards it also feels like excellent aim is mandatory. L4D emphasized team positioning over aim while B4B demands both and gently caress you if you can't keep up.
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Aug 14, 2021 20:39
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When I did it with a buddy we had a hellishly difficult time... until most of the way through, when things stopped spawning. Definitely buggy.
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Aug 14, 2021 23:11
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Went into the church personally carrying four pipes and we still wiped because the game hit us with simultaneous armored bruisers at once from every direction. gently caress this game's sorry excuse for a difficulty curve.
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Aug 15, 2021 08:20
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We did the church tonight on vet with 3. The key is indeed to rush initial boards on as many windows as possible during the first pipe. If you can seal all the windows before specials get in then you can outpace the damage that the zombies do to the boards.
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Aug 16, 2021 08:02
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After a weekend of play and a bit of time to reflect, I think whether or not I buy this will depend heavily on the amount of campaign content and design refinement in the release. The lack of modding means that a lot of campaign content is absolutely essential - and if they're charging sixty bucks, there had better loving be a wealth of it included! The beta levels were feeling tired and repetitive by the end of the weekend after only 3-4 playthroughs. Doesn't help that the "director" and card systems aren't actually doing much to make different runs feel meaningfully different. I put a lot of blame on the lackluster special infected designs compared to L4D, particularly the lack of tank equivalents (and no, spawning 4-5 bruisers in a row isn't anywhere near as much fun as L4D tanks). If there's at least four times as many levels in the total campaign then I could see it still working, assuming a bunch of the bugs and imbalanced mechanics are ironed out by release. If it has only, say, twice as many levels as the beta? I don't think it'll hold interest long enough to be worth the price of admission. I've gotten dozens-to-hundreds of hours of top quality entertainment out of games half the price they're asking for B4B. It's also very clear that there's a fundamental difference in target audience between L4D and B4B. In almost every place it could, B4B adds complex mechanics alongside extremely punishing challenges that will force you to learn and exploit those mechanics to the fullest - or else you die horribly and have no fun at all. L4D, in contrast, was constantly simplifying so as to put as little friction as possible between the players and living out a bunch of classic zombie movie vignettes. B4B is also very focused on consistent challenges and planning smartly for them before the game even starts - part of why the levels feel so repetitive - while L4D dialed the randomness up for the sake of entertaining variety and got away with it because of far more forgiving mechanics. B4B is about the satisfaction of getting into nitty-gritty mechanical details while L4D is about not getting bogged down on the way to having fun. I remember a huge uproar from the simulationist crowd back when L4D came out because of the lack of aim down sights and having only three guns that each represented fundamental weapon categories. B4B is made by and for the exact same kinds of players who were making those complaints. I'm not entirely sure whether that target audience includes me. Considering that I've been obsessed with insanely difficult coop games since Myth coop on Legendary back in the early aughts, and have done both Mythic and Savage raid clears in their respective MMOs, I clearly enjoy the near-masochism of being forced to reshape myself to solve an artificial puzzle. Hell, I went so hard on L4D back in the day that Expert Realism started feeling too easy. In that vein, B4B is right up my alley. On the other hand, I've never been a gun nut nor milsim fan so a lot of the gun customization mechanics feel less like an interesting puzzle piece and more like a drag that has to be slogged through by rote on the way to the actual challenge. Not to mention that I'm not in my teens or even twenties anymore; while I've never really grown up, I still don't have quite the same fire for artificial challenges now that real challenges weigh heavier. I can still feel the Everest-like call of the seemingly-impossible Nightmare full clear, but I'm not going to spend the time and energy to find/build a progression group from scratch at this point. These days the decider is how many casual playthroughs with casual buddies the game will be able to sustain. tldr: B4B is a sweaty apocalyptic militia-fantasy game that is half fascinating, half actively offputting, and half self-sabotaging. It's weird. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Aug 16, 2021 |
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Aug 16, 2021 21:12
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Hoffman is well written. He's absolutely not likeable, but he's a very believable character.
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Aug 17, 2021 19:42
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The lack of randomization in the card system (and why is it called a card system then?) is strange, but goes along with the less casual feel of the mechanics. It really isn't L4D. They want you to get into the weeds and optimize in order to complete higher difficulties. But then you have the spawning system and the model-sharing between specials and I just can't decide if the game is half-baked or clever in a way that escapes me. Most of this stuff is very clearly intentional.
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Oct 13, 2021 23:29
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The weapon stats lie bigtime, yeah.
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Oct 14, 2021 04:29
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Played a bunch tonight. The spawns sometimes feel absurd, but I can't shake the feeling that they're entirely manageable if you've got consumables. I think you're meant to be regularly buying stuff like grenades and bringing along gas cans for crisis situations, because boy oh boy is the game going to dunk you into a trash can if you don't have an emergency delete button. All the consumables seem good but grenades in particular seem fantastic for their price. Like when the game says "gently caress you" and spawns three bruisers at once it feels really good to blow all three up with a single grenade.
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Oct 14, 2021 08:20
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The more that I play this game, the more that I like it. That said, I have an entire group of players that love punishingly difficult team games. There's a lot of dying horribly on veteran, but it always feels like we either hosed up big or failed to use our resources properly. Definitely feels like there's a missing difficulty though. Recruit is so laughably easy that it's no fun at all, while veteran feels like raid prog. I wonder if they were afraid of fracturing their playerbase?
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Oct 15, 2021 09:50
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I turned them off because I wanted to learn the noises.
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Oct 15, 2021 21:03
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I have 6+ friends who all play, half of which have bought the game outright, so I've not had to brave pugs. Under those circumstances, it's worth the 60. I expect to be playing this for a long, long time.
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Oct 16, 2021 20:49
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Gay Rat Wedding posted:is there no crouch toggle? I see toggles for other things but not crouch There is. They're not all together, but the options exist.
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Oct 16, 2021 21:27
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Well, we finally finished act 1 on veteran. They really nerfed the church finale. Rightfully so, but drat was it a bare shadow of what I remember. Maybe we got extremely lucky, but not a single special got inside the church before we'd gotten at least some boards on all the windows - at which point it was a formality. Instead, the ridiculous roadblock is the following level. It just goes on and on and on with tough section after tough section after tough section. Absolutely brutal. Doable, but brutal. The final level was kind of a letdown by comparison. Don't get me wrong, it was dangerous, but it was nowhere near as hard as the penultimate level. And also I died right at the end and didn't get the achievement or supply points for completing the level or act, which kind of pisses me off. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Oct 17, 2021 |
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Oct 17, 2021 09:03
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Because I've been playing a consistent build for the last ~15 hours of game time, and because I'm trying to keep my mind off IRL right now, I'm gonna write about the sniper rifles in B4B. Back in the beta, I seriously misevaluated sniper rifles because of my L4D experience. The sniper in L4D was very underwhelming because the design of the game really didn't mesh with it's role. L4D throws huge hordes and fragile specials at you, while tanks demand raw DPS rather than long range precision. B4B's enemy design is very different. Specials are very tanky compared to L4D but have very vulnerable weak points to compensate - and many are extremely dangerous at range. Hockers, stingers, and retches don't have to get close in order to end your hopes and dreams. Not to mention that the rifles in B4B don't act like the L4D sniper. They have more DPS relative to the B4B rifles than the autosniper had to something like the beastly L4D2 AK, and stun - or "bullet stumble" - is a very significant mechanic. L4D specials were so fragile that crowd control mechanics didn't make sense to include, but B4B specials - or "mutations" - have large enough health pools that crowd control becomes a useful option. The only weapons I've yet seen inflict big enough burst damage to cause a tallboy to stumble are shotguns... and sniper rifles. Plus, on top of everything else, having a team sniper is drat near free since they'll draw on a different ammo pool than the rifle, shotgun, and SMG users. All that makes for a real appealing package. Don't make my initial mistake of dismissing sniper rifles as a category because they don't mesh with prior horde-game mechanics. B4B is different. There are three sniper rifles in the game and, despite having very distinct strengths and weaknesses, they all seem viable. The M1A is the most readily available sniper-category rifle. It's the most AR-like of the sniper weapons, possessing a large mag and not requiring manual operation of the bolt between shots. As a tradeoff, it's per bullet damage is the lowest of the sniper rifles. The M1A is very good at gunning down commons (no headshots required), but doesn't have as many advantages against specials. The low damage per shot means that stuns are difficult to achieve, usually requiring +stumble ammo and weakpoint hits to disrupt specials, and the greater ammo consumption means that I've occasionally had to ask for extra ammo from teammates when using the M1A (which briefly slows forward progress and never happens with the other sniper rifles). It's really more of a battle rifle than a sniper rifle, but it performs well as an AR-adjacent generalist option that still uses the sniper ammo pool. The Phoenix is both my favorite and least-used sniper rifle. It has a decent mag size but requires you to cycle the bolt after each shot. It's still quite effective against commons - the bolt doesn't take that long to operate - but you can't hipfire your way out of a close combat situation like you can with the M1A. The upside is that the Phoenix hits way harder. This is where crowd control becomes a real option, especially with bullet stumble ammo, and your ammo efficiency against specials goes to near infinity. It's also worth mentioning that just like reloading, you can melee while cycling the bolt - making you much less vulnerable to commons than you might think, even when trying to perform your team role of dealing with specials. This is just a rock solid rifle, though attachments do feel required to get the most out of it. The Barrett, on the other hand, doesn't need help to do it's job. It has a very small magazine, a noticeably longer cycle time on it's bolt, and completely absurd damage output. This sucker often doesn't even need bullet stumble ammo to make specials rethink their (un)life choices. It's by far the most specialized - fighting commons with the Barrett feels extremely clunky, and a missed shot against anything is very punishing - but it absolutely annihilates specials. It doesn't feel good to use the way the Phoenix does, but I often feel compelled to take it anyway. Watching a tallboy go reeling back from a head-on approach is it's own kind of satisfying that can save runs in a way normally exclusive to grenades. It's worth taking a minute to talk about cards, too. I don't think sniping actually requires a heavy card investment. I'd definitely take some of the intuitively-good +damage cards, whether for snipers specifically or that synergize with aimed shots, but I'm currently running a hybrid build more focused on grenades and melee. The knife works very well with bolt-action weapons and, when accompanied by the healing on melee kill card, I've started taking a wide-striking (bat or machete) melee secondary if I pick up a Barrett. Melee is never my preferred tactic - it's extremely dangerous - but hordes don't care what you prefer and good melee capability covers the sniper's weakness against hordes of close range enemies very well. The Barret in particular benefits, as the more pronounced the weakness the more useful the melee accompaniment becomes. I'd be happy to spec even further into melee if I hadn't also organically evolved into my group's Grenade Man (having first caught on to how absurdly powerful B4B consumables are). If your group has someone else playing grenadier, then you can go a lot harder a lot earlier on either melee or additional cards that help sniping (like reload speed).
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Oct 17, 2021 21:13
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My conclusion after trying to play with randoms is don't.
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Oct 18, 2021 02:27
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I'm glad my post convinced some folks to try snipers, even if I was dead wrong about L4D. I don't remember them being good but none of us were comp-level players.
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Oct 18, 2021 08:43
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Xaris posted:tbf all the specials are generally very poorly designed... Couldn't stop thinking about this, because it's been bothering me for a while. Not that they're badly designed, but that they absolutely do appear badly designed on the surface. So many mechanics in this game seem so well thought out once dug into that I'm reluctant to condemn the enemy designs just yet. L4D casts a long shadow over B4B. Pretty much all of the complaints I have about the enemies are complaints about them not acting like L4D enemies. Most notably, L4D specials don't do easy chip damage. They'll murder a completely isolated player but are totally negated if taken out on the way in or if players are supporting each other. The ammo cost of killing them is usually irrelevant too, given that ammo piles offer infinite full refills and most specials die to a stiff breeze. B4B specials ain't like that at all. They're almost guaranteed to deal chip attrition. Tallboys drain ammo (an actual limited resource) or grenades (an even more limited resource), while retches and the stinger family will almost always get an initial hit in before being shot. Where the players have agency is not in avoiding attrition entirely but in limiting the damage. Stingers are the most obvious: their entire purpose is chip damage, and though their attack has a cooldown the ranged nature means they'll almost always get one shot off as they pop around an obstacle. Your goal is more to kill them before their attack cooldown runs out. I can't count the number of times I've staggered a retch out of their vomit animation, but it almost always gets off one "puddle" of barf. That's still a hell of a lot better than taking the entire attack. The implication is that B4B is a resource management game even when played extremely well at the tactical level. The more time you spend in the level, the more inevitable resource depletion you'll face. Punishment for loitering isn't new to the genre, but the degree of inevitability is. It wasn't uncommon to escape hordes or special attacks in L4D without a scratch; the director spawning more of them was certainly more chances to screw up and lose, but it never had inevitability. In B4B, your resources are always dropping. Ammo chests are substantial but not infinite, and specials can drain a lot of it. Healing items aren't simply mitigation for mistakes the way they are in other coop games, they're a chip damage timer that the game is balanced around. There's some breathing room for mistakes or loitering built in, but the margin gets narrower the later you go in the campaign and the higher the difficulty is. I'm also starting to notice that different corruption cards are best dealt with via different consumables, so you can extend your "timer" by buying accordingly at the start of the level (and hoo boy are you clearly meant to buy consumables of every type - trying to "eco round" a level is a colossal risk and probably the single most common fatal mistake for new players on veteran). More and more, I'm coming to believe that B4B's design flaw is how it handles player psychology. If you can accept that your resources are there to be burned through - even when playing well! - then the game feels much less punitive and you can start to see ways to take control over the outcome. An early mistake can put you behind the resource curve and kill you much later in the level in a way that (then) feels nearly impossible to avoid. Hell, failing to achieve a bonus objective can lead to a wipe in the following level due to consumable shortage. Thing is, that's not how prior games in this genre work at all. Flawless play is humanly possible and mistakes are punished immediately rather than on a dissociative delay. The potential playerbase has been taught to expect completely different things going in, and the developers tripled-down on that by emphasizing the past L4D connection (despite many statements of how B4B is it's own game and not L4D). Stick an old-school roguelike fan in front of B4B and they'd probably grasp the resource economy, and it's fatal delayed pitfalls, pretty quickly. Is that bad design? Sure, but it's not the sort of bad design that produces a broken game. It's the sort of bad design that unnecessarily steepens the learning curve and makes the game less accessible. (Also worth mentioning that any time I say L4D here, I could just as easily say Vermintide. Despite the huge thematic and mechanical differences, Vermintide's design philosophy is far more akin to L4D than B4B's design is.)
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Oct 18, 2021 21:08
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Special spawns in this game feel a lot like versus L4D: in groups, as close as possible within the game rules, and out for coordinated blood rather than trickling in one at a time. They're actually kind of predictable when you view them that way. It's also interesting to read about the exploder being so dangerous, because I've come to view exploders as one of the easiest specials to fight in this game. They're one of the few that doesn't have inevitable chip damage baked in, and while they're a lot more durable than a boomer they'll still die quick if caught before they're on top of you (and the explosion radius is actually pretty small).
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Oct 18, 2021 21:45
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ShootaBoy posted:I especially don't get what the hell makes that water instantly fatal, yet other edges in the game are absurdly sensitive and will yank you into the "oh no ive fallen and cant get up" animation from 6 feet away. Probably no room for the dangling animation, so it just kills instead. I'll defend a lot of things about this game but not lazy level design.
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Oct 18, 2021 22:32
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Kokoro Wish posted:The silhouettes for the specials in the game are absolutely appalling, especially since this became a well-known design thing after TF2 and Left4Dead brought it to prominence. Yeah, that particular design choice is just indefensible. e: It's not *quite* as bad as it looks because the differences in big glowing weak points are either instantly obvious or irrelevant (you treat a tallboy or bruiser exactly the same, idk why they're even different versions), but it's still a mind-bogglingly bad choice Corbeau fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Oct 19, 2021 03:07
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SettingSun posted:Wait what's the difference between a bruiser and a tallboy? Don't they do the same thing? Bruiser has the thrash attack. Other than that idk of any difference. Pretty sure it's there to pad the roster so it's a uniform 3-per-chassis.
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Oct 19, 2021 03:31
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Rotten Red Rod posted:How do you deal with horses of commons, though? The only way I could see doing a sniper is something like a dual primary sniper/shotgun build. Especially if I'm not with a coordinated team. When sniping I dedicate three cards to dealing with commons: Combat Knife, Adrenaline Fueled, and Battle Lust. If I'm using a Barrett then I'll also pick up a machete or bat to shore up it's weaknesses even further. Combat Knife is great for sniping because you can stab a common while you're cycling the bolt, giving you basically double the common-killing power of your rifle alone. The combination of Adrenaline Fueled's stamina-on-kill and Battle Lust's heal-on-melee-kill are what makes this work against hordes. You have to actually aim - the knife has a small hitbox - but you can kill a ton of commons quickly and without getting your health totally wrecked for it. Plus you can now heal up from picking off lone commons or occasionally go ham with a bat or machete if you're getting really swarmed.
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Oct 20, 2021 23:12
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Something that I'm not sure is mentioned enough is that movement is extremely powerful in this game. It doesn't seem to have L4D deathracing, where you literally out-distance the game via strategic-scale speed, but I think tactical movement is actually more important in B4B. A ton of the specials are designed such that they're great at dumping on the player they're targeting, but doing so leaves them vulnerable to the rest of the team (the bruiser/tallboy being the posterchild of this, though the barfing guy is another example). If you're the closest and/or clearly the target then it's often less costly to reposition and let your team kill it. Hell, I've managed this with stingers and hockers - they don't seem to be hitscan attacks, they have to actually lead you and you can juke them if you're on the move. Context always matters of course; trying to reposition during a common horde is Very Difficult, and geometry is always a limiting factor. Just remember that you don't have to hunker down and magdump in every situation. I'm learning that some flexibility can actually avoid some of the seemingly-unavoidable attrition.
Corbeau fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Oct 21, 2021 |
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Oct 21, 2021 20:39
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I wouldn't go quite that far - learned tactics and mechanical execution also make a huge difference, and the push to learn them just ain't there on recruit - but powerful decks do make it easier.
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Oct 22, 2021 05:40
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Every time I play this game with a solid team, it just feels so good. Peoples' builds are really starting to come together; despite it being a challenge, we did act 2 on veteran without anything near the difficulty that we had on act 1. I'm also sold on Jim for sniping - not for the passive stacking bonus damage, though it's real nice if you can keep it, but for the aim down sights speed. It's tough trying to fit +ADS into the card build.
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Oct 23, 2021 06:25
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Man, playing act 1 after progging the end of act 3 brings into stark contrast how much early guns suck. I got used to easily firing-squadding down groups of bruisers in act 3, then we get curbstomped by a single tallboy in act 1 because everyone's guns and attachments are a mix of white and green. Consumables are always important, but they're so much more important early in the campaign.
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Oct 25, 2021 08:36
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moist turtleneck posted:lol monkey paw curls This is terrible news. Removing attachments was one of our group's greatest fears after the beta, since it would entirely defeat the purpose of attachments in adding variation to the otherwise simple loot system, and we were ecstatic that the devs didn't cave on release. Now this is potentially even worse if it turns out to be worth a card slot, as people will have to fight with the inventory interface (which is emphatically not designed to be used this way) to have one person tinker with the entire group's guns. I hope they add some loving abysmal malus to the card to make it not worth taking, or have it literally only function inside the saferoom so it at least doesn't disrupt flow mid-level. God I hate the general public. No interest in having choices, just incoherent frothing over not having all the shinies at once.
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Oct 25, 2021 20:30
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Chasiubao posted:I don't understand all the discussion about rarity and attachments it's not like I need a scope or a barrel on my fuckin axe Because I can't touch melee in this game without remembering how much better Vermintide 2 melee combat feels.
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Oct 25, 2021 20:31
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This game is fun as hell with a solid melee deck. Why use a gun when I can turn into a blender and kill a tall boy in two hits of a hatchet 
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Glad your group likes it, happy you want them to make something optional useless so you can continue feeling smug that you don't want to use the option. If this was a different game with private loot, I wouldn't give a poo poo - but I don't get to opt out. If any of my teammates decides to pick up the card, I am straight-up hurting the team if I don't make use of their ability. And that sucks.
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Oct 25, 2021 21:00
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And if you've got a bolt action, then each stab is worth one hell of a lot more tempo than if you've got an AR/SMG/Shotgun.
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Oct 26, 2021 19:28
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Trustworthy posted:After a week or whatever, I'm still (non-rhetorically) asking myself, "What does this game do better than Vermintide 2?" Gunplay and (because it's new rather than already-explored) build tinkering.
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Oct 26, 2021 20:24
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Also: grenades, grenades, and more grenades. The combination of grey/green weapons and incomplete builds mean that early in the run you've gotta utilize consumables.
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Oct 27, 2021 08:50
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Rotten Red Rod posted:It's probably a bad habit that I have no compunctions at all about throwing a grenade in the middle of a group of ridden and teammates. Players have a huge inherent resistance to friendly explosives. It'll still do damage, but it's often just fine compared to the alternative.
