Nah you can totally dodge any net from any distance via perpendicular dodge slide at the correct timing
I see Emilio has been ‘fighting the good fight’ in here, and I was debating on saying anything more than I already did given this seems to just be a circle jerk where literally nobody reads what anyone else has to say and just says their points again over and over hoping the other person will somehow agree with them now. BUT, I felt it worth saying the main point again anyway, with the example that came to my head to emphasis it.
Trappers are currently the only enemy in the game that does not interact with the wave, this feels bad, no matter how you slice it. Every other type of enemy does so, even other disablers and ranged enemies have the decency of doing so. Mutants knock everything over getting to you, Dogs do the same leaping at you, gunners will beam the he heck out of their friends and flammers will set them on fire. An example that sticks out in my mind from my more recent games was when a trapper was about to nab me in a havoc run, but a gunner behind them started trying to beam my butt, and instead beamed the trapper in the back of it’s head resulting in it getting constantly stagger stunned, allowing me to deal with both and me actually thanking the gunner for it’s service.
It’s interactions like that that make understanding how these games systems interact with one another feel rewarding. One can actively know while they are dealing with heavily armored targets, they can leave shooters for later until said armor drops. They know that the tick of a flammer will ignore everything and cause a massive push effect, resulting in an instant attempt to disengage with said flammer actually helping you do so if you time it right. Many more examples, but that is only part of the point so I’ll leave it there.
But Trappers ignore ALL of this. They ignore all of this learning, they ignore everything the game has put before you. They are a ranged type enemy, a disabler as well, and yet they completely ignore the wave and dumpster you. And while some have said ‘this encourages team play’, it doesn’t. Why? Because they yank you out of position. Being close or far from your team does not matter as you are yanked through enemies to get to the trapper, resulting in any form of wave that’s between you and them nuking you from full before your team can even realize your trapped instead of downed. This made even worse with the recent console additions, as expecting anyone on controller to have even turned in your direction, much less ran over and held the ‘free you’ key, is a laughable notion in Auric+.
And I realized while thinking through all this, the reason as to why this feels so bad. They are ‘a mutant with a Dog’s punishment’, essentially. They are a unit entirely built around getting you out of position and punishing you further if you are already out of position, but instead of just ‘smacking you on the butt’ and tossing you into the horde to deal with as best you can like the mutant, or ‘knocking you out’ but making you invisible to the enemies until your team mates get to you like the dog, they do both. They yank you into the clutches of the enemy while ignoring everything they just shot through, AND they instant down you in a unique un-interactable state that the enemies do NOT ignore, and in fact will hone in and ‘finish you off’ before doing anything else.
This feels terrible, and results in this discourse happening every month or so, as people like me and Emilio here hate how much these trappers feel ‘completely outside of the game they are placed in’ due to how little they feel like they should justifiably interact with the enemies around them, and how ‘unfair’ the punishment feels like it is compared to what the punishment does to the player (yanking them out of position and almost always instant killing them cause of it). To that end, I’m going to re-itorate the ‘solutions’ in mind I feel are worth doing if trappers want to stay in the state they currently are ‘while feeling more like the rest of the enemies’, or, adding in another solution based on my reasoning and comparisons above.
Either:
-
Make trapper nets sudo stagger all small enemies they pass through, making this ‘shotgun disabler’ feel a lot more like the other disablers around her, and give your team those precious seconds to ‘close the gap’ to actually get you up, before the wave utterly melts you.
-
Make the trapper net ‘run into’ armored targets, such as Ogryns and Monstrosities, and thusly encourage within the trappers AI to ‘find line of site’ before firing, so as to have it try and run around these enemies/run behind or to the side of the player in these instances before trying to trap them. This makes it so you can lean on the pre-existing understanding that ‘behind armor I’m relatively safe from gunners’, while not making this enemy type randomly knock over such big targets as that would make little to no sense. This also allowing an individual to try and ‘get the net to clip these larger targets’ to get it to fail, but in turn leaving themselves vulnerable to these larger targets a lot more as they’ve now just dashed in front of them instead of away.
