By John Walker on January 15th, 2009 at 8:43 am.
During the night the beaver slaves at Valve have been adding all sorts of fixes and features to Left 4 Dead. At this difficult time of year, we at Rock, Paper, Shotgun are asking you to think of the beaver slaves, held by the tyrannical Valve because of their dedication to hard work and comical teeth. To find out what this cruelty has resulted in for the game, look below.
At the bottom is the complete list, but first the bits I venture are most interesting. I’d say the best bits are the Tank and Witch changes. The chances of a Tank or Witch spawning have been increased, and are now the same for both teams, which does away with those crazy matches where one team finds themselves facing three in a row while the other breezes through. Plus they will both now spawn directly on escape routes. Ha ha. Sadly, the ability to trigger the Witch on the Survivors has been declared an exploit and prevented.
Hunters are getting more power to their pounce, with increased damage, and an easier time jumping on meleeing Survivors. Smokers are getting more powerful too. To break the tongue you’ll now need to either kill the Smoker, or destroy his tongue completely, and it’ll be doing damage every second when dragging a Survivor. Tanks are more resistant to shotguns, and will have a clearer idea what to hit – that which can be bashed will glow red. Meanwhile, their frustration timer will now only be reset by hitting Survivors with rocks or fists.
Most of the rest of the changes are exploit fixes or tweaks for balance. Of course, both these factors will affect how the most dedicated play. All these updates will appear by auto-magic when you run Steam. Here’s the complete list of what’s been done:
General
- Fixed Survivors being able to climb surfaces marked for versus infected only.
- Fixed a class of SurvivorBot bugs dealing with rescuing downed players.
- Players can no longer grab ladders while flying through the air after a Tank punch.
- Shooting near a car with an alarm that has already fired the alarm will no longer make chirping noises.
- Improved loading time.
- Fixed mini-gun physics exploit.
- Fixed propane tanks (and other physics objects) causing players to fall through elevators.
- Fixed rare achievement bug issues.
- Fixed several map exploits.
- Fixed various match making issues.
- Fixed NAT traversal issues.Versus Changes
- Added HUD elements to show status of other infected players.
- Changed color of infected player name in chat to red.
- Fixed exploit where players could spawn infected bots
- Fixed instance where a Survivor changing to the infected team would be attacked by infected bots.
- Normalized special infected melee damage.
- Made the following client commands cheat protected: “Kill” and “explode”.
- Fixed exploit where infected players could run away and teleport back to gain health.
- Players can only change teams once per map.
- Players can’t change teams while other players are still loading.
- Tank spawns at the same % through the map for both teams in versus mode.
- Made the Tank and Witch spawn directly on the escape route.
- Increased chance of getting the Tank or Witch.
- Fixed team swap issue.Hunter
- Easier to pounce a Survivor who is meleeing.
- Increased Minimum damage a Hunter pounce does.Smoker
- Fixed Smoker tongue tolerance.
- Smoker now has to be killed or the tongue destroyed for the tongue to break.
- Survivor’s cannot bash someone off the tongue until the Survivor being pulled is paralyzed or hanging
- Tongue attacks that fail to paralyze or hang a Survivor will use the shorter ability delay timer.
- Fixed cases where the ability timer was not using the correct time.
- Fixed case where you could point at a Survivor but not register a tongue hit
- Fixed Smoker tongue not targeting and landing properly through PZ ghosts.
- Smoker tongue does damage every second while dragging paralyzed Survivors.Tank
- Bashable objects now appear with a red glow.
- Tanks hitting a car with an alarm disables the alarm permanently.
- Tank frustration timer is only reset by hitting Survivors with rocks or fists.
- Reduced autoshotgun damage against Tanks.Witch
- Witch spawns at the same % through the map for both teams.
- Avoids spawning within a certain % of the tank.
- Fixed an exploit where the Witch could be woken up and tricked into attacking Survivors.