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Oct 27, 2021 20:00
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It's funny how much my opinion on cleaners has changed over time. I used to think Evangelo's entire kit was a newbie crutch and that Jim was useless unless you were a CS pro. Now I'm having my best games with Jim and Evangelo. Jim's quick ADS makes a huge difference when sniping, even ignoring his stacking damage, while Evangelo is low-key insanely good because of the value of mobility. On the other hand, tonight I learned that I suck with LMGs.
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Oct 28, 2021 09:26
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I've been surprised that they haven't patched, but I imagine they're trying to fit a bunch of fixes into one big patch rather than doing the console validation dance multiple times. I think the only things they've quickly changed are server-side stuff.
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Nov 1, 2021 22:11
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Presumably they just wait to spawn anything until they know cards are locked in. Even if there aren't cards currently that change the shop, that doesn't mean they don't want the design space.
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Nov 2, 2021 03:04
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Well, there are technically three varieties of each. Often, two of them are dealt with the same way even if the details are slightly different. There could easily have been only 6 types. ---- Tallboy: Lumbers into range and then does a lunging smash (with really good tracking and range once it's initiated). Call it out so your team can focus-fire it down or, if that's not possible, spend a grenade. - Bruiser: Tallboy with chunkier arm and back, deals a bit less damage but has significantly more health. Will sometimes also do a flailing short range AoE attack that's usually useless but will ruin your team's entire day if it catches you all in a closet. Dealt with the same way as a Tallboy. - Crusher: Tallboy with huge arm and big weakpoint on it's front-neck. Acts very differently: it will charge and grab a cleaner, immobilizing them and doing damage over time. The charge has much greater range and speed than a Tallboy or Bruiser attack, but only the grab part has good tracking so you can actually sprint past a crusher's charge to evade it. Stinger: Jumps around and snipes from range. Will attempt to reposition after it takes damage, but if you don't return fire it'll plant itself and start machine-gunning attacks. One Stinger attack is nbd, and can be fairly easily juked by changing direction as the attack is fired, but if you don't shoot back then it's steady stream of damage will add up fast. - Hocker: Looks almost identical but instead of dealing damage their attack will immobilize, knock back, and start doing damage over time. It won't machine-gun like the Stinger but you still want to kill it ASAP. Aside from breaking teammates out of the stun, you deal with Stingers and Hockers the same way: use cover and/or movement to juke their initial attack, then kill them quickly. - Stalker: Big weakpoint on top of the head, behaves totally differently from Stingers. It's... well, it's a hunter from L4D except it'll drag the pounced player around like a jockey. Stay close-but-not-too-close to avoid the pounce stumble, which lasts longer than in L4D. I don't know if a bash will stop a pounce before it lands like in L4D but bullets always do the job. Reeker: Tanky and without weakpoint, they aim to walk up and melee you - and will splash nearby players with boomer bile on death (summoning a horde - or at least claiming to, I've seen times when it clearly doesn't despite the message appearing). Bullet stumble is your best friend for dealing with them. They need to get close to do anything but are fairly tough to due lack of big glowing weakpoint. They're still not Tallboys though: if you see them at a distance then you can kill them easily. Just keep your situational awareness up. Even if they get on top of you and start clawing, making it stumble before killing it will let you gain enough distance to evade the death splash. - Exploder: Reeker with big glowing weakpoint in center of mass, making it extremely easy to kill. Will charge at you while glowing; if there's a player nearby at the end of the charge (I think), or if you kill it, the Exploder will... explode. The radius is surprisingly small but does incredible damage and knockback. Like the Reeker, just keep your head on a swivel during play. This is, IMO, the easiest and "fairest" special in B4B: it won't do anything to you if you're paying attention, but can be devastating if you're preoccupied. - Retch: Reeker whose glowing weakpoint is the head. It's a tankier version of the L4D spitter: an area denial enemy. Don't clump up. Since it barfs in a stream and will track it's target, it's often best to stay on the move if you're targeted and let your teammates kill it. Bullet stumble will also knock it out of it's vomit attack, which has a significant cooldown. ---- IMO the Retch, Stalker, and Crusher should have different models since you handle them differently. I don't really care about the Tallboy and Bruiser being similar, for example, because you deal with them the same way. Except that I'm not sure why they're different at all since... you handle them the same way. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Nov 4, 2021 |
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Nov 4, 2021 23:17
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