Thread: The jockey needs work!

Going off topic here....the original idea is that ppl are having problems with charger/jockey misses. Not how usefull/useless classes are....but anyways, they are all useful when used PROPPERLY. So I agree with kanati. Having problems with a SI class, ask your team, they would LOVE to help...

Originally Posted by Kanati8869

The hunter is far from weak. As long as he is used when proper, he is one of the highest damage dealers. You just can't pounce into the middle of an unharassed group of four full health survivors and expect anything but a bullet in the head before you do any damage. But pouncing the lagging behind or rushing too far ahead survivor while the rest of them are dealing with a horde or spit, or other distraction and you are going to get some major damage in.

The Charger is superior to the Hunter in just about every possible way. The only advantages a Hunter has over the Charger is silence (when not crouching), movement speed, and the fact that it's usually harder to avoid a pounce from the flanks than a charge from the flanks (since the pounce isn't nearly as loud or distinctive as the charge.)

All that aside, the Hunter is weaker. The Charger does more damage per second than the Hunter. The Charger can't be punched to free his victim, nor can he be punched to stop his charge. The Charger's swipes hit significantly harder and at the same rate of "fire", and the Charger has much more HP than the Hunter.

The Hunter isn't useless, but when you consider how much more effective the Charger is in most situations, it makes you wish the game gave you something better. I still think that Hunters should be immune to punches when they're in the middle of a pounce (i.e. in the air, not on the ground.)

You still don't get it Pizza. It's not about charger vs hunter. It's not about jockey vs smoker.

THEY ARE NOT MEANT TO BE USED BY THEMSELVES.

Just the same way you don't go grab an engine and expect to drive to the store with it alone. The engine has the power. The tranny, wheels, chassis all working together make up the car that gets you where you want to go. So yeah... The charger has the power. But by himself he's a chump and can be sidestepped pretty easily. Throw a hunter, smoker and spitter in the mix with him and you have a car that could, if used right, roll over the entire team of survivors.

The only thing that needs an upgrade are the teams of players using the SI if you think them ineffective.

Originally Posted by Kanati8869

You still don't get it Pizza. It's not about charger vs hunter. It's not about jockey vs smoker.

That's a load of shit. How many times do you hear people on your team going "damn I wish we had a charger" or "damn I wish we had something besides <infected>."

Sure, the Super Ideal Awesome Teamwork Amazing Perfect Team™ would take what they've got and just kill the Survivors so fucking hard that their modems would melt and their girlfriends would dump them, but this isn't about that super-team - it's about your average team playing against another average team.

Hunters are a fuckload harder to use than Chargers for the purposes of doing damage, pinning someone, or even disrupting the enemy team, and I don't know what to say if you think that's not true. Does this make Hunters useless? No. But does it mean that, in a lot of cases, it's easier to work off of/work with a Charger than a Hunter? Well, yeah.

Or to put in a way you might agree with more easily: Are your options limited more with a Hunter than with a Charger?

Say you've got a Boomer, Smoker, and Spitter all ready to go - this represents what I'd probably call the most dangerous combination of Infected in the game right now. With a Charger, you have a ton of options: have the Charger initiate, have the Boomer pop in to puke on everyone while they're distracted by the Charger, have the Spitter hock a loogie when they're busy fighting off the horde, and have the Smoker pick off someone that's strayed from the pack or is in an otherwise vulnerable position. Or have the Boomer initiate, use the Charger to pin someone, and use the Spitter to either separate the Survivors or help knock down the one that's already pinned. Hell, you could even have the Spitter or Smoker initiate by blocking the path forward or forcing them to backtrack respectively, and build off of that.

But what if you have a Hunter instead of the Charger? Now you're probably going to have to rely on that Boomer to initiate (because Smokers are horrible at initiating, Spitters are best when they can't move around a lot, and the Hunter's going to get plowed if your timing isn't absolutely perfect), and that can be risky, especially if the enemy team is expecting it... and it might not be worth much of anything if they're in a place where the horde can be easily dealt with (like inside a room with only one or two entrances.)