I have (sadly) not played nearly enough of the game to know whether I like these changes or not, so I’ll just assume that they’re basically a Good Thing.
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Since my usual partner in crime has lost both his job and internet access I’ve not been playing so much L4d, but I’m glad to see the smoker changes. It did get annoying that you’d have to get a really good hit, on an isolated survivor to even get a chance, and even if you did it did barely any damage.
Also, I never saw the exploit to wake the witch, but the tactic as an infected of standing right next to the witch and waiting for the survivors to miss you and hit her should still work :)
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Having played plenty of Vs I can say this patch sounds awesome. Looking forward to trying this out this evening.
Especially the Smoker fixes, they sound ace.
“Increased chance of getting the Tank or Witch.” Though. Really? The Director is enough of a dick as it is :p
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They all look good to me! I didn’t even realize some of them were an issue.
Certainly, it got to the point where I had no hunter fear anymore, because the entire length of the melee animation could block their attack… effectively meaning there was only a split second of vunerability if you were constantly meleeing. Didn’t feel unfair if you were the one using it. Felt terribly unfair if you were a hunter, and were left with almost no way to pounce.
Then again, getting timing right with any amount of latency connection… not so fun. Lucky, then, that it’s not an absolutely central part of the game.
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Yeeah! :D Finally a lot of bug/exploit fixes! :D
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That looks like it addresses the vast majority of my problems with the game. Well done Valve. Now they just need to change the vs scoring system for finales, so that you get credit proportional to the amount of time you survive (currently if you get to the final defence point and die immediately, or if you all die running for the escape vehicle you get the same points).
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I really like the hunter and smoker changes. Early on, it was easy to pounce with the hunter, but eventually people learned to randomly melee whenever a hunter was near. That’ll take more skill now I hope :)
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I would argue, though, that now the team playing as survivor second gets an extra advantage (though they always did). Previously, they got a refresher of the level layout from the infected PoV before trying to get through as a survivor, and now they get that, PLUS they’ll know when and where the tanks and witches are coming, and be able to prepare.
You know how Go has that score modifier against the person who went first (since the first move carries a little advantage)? With valve’s excellent stat watching tech, you could totally come up with that value (I can’t remember the name of it).
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Aubrey: Handicap?
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@Aubrey: I’m not sure “PLUS they’ll know when and where the tanks and witches are coming, and be able to prepare” is correct … they do know how high the probability for tanks and witches is, but the patch doesn’t say “they’ll spawn in the same spot”, just “on average, as many tanks and witches each will spawn for both teams”. It talks about spawn probability percentages, not spawn positions.
So if one team has two tanks, the other very likely will have two tanks as well, but that’s all that can be concluded.
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Excellent. Things should be far more playable now as a smoker. Can’t wait to try things out later today.
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I was getting tired of spawning as a Tank and getting hosed in the first ten seconds.
Sadly, these fixes can’t fix the fact that I’m rubbish.
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@Aubrey: Komi. In Go it also prevents ties.
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@Guido : “Tank spawns at the same % through the map for both teams in versus mode.” is pretty explicit that it refers to the exact location the Tank will spawn at. And so yeah, going second is a big advantage.
They should flip flop which side you are first as you go through the game so you always end up playing Infected twice in a row then Survivor twice in a row.
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Guido – No, it doesn’t. It talks about “the same % through the map for both teams in versus mode.”
If it meant probability percentage it would say so. It doesn’t. It means the percentage of the way through the much, much in the same way the survivors progress, if they don’t make it all the way through a map, is measured in percentage.
Aside from that, really happy with these changes. I never wanted to complain when one team would get a tank and the other wouldn’t because it makes me sound old and grumpy, but it really does mean the difference between making it through and failing.
One other thing though… “Normalized special infected melee damage.” Does this mean the hunter’s slap will no longer do 10 damage? Incapping low-health survivors with a slap to the back then scampering off giggling to my self is literally the most fun I’ve had in any game.
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Looks like my weapon of choice is the hunting rifle again. Ever catch the tank in the open the 15 round clip can really hurt the poor sod. Its my favourite way to deal with witches too, even better than motlov. Hell it even excels at crowd control if you can get them to line up. Did anyone make the l4d vs tf2 mod yet? I want to use a heavy or better yet a tech 3 turret on the undead. Also! “That boomer is a spy!”
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Sorry for the (almost) double post but wow! Four heavies against hundreds of scouts with 30 health and baseball bats, and spies as the special infected. It would be incredible.
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@Guido
“Tank spawns at the same % through the map for both teams in versus mode.”
Means % as in distance to the safe room, so Aubrey is spot on.
You could, I suppose, alternate which team gets to play survivor first on maps 1-4. Doesn’t matter on the finale since everyone knows when the tanks show up.
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These changes sound great. I must make some time for a few good sessions. There are few things more satisfying that making a long-range leap and landing on a Survivor with a bone-crunching thud.
Is % developer language for location? I assumed it was percentage chance, but reading it as location makes more sense grammatically.
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Ah ok, percentage distance. Got it.
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I likey. I likey a lot. Finally I may be able to get my expert achievements (4 completions, none have registered). Plus, I’m going to enjoy super pouncing a lot more now. I hadn’t realised just how easy it was to melee a pounce.
Also, finally, Smokering should be powerful. I’m awaiting versus survivors crying a lot about these changes. I don’t think many teams will hit 100% on every map.
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Oups, sorry :P
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Smoker was always my favourite infected to play, and I like these changes a lot. Apart from the no-melee to free survivors until paralyzed. That seems a tad unfair. Up-close melee stops hunters, and pushes boomers away. No reason it shouldn’t be the same for smokers. This might make it a bit too easy to drag someone away from the group, rather than needing to pick on stragglers.
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Generally delighted with these changes… I play a lot and I would say my main complaints/whinges up until now have been:
- Unfair tank distribution (e.g. one team gets it before the generator room, one just after – the difference being one team gets healthpacks and ammo, the other doesn’t)
- Overpowered melee defence against hunters
- Smoker tongue failing to hit, or do a reasonable amount of damage
- Tank being owned too easily by a team with multiple autoshotguns
So those are all fixed. Slightly concerned that Hunter slashing will be markedly less effective, as it was frequently the only way to inflict damage on a team that were too good at melee defence and reacting to knock pounced Hunters off their targets, but then if melee defence is nerfed a bit and pouncing does more damage then it ought to balance.
I’m awaiting a lot of complaint about smokers becoming overpowered though – they are going to become massively more influential now. Hopefully ‘closeting’ will be significantly reduced with Smokers able to haul Survivors right out.
Still on the wishlist:
- knockback stumble when melee’d is too much, making a Hunter helpless until killed – should be able to still melee back and get a few hits through
- fix blocking on ladders
- server selection/filtering in the lobby system
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Guido: you son of a bitch! Suck on! I was right on the internet! I am so fucking cranked right now!
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Don’t forget this is for high levels of play. A well coordinated team that sticks together is too hard to pry apart – the Smoker buffs go some way towards fixing this. It’s still too hard to get a Smoker LOS on certain exploit positions though.
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Glad to see the good people at Valve are still hard at work. Although I absolutely love L4D, sadly I haven’t played much of it as I find playing with strangers less satisfying. Damned schedule conflicts and less than a handfull of friends playing can truly make an ape zombie starved!
In any case, this warants some play time, I just hope we will see some content update sometime in the near future.
Go Valve, go!
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So versus mode gets changed drastically and the single player gets not no real attention…not that it needed attention I am just saying that I don’t play versus mode and feel neglected and unloved :( such is life.
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Given that single player is essentially just the standard co-op game on a private server, I’d assume that any changes made to the online co-op would filter through.
It’s pointless though, as I’m sure the survivor Bot AI is beyond saving!
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Aww i loved my witch exploit i found! Boo, hiss! Was so funny upsetting her as an infected and then leading her into the group of survivors who were always suprised to see her. What i found odd though is that no-one ever complained or mentioned it, even when i dragged her screaming through half the map towards the survivors.
How was it done you ask? As a hunter simply do a fairly long distance pounce onto her and then as your on top of her/slightly clipping into her, repeatdly attempt furthur pounces and she quickly woke up. You gotta couple hits before you die so just go pounce some unlucky survivor and the witch will follow up and nearly always incap that survivor, lol. Ebil.
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Survivor bot AI is quite frustrating. Sometimes they are utterly retarded and fail to react. At other times they are inhumanly good and shoot you faultlessly at long range through deep cover… I sometimes have to prioritise taking out the bots in a VS game in order to have a chance at getting the humans…
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Slightly concerned that the Director has been listening in to our conversations and feeding info to Valve again. There are a lot of buffs here that me and my group have been talking about while playing.
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I love you too, Aubrey :D
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not had a chance to play yet…
but by “hunter pounce damage” does it mean they take damage immediately upon being pounced, or does it only apply to the bonus damage you deal if you pounce on someone from a great height?
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I don’t think these changes are incredible, but it definitely needs plenty of tweaking here and there, so I will probably like it.
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The words “balance sides” don’t apply to L4D. Because both teams have the oportunity to play infected or survivors. This free Valve to buff or nerf any feature of both sides, to make the game more fun.
So,… hare this changes to make the game more fun?
I almost suspect are attemps in that general direction. Some people was whinning on the forums about the useless feel of the smokoer in closed area maps ( and getting replys with responses to L2P ). This changes buff the smoker in a way, that will convert it in the unstopable force of destruction ….already classes like the boomer or the hunter are.
I would have love to see the smoke puff that is created on the smoker dead be buffed. I really love to blind+mute survivors with it.
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One of the more notable changes for me is the HUD update for infected. Being able to see how long people have to spawn is a big help.
It may have been just luck, but infected were working a lot better as a team last night when I played. I think the updated HUD might have something to do with it.
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By ‘fixing map exploits’, no doubt they mean the Dead Air ‘Skip the Crane bit’ Exploit… That was quite amusing.
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“Normalized” melee damage means, according to the geniuses at the game’s official forums, that Hunters do 6 damage per swipe (lowered from 10), and the others do 4 damage (raised from 2). I’m not sure if I like this yet.
On the other hand, I’m ecstatic at the map fixes they’ve done. I’ve yet to check a personal peeve of mine, the No Mercy finale ramp, but things like the breakable door before the sewers have been solved.
Ben
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- Fixed exploit where players could spawn infected bots
Is this the exploit where Infected players swap to Spectator team then back again until they get the class of Special Infected they wanted?
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I assume it’s the exploit where Infected players go/went into the end safe room, swap/swapped to spectator then back again, creating a new Infected and leaving their original Infected as a bot. Apparently you could fill the safe room with Hunters and give people nasty surprises, but I never saw it.
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Also boo at only 6 damage per Hunter swipe. Though it will still be possible to drop people on *very* low health by slapping them, which, as mentioned above, is hilarious.
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I haven’t played this (brilliant) game in ages. Might go back to it now for a charming arse-kicking.
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Man, I just tried playing this for the first time online tonight. The only map I’d done previously was No Mercy on Normal.
Anybody want to play a game, look for me as jhoosier. I think I’m on the RPS group, but nothing came up when I searched for my groups. We got to the finale at the lake one, but just couldn’t get the team to work together well enough. Ah, well. This weekend I’ll be playing some more.
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Hurrah! This all looks very lovely. Now give us Dead Air and Death Toll in Versus mode already, please Valve :(
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Left 4 CROCHET
http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=286431.msg3245554#msg3245554
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Horrifying. In a good way.
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I play versus a lot and all of these changes are fantastic, although I’m not convinced that Guido was wrong in his reading of the Tank change. I guess I’ll find out when I boot the game up tonight.
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Well after a game last night, I for one welcome our new game balance overlords. Hunters felt refreshingly menacing and less prone to melee stumble, smoker is quicker to deal damage and bit more solid, and as is mentioned further up, the new Infected HUD is great and something I’d been hoping for, showing who your team are spawning as and when.
Good stuff Valve.
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The way I read the Tank/Witch spawn percentage is that the Tank will appear in roughly the same area (likely within 2-3% of the other teams distance covered) but at a different point so as to keep things mixed up.
i.e. if a Tank spawned in Death Tolls Map 4 Gas Station for one team, it would spawn over the road/behind the bus for the other team. It keeps it fair, but stops it being predictable.
As for the witch, as long as the game doesn’t spawn her in the safe room after a Tank attack that leaves 1 survivor alive with 10 health, I couldn’t care :)
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I don’t like it.
The hunter slash being nerfed is terrible as you get hunter the majority of the time. The added pounce damage is very small. A hunter pouncing a player in a group will now get maybe 6 damage from the pounce and then be immediately hit off or killed. While previously slashing was a viable tactic on a tight group of survivors, it is now less so and pouncing is still near useless.
The smoker tongue is a little better but it doesn’t stop closeting. Now teams just need to have a person shooting instead of everyone meleeing and anyone grabbed will instantly be freed.
The tank and witch spawns (especially with the addition that the with cannot be incited by a hunter) give the second team a huge advantage.
The tank is now forced to charge survivors instead of engaging them on his own terms and the lower damage from autoshotties is negligible so he’s forced to run to his doom.
Boosting smoker and boomer melee by 2 is negligible and just makes it less satisfying to incap someone with a boomer melee.
The only plusses are the fixes to map exploits and the infected cloning bug.
I’m heading back to campaign now, which is sad, as I’d started liking VS.
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The Infected HUD is great, you can see what you’ve got active, and how long before others spawn. Very useful.
The Smoker update is much needed. I never had problems getting the tongue to latch it was just that it would often go like this:
pull, pull, pull, pull, melee, aw zero damage.
I like the concept of everybody getting the same Tankage (your team not getting a tank on the building site section when they do was a f*cker), but it does mean that the second team has a big advantage. You know exactly when he’s coming and can explore every closet making sure you have Molotovs and are ready.
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I think the Tank control bar change was the way the Tank was always supposed to be. It was done to ensure you don’t lay in wait, you run in and charge.
You’re supposed to be a ball of hulking rage.
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The second survivor team will have an advantage, but the team to play infected second will know almost exactly when the tank is coming as well, and they’ll be able to set up in spawn mode for an optimal ambush.
Likewise (and maybe even more so) for the witch.
Edit. With those control bar changes, I expect to see more people putting the tank somewhere inconvenient and letting the AI take over and wait for the survivors, now.
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lol @ Anonononomous (if that is your real name).
The way I see it is this – it takes more than one or two bullets from a gun to kill a smoker, and if you read the update fully, you’d have realised that you have to kill the smoker or destroy the tongue to release a survivor being dragged.
With that in mind, if the smoker can better split up a group, hunter pounces will be more effective, and the extra damage there means something.
The same tank and witch thing is a little annoying, but with a simple tweak they could make it so that both teams go first twice in a game (as other commenters have suggested).
My favourite is where you say that the auto shotgun debuff vs tanks is ‘negligible’. In my experience tanking is a lot less futile once the survivors have the better weapons now. And what kind of player sits around as a tank? Tanks attack players! They don’t wait around like pussies.
Actually, I have a new favourite:
“Boosting smoker and boomer melee by 2 is negligible and just makes it less satisfying to incap someone with a boomer melee.”