This now makes the punishment of the trapper make sense, while also properly encouraging you to ‘be with your team’ around them, as if your team is close to you they can take advantage of the knocked over state of the enemies to quickly free you, but if you aren’t close to them (like the trapper in it’s current state is meant to punish), no benefit will be incurred, and you’ll get melted just the same. This still leaves them as a potent threat (especially in the numbers they tend to spawn in), but also makes them interact in predictable and UNDERSTANDABLE ways compared to the rest of the enemies, and overall makes getting trapped by them more ‘the players fault’, instead of it leaning more toward the games. (as a point I’d like to bring up, right now if you hear a trapper charge up in base game, and they are behind a wall of carapace, you have no idea where that trapper is shooting you from unless you have surround sound headphones and can properly judge which direction the sound is coming from, since you can’t visually confirm if the trapper is in front of you or not. So if you backstep? screwed, sidestep the wrong way since they are on one side of ‘the wall’ or the other? screwed. In the middle of trying to dodge a crusher overhead from the 3 coming at you? screwed. Just doesn’t feel good, especially since game wise, it feels like it ‘shouldn’t happen’).
OR
- Make it so being in a trapper net functions like a Dog, making you invisible to other enemies, as you are now ‘the trappers property’ (she does have a voice line about ‘I’m gonna sell you down there’, which makes little sense when you’re just gonna be a pile of meat and mush in a matter of seconds). This now makes it a proper ‘team effort’ to free you while dealing with said trapper, while also making it so getting trappered through things doesn’t feel nearly as BS since the enemies around you are now encouraged to ignore you, leaving it now a proper race between your team getting to pull the net off you or them getting overwhelmed by the enemies you are no longer keeping control of.
This keeps the punishment of getting yanked out of position, often into a see of enemies/ogies/etc, completely intact, but lowers it’s cost to that of the dogs, as it feels like the trapper is meant to be a melding between the two disablers anyway. Now you get the ‘out of position’ feeling of the mutant, with the ‘completely immobal’ punishment of the dog, turning the ‘blame’ of this occurrence on yourself and your team (if they are close to you), not the game and it’s ‘bad feeling systems’. Hell, you can even up the corruption rate of the net to match the dog if you want, to really emphasis the need to ‘get to them now’ but to still make it a quick button hold to free them, verses it near instantly always shifting from ‘net’ to ‘instant down’, and now your team basically just has to leave you behind as you’re down locked neck deep in the wave, and nothing short of the OP veteran shout is saving you.
I feel either of these changes will result in the trapper becoming ‘tolerable’, and make them actually ‘fit’ the game they are in verses completely ignoring it for no good reason. I’m sure others will say once again how ‘trappers aren’t a problem for them’ and how ‘just get better at dodging forehead’, but to that I will say a point that’s been said in here a bunch already. ‘These enemies already don’t effect you because you’re just so good and awesome and great and wonderful, why do you care if they are ‘functionally deleted from the game’ in your eyes?’ (even if that would be anything but the case). Is an audio QTE really that fun to you? And you can’t get your fill from literally every other one that exists in this game? (including the trapper that will still exist and try and hit you?)
You can hear those walking every step.
Conversely their grab isn’t as noticable as the netgun sound and they don’t glow so it evens out. Although I wouldn’t mind more trapper noises to be fair, they do have a lot of stuff on them so it would be sensical to make them rattle or emit an electric noise
There actually is an electric buzzing noise you can even hear when she’s standing still and not cackling, but I think it just gets drowned out by the mob density or maps and obstacle or whatever else.
If you turn off the sound muffling in the grinder you can hear it, it’s really quite cool but again, likely lost in a map due to the other factors.
The cackling and net reload sounds are usually quite prominent though, and the net firing sound actually triggers before she even aims the net and it comes at you, giving non-ogryns ample time to dodge usually. (grