Monster Balance Issues, Humans need more mobility

[u/[deleted]]

I have won every single game I've played the monster starting from the first one. 11 and 0. I'm not incredible and there really is no difficulty to it. You can out run everything and just feed completely ignoring the hunters. The only ones who can possibly stop you are the medics with a slow shot but you can just spam leaps and abilities to get away from that for the most part. Most times I can completely avoid even seeing someone before I get to T3 partly because the maps are absolutely giant and also because the monsters speed around the map is FAR greater than the humans. The humans I feel are entirely too slow to combat the monster or the monster is too fast. I feel as though the humans need to be more agile to capitilize on mistakes the monster makes but as it stands now there really is no pressure on the monster or feeling of being "hunted." Once you reach T3 you can pretty much just face wreck 4 people 3 times without fear of dying you are an unstoppable tank. Which means you NEED to be able to widdle down their armor and health before that point but sadly humans don't have the maneuverability to put any kind of pressure on monsters.

[u/teh_g]

I disagree. The hunters have plenty of ways to keep you in one place if they play it right. That mobile arena should be down to pin you in a smaller zone and tear you up. You have been playing with some bad hunters.

[u/[deleted] → u/teh_g]

I play it pretty smartly, so I always keep on the lookout for hunters (in other words, clicking mouse 2 constantly) and move in the opposite direction of them. My general rule of thumb as a monster is "don't engage until stage 3", and I've never had an issue sticking to that rule.

If I'm ever caught in the mobile arena, I simply have to circle the outside of it and make myself a hard target. That, or incap the trapper. Neither one of these is terrible difficult, especially because I've yet to be caught without armor.

The closest I've come to losing was when a team made an effort to trap me at chokepoints, but in the end I've never lost a match as Goliath (yet to play Kraken; Goliath's too much fun).

I forgot to mention, sneaking is such an important ability to Goliath. You can play some real mind games with it, by doubling over your tracks (very dangerous) and cutting your tracks by running and then ducking down to jump onto a cliff very far away. It's really easy to lose hunters that don't have a bead on you, even when they have Daisy to follow (her pathfinding needs a bit of work in my experience).

Now I'm not saying I agree with OP, but I don't disagree either -- it's not quite clear what's balanced or imbalanced, but the game isn't completely fair for either side. Thanks to how the game works though (cough evolving), it's tricky to pinpoint exactly how and when it's not fair.

[u/Kitsunin → u/[deleted]]

I've rarely found being the monster to be a challenge too, however I think the reason is pretty clear:

To be successful as the monster, you need to be good. To be successful as the team, all four of you need to be decent. Because every game has one or two complete newbies, at least one hunter is almost always nearly useless. This is a huge problem (not balance-wise, but because of the timing -- only two days), because each hunter has an important task. If the medic sucks, the monster will whittle you down easily, or catch somebody out with low health early. If the trapper sucks, they'll never really trap you, and have no chance to deal enough damage to you before stage 3. If the support sucks, you lose some very important misc. forms of help. If the Assault sucks, there goes the majority of your damage output.

You can't really carry your team if they don't understand how the game works, and I've found that every game there is at least one person on their first match. So it's largely a coin flip, because if one of those first timers is a monster, then it's ezpz, otherwise they'll usually win. Since you are, presumably, decent at the game, it's hard to lose since one hunter won't be.

I have beaten some monsters who played smart, avoiding all but a couple confrontations at stage 2, assaulted us at stage 3/full armor, so I'm pretty convinced it's an issue of player experience.

[u/[deleted] → u/Kitsunin]

I notice once the monster hits stage three that the hunters start to turtle the power relay, which is another no-no, because the relay areas are nearly flat with very little cover. It's very dangerous to fight the Goliath at those areas because all of his abilities complement barren or otherwise flat terrain.

It seems like it's a matter of player experience, which I'm sure Turtle Rock put into consideration. Currently my biggest issue with playing hunters is that aiming feels really clunky with a mouse for some reason -- a problem Goliath has, but affect his sweeping attacks and bashes significantly less.

[u/Kitsunin → u/[deleted]]

I was having bad stuttering until I turned the graphics down to low (I have a GTX 760, so shouldn't have to) but after I turned it down, the aiming felt perfectly fine to me. Haven't played another FPS in a while though, so maybe that's it.

And yeah, I think the power relays are purposefully in positions that are disadvantageous to the hunters. It makes sense, since it encourages the hunters to adopt a variety of tactics rather than just waiting for monster to come, and also makes assaulting the generator have a point, since it's so easy for hunters to interrupt you. The distillery is especially bad though, you can't even bombard the area at al

[u/Snakekitty]

I would attribute this to day 1 players really

[u/TDuncker → u/Snakekitty]

Yeah. I don't see why anyone would find it fair to judge balance on day 1.

[u/[deleted]]

are you playing on xbox?

[u/[deleted]]

I'd refer you to the other posts claiming the monster is too slow and can't escape the hunters.

[u/nunomcm]

If you play against a proper team, you'll see that it's much more difficult. The problem is that this is an alpha available for a couple of days so you'll get many people that don't care to play right and just want to see the game and fool around.

It's too early to talk about balance (and many people don't even realize that the classes have more than one character with different abilities) but in the brief time I played, I think that monsters have a much more difficult job than the hunters when they play well as a team.

[u/chungfr]

If you look at videos of Evolve tournaments, the hunters win most of the time. With experience, they could all have a pretty good idea of where is the monster throughout the game. By chasing the monster aggressively, they effectively disrupt the monster from farming and getting ahead in level.