I do agree with you that a good team will use them all effectively, and I don't think that the Hunter is useless. I do think that the Hunter is a lot more limited than any of the other SIs because he doesn't fill a niche role, and as a general-use infected (pin/damage), he's eclipsed by the Charger in all but a handful of situations. There are a ton of ways you could bring the Hunter up to the level of effectiveness and ease of use of the Charger - shit, just allowing him to cancel the pin once he's pounced someone like the Jockey can do would open up whole new ways of using him effectively and wouldn't necessarily leave you absolutely fucked if your teammates' timing is off, or you manage to pounce someone five feet to the right of the person you were landing on top of.

Originally Posted by PizzaSHARK!

Or to put in a way you might agree with more easily: Are your options limited more with a Hunter than with a Charger?

No. I don't agree. They just have to be used differently. The spitter at that point becomes critical. The hunter hunts and IMMEDIATELY the spitter spits the hunt. The time it takes for that person get back up after the hunter is shot off means that the acid damage is going to be near maximum. I guarantee you that person will be needing a health kit shortly after. And if the boomer and smoker do their jobs as well, that leaves two people to deal with the horde. And if you haven't realized it yet, even if the smoker doesn't do his own scratch damage, the damage that the horde does to the smoked person adds up VERY quickly depending on how many of them there are.

You can do as much damage with that setup as you can with the charger. POSSIBLY more. Will you do it every time? No. But the same goes for the charger setup. One person on your team misses his/her cue and the whole house of cards falls apart.

I remember getting evo-raped in the original game on more than one occasion. They knew how to hit their pounces... They knew how to hit the three hunter one smoker game ender better than anyone I played before or since. I saw them do it to my team THREE times in one game. They did it because they knew how each other played and they worked on their skills with the existing SI. They didn't complain that they needed upgrades or how horrible the smoker was... They just did what they needed to to win the game with the hand they were dealt. And they did it pretty consistently.

Originally Posted by PizzaSHARK!

Sure, the Super Ideal Awesome Teamwork Amazing Perfect Team™ would take what they've got and just kill the Survivors so fucking hard that their modems would melt and their girlfriends would dump them, but this isn't about that super-team - it's about your average team playing against another average team.

Then you just proved what I said earlier... It's not the SI that need an upgrade. It's the teams playing them.

I think this game really brings out the need to be able to think on your feet. You cant stand around and wish for different classes. You need to work with what you are given as effectively as possible. There are just endless combinations that can be used with different SIs at different parts of maps. Id much rather have that randomness rather than knowing that its gonna be boomer-smoker-hunter-hunter and then hunter-smoker-boomer-hunter just over and over again.

Originally Posted by Kanati8869

No. I don't agree. They just have to be used differently.

How so?

If we use both the Charger and the Hunter as initiators in this scenario, you can't deny that you have more leeway with the Charger. You can't punch the Charger to free his victim. The Charger can take more than twice the punishment the Hunter can. The Charger can carry their victim a significant distance away, and knocks down anyone else that gets in his way.

In this scenario, what advantages does the Hunter bring, versus the Charger? Well, he's completely silent when he's not crouched, and he's a hell of a lot more mobile (faster movement speed and immense mobility from pouncing/walljumping.) That higher mobility allows you to attack from different angles than the Charger can, and pounce damage is done immediately - however, the impact alone from the Charger does 10 damage, so the pounce would have to do at least 11 damage (relatively simple) to beat the instant damage factor. As far as damage per second when they're pinning someone, it's even - the Hunter does three hits for five damage each in the time it takes the Charger to do one slam for fifteen damage (1.5s.)

