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.

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.

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!

One person spamming melee can be pounced more easily, but 2+ in tight formation meleeing are still pretty untouchable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…. ;)

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 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?

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.