Makes it less satisfying to incap someone with a boomer melee? If it is so negligible surely it will still be satisfying?
I just find it funny that for someone who thinks that most of the fixes don’t really change the way the game is played, you have quit playing vs mode in outrage.
I’m glad that I will not have to play on your team in vs mode now!
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Alright, as far as first and second team, why even have teams sign up as “infected” in the selection screen?
Have them fill up as player type and “home” or “visitor” team. Visitors go first. It’s called home field advantage. This translates competively where servers aren’t neutral either. A league can balance “home” and “away” games, and figure out from there. Groups of four who want to challenge random people should play as visitors.
In short, a slight handicap is a useful thing, as long as everyone recognizes it’s a handicap.
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I hadn’t thought of letting the AI take over the tank. If you leave it out of some range from the survivors does it stand idle?
The patch has done nothing to alleviate ragequitting though, in fact it may have made it worse, by making Hunters and Smokers better. 3 randoms and I thoroughly whupped 4 friends/clansmen twice in a row. They all simultaneously ragequit halfway through the second map.
Managing the expectations of the enemy in VS games becomes a significant challenge. You want to beat them, but not too much!
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These look like good changes. Particularly like the increased damage for the Smoker, who was a class I always hated getting bar, in a few locations. The only way to use him most of the time was in conjunction with a Boomer, which rarely worked on a team that was sticking together well.
Really, the Infected needed to be really buffed compared to Survivors. Lowering the chance that a team can make it all the way to the end makes Versus much more competitive, with people rushing to get as far as possible and tighter scores. It would also probably stop people being so quick to hit the quit button when they have a bad Survivor round.
Edit: And Valve, hurry up and get Dead Air and Death Toll into versus mode. I never play co-op any more and would like some variation with the maps I play. I would imagine Death Toll (with its town setting and lots of roofs to hide on) would be fantastic as Infected.
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Adam,
Shooting the tongue is easy. That’s how I did things most of the time already. If it was changed to keep people from closeting and meleeing, it now simply forces a person to be shooting during the closeting and he will easily break the tongue. It does make the rifles more effective, as the shotgun isn’t good for taking out the tongue, though, and that’s nice. That also makes it so that the tank is less likely to run into 4 autoshotties.
I have always been a fan of the idea that teams alternate positions. Then the tank and witch spawns wouldn’t be as big a deal. Of course, if they;’re going for parity between teams, they also need to address the fact that the director often gives one team tons of medpacks and the other team gets few to none.
I’ve seen tanks still go down to shotguns ridiculously fast. Maybe not as fast, but it’s still suicidal. Not being able to bat around physics objects and wait to engage the survivors where you have space to avoid the molotov and shotguns still ends up screwing the tank, even with the lowered shotgun damage, I feel.
It was funny to incap someone with the boomer because he was so damn weak. Now he’s twice as effective in melee. You used to have a 1 in 50 chance of doing it. Now it’s 1 in 25. Still amusing, but only half as much. Or, think of this this way: he used to have 1/5th the melee power of a hunter. Now he as 2/3rds.
And I don’t see how you got the impression I thought the patch didn’t change things. I think it makes things a lot less fun for any survivor other than the smoker.
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I dont see it as much of an advantage that the second team knows where abouts the tank is coming. You can hear the tank anyway. If the first team is competent they should be well ready to deal with a non surprising event like the witch or tank.
The second team could be more prepared or they could just be more cautious and fanny about giving the infected’s more chances to kill them.
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I miss the early Farmhouse finales. In the beginning before everyone else decided to always go autoshotties there’d be a lot of movement through the house and it was fun. Since people worked you could just stand in corners by the ammo with autoshotties and mince everything in seconds it got no fun at all.
There are still some big flaws. If all else fails backing into a corner and spamming melee is still unstoppable.
I think long term something needs to change with the melee. It’s important that it’s there, but it becomes an impenetrable forcefield button. Maybe there should be a finite chance that a regular infected will grab your gun and grapple with you for a few seconds, like a brief tonguing. It wouldn’t do direct damage, but other infected could hit you?
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That (infected grappling) would be interesting. It would need a lot of work, though.
A simple solution would be to have some melee fatigue. For example, you have some sort of stamina meter and you can constantly melee 10 times before it is depleted and then it needs to recharge some. You wouldn’t have to wait for it to charge all the way before hitting again, but it would run out faster if you didn’t. It would be just like reloading the shotguns. I know Valve apparently playtested melee fatigue and decided to take it out, but I have no faith in their playtesters. They only make the games dumbed down from what I have read.
A melee fatigue would force teams to either figure out a pattern for meleeing and trading off or it would make people shoot more when being attacked by a hoard instead of just sitting in a corner and meleeing.
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“smoker tongue tolerance” is an amusing phrase.
That’s all I have to say.
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Gave the new patch a test run last night, and damn, it’s fun. It feels far more balanced and fair. Nothing was more frustrating when you played smoker, than losing your target because you dragged him over a tiny pebble. Boomer bile seems to hit a lot more consistently now. (Before the patch, it seemed like only the last half of the burst actually mattered. So you had to spray someone for quite a while before it took effect)
All in all, it seems infected is a bit more powerful, which is good, because that makes the scores a lot more meaningful. When both teams consistently win as survivors, it’s basically random who ends up with the highest score. When actually getting to the safehouse is unusual, it depends much more on how far you got, how soon the infected killed you.
They also fixed a few other exploits, such as closet camping on the No Mercy finale (under the ramp. They stacked a few crates under it to block it)
Good stuff :D
I disagree. This is what the smoker is intended for. Pull a single survivor away from their cozy little closet camping. Of course, before the patch, that didn’t work because you just meleed the tongue along with everything else. Now, it’s a bit more viable, because you have to actually break the tongue before it releases the survivor. Which means he’ll most likely be dragged a bit away, at least. Similarly, hunter pounce stuns nearby survivors, giving the infected a few moments to act in. And guess who just became harder to melee? HUNTER! I sense a conspiracy here. Seems like Valve is well aware of the problem with meleeing, and have already changed it. Perhaps it’ll take a bit more tweaking to fix entirely, but from the games I’ve played after the patch, it already seems far better. It still takes skill to deal with surivors who are closet camping, but now it’s no longer hopeless.
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It can still be a major advantage. Hearing the tank doesn’t tell you which direction he’ll be coming from, and it doesn’t give you as much warning. In some cases, of course, it doesn’t matter, but yesterday we got a tank in the alley around 30% into No Mercy 1. That’s right, tight, enclosed space, no grenades, no T2 weapons, and lots of cars for the tank to throw at you. We got the first round as infected, so we killed them all by throwing a few cars, while the survivors tried to retreat back to the house.
On our turn, we knew the tank would be coming, and we knew this alley was a bad place to fight it, so we ran straight for the street, where we could dodge the cars more easily.
Guess which team won…. ;)
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I think the melee has been slightly diminished with the Hunter and Smoker changes, and that was the point, but I don’t think it’ll change things dramatically (Valve MP updates are usually about small corrections).
One person spamming melee can be pounced more easily, but 2+ in tight formation meleeing are still pretty untouchable.
The smoker can now drag someone a little way and do damage until people shoot instead, whereas before it was impossible when people were huddled meleeing.
The boomer is still fairly screwed damage-wise, if you actually look at the effect of the boomer it’s really only a distraction (allowing a pounce/pull while they can’t see), backing into a corner and meleeing removes much chance of infected attacks while vomit covered. Maybe that’s the point of the boomer entirely, but it’s pretty frustrating to see a 4 person vomit go to waste because the rest of your team don’t attack and the regular infected get thrown around.
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@ jonfitt – That is why you boomer people when they are in the open and not in tight areas ;)
I personally find Boomer to be the most effective of all the Infected, lacking the very limited uses of the Smoker and the fiddly nature of the Hunter.
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Oh God I’m so excited. As to the smoker, I find it a bit disturbing that one can melee the smoker off if the person is hanging. Doesn’t that discourage smoker players from getting high up vantage points where the survivor will be quickly hung?
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A-Scale: To a certain extent, perhaps. The smoker is meant to separate the survivors, rather than deal raw damage. So if you use it to pull a survivor 8 inches just to hang them somewhere, you’re doing it wrong. ;)
It’ll still keep them occupied for a few seconds, of course, a deal a few points of damage, while making you pretty hard to see and kill, so I don’t see how it’s discouraging anything.
Well, they’re 2 vs 1 then, what did you expect? ;)
But if one hunter can get a pounce in (should be easier now that hunter is harder to melee), that stuns all survivors for a second or two, and a smoker then has a perfect opportunity to pull a survivor out of melee range. And of course, if you have a boomer around too, bile them to keep them busy so they can’t easily free their smokered friend.
It’ll still take practice and coordination, of course, but it’s too early to say that more melee nerfs are needed.
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I like the changes for the most part, but frankly i think the infected are already better than the survivors in vs mode. Seems like few survivor groups will get to the end, it will be a race to see what team can kill the other faster.
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Well cowboy, I don’t see why it should be the other way.
Survivors should have a hard time surviving. Ofcourse it shouldn’t be expert level with human infected players, but it should be a manageble challenge. And besides, I don’t think it’s that hard if you just keep it fast :)
L4D stats are being implemented now, check your L4D stats page to see what they’re doing with it. Theres a “Finales survived” PERCENTAGE stat. Not Good!
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Sadly Valve also fucked up Radeon cards with this patch (at least older ones). My brother who used to be able to play at moderate levels suddenly was crashing anytime he got control of a character. They’ve since hotfixed that, but the entire game lags horribly now for him. He gets 14fps maximum.
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you guys are talking as though knowing when the tank coming is a massive advantage, you still cant account for its unpredictable devastation. it all lies in the ability of the players, a poor survivor team will still be no match for a well organised infected team with tank.
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hmm… I noticed some pretty bad slow down on TF2 the other night and possibly on L4D last night (although it may have been lag that time.) TF2 was ranging from 130 FPS in start locations down to about 30-40 in busy locations and that was on a HD4850. Maybe related.
Enjoying the changes very much. Really like the Smoker now, although he hasn’t been made unstoppable. Still fairly easy to melee his tongue when the Survivor has been paralysed and shooting at the Smoker quickly releases them too, but he is much better at separating.
The major improvement is the HUD for the Infected. Really helpful knowing how long it will be for team mates to spawn and being able to quickly gage what class each person is makes a big difference.
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I’m really delighted with the changes.
Although from early play I say that melee is still possibly slightly too good, and like either Anonononomous’ or jonfitt’s ideas about fatigue or grappling
Its still much too easy for 4 decent survivors to get to the end and I do much prefer the dynamic of how far you can get in the level before being overwhelmed rather than who can get to the end witht he most health. Although this is possibly linked to the way I play (with 3 friends vs 4 randoms) but certainly we very rarely struggle as survivor (and if we do its down to our fuck ups rather than the other team).
In terms of Tanks and Witches spawning in the same place, on the whole I think this is ultimately a good thing however it does give the 2nd team something or an advantage but no where near as much of an advantage as they get from knowing where the L2 weps are.
I like the idea of team switching order for each level although this would further encourage infected whoring (people who play as inf and then leave as soon as the round is done to find new server)
Agree with the others that they need to hurry and give us more versus maps, because as great as the maps are they’re starting to wear thin.
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