Insofar as doing damage in this scenario, I find it hard to see the Hunter combo doing more than the Charger combo, unless the Spitter paints the area before the Hunter pounces (remember, it takes about 1.5s before the spit starts doing damage), assuming both Charger and Hunter are immediately knocked off. If the Hunter gets a high-damage pounce (20+), it might be possible... but there aren't many areas in the current campaigns that offer innate jumps that high, and doing the walljumps necessary to hit those numbers in other areas of the game are going to make your Hunter vulnerable and give away the element of surprise (though I guess you could instead use the Hunter walljumping as a distraction for your Boomer... but you could do that with the rather noisy Charger, too.) As far as I'm aware, Survivors get up just as fast from a Hunter pin as a Charger pin, so Spitter damage would probably be the same. But then again, you can't stop the Charge with a well-timed punch, nor can you simply punch the Charger to make him let go.

The Hunter isn't useless... but you have a lot less leeway in his use, especially as an initiator for your team. I just don't see why, when they appear to be designed around filling similar roles (pinning/initiating), the Charger should be so much simpler and efficient.

At first I thought the new scoring system was a blessing. While I still think it's better than the old one, it's almost a curse, especially with the new style of play (improvisation over planning, multiple combinations of SI). The new style of play almost encourages chip damage, but chip damage has almost no effect in L4D2 due to the Director's medikit constipation and the fact that medikits and health do not matter in the scoring. In L4D1, I started worrying less about killing the survivors and more about using up their medikits.

As for the Hunter, I disagree with Kanati. The Hunter is definitely the most limited of the SI in L4D2. It's pretty much a Jockey that does slightly more damage per hit (DPH), is long-range, and is stationary. That is really bad, because with the killing power of T2s especially, the Jockey is somewhat protected by the fact that he is on the survivors' back and is moving away from them. The Hunter is on top of a survivor and does not move at all. Even the long range can be detrimental at times: pounces can be bitch-slapped out of mid-air or gunned down in seconds. Jockeys can more easily use cover and are a great deal more ready to attack as well, since Hunters have to crouch, which causes them to move at less than half-speed.

As for the Tank, I think almost everyone who plays here knows that the Tank REALLY sucks in L4D2. Not only was it nerfed in regards to speed (slower than yellow survivors), the survivors have also been given a great deal of new toys to help against it: Boomer Bile Bombs make hordes not only useless to the SI but detrimental, Grenade Launchers and Explosive Ammo stagger the Tank, Incendiary Ammo is the worst, with every shot allowing the Tank inevitable death against a team at yellow health and above, and then, maybe most of all, Adrenaline, which nullifies any effects of already-nerfed survivor movement penalties. Even with your friends helping, it is nigh impossible to beat a healthy, good survivor team unless they make a catastrophic mistake. For one, you only have three teammates with random abilities to help you. They have to distract the survivors first to allow the tank to avoid being set on fire by the two or three molotovs they very probably have, causing them to die before making a major contribution. The best teammates for the Tank to have are Jockeys and Smokers because they pull survivors away, and both do negligible damage. Boomers are usually killed instantly because the survivors fight tanks in open areas, plus their booms are often nullified by the inevitable pipe bomb/BBB. Plus, the Tank's DPH is slightly more than the Charger (around 20-25, I believe). That means the yellow/green survivors can run circles around him while he tries (often in vain) to get four-five hits on a single survivor, and most of the time the survivors all have autoshotties that can eliminate half his health within ten-twenty seconds, not counting the probably fire.

That paragraph's a bit too long, so let's finish up. Plus, the tank's spawns are often ridiculously far away. For example, in TP2, the tank spawned in the bus station when the survivors were at the trailer. In TP3, he spawned in the impound lot before the survivors were even at the sewers. By the time the tank gets in range of attack, most of your teammates are probably dead, plus you only have one more chance to use him before he goes AI, meaning you probably can't sit around and wait for your team to spawn, in addition to the fact that the survivors often seek you out to set you on fire. It's like the BH finale, only all the time. We only managed to beat Frag's team in TP3 with the tank by the fluke of luck that happened to be Ellis getting incapped during a horde just before the Tank came over the roof, and the fact that we had a Spitter to stop them from getting him up. Then Frag tried to Leeroy Jenkins the Tank with his chainsaw, earning us another incap. By then, the rest of us were back in.

There's my little rant on the tank in L4D2. I hope it highlights not only some of my frustrations, but those of others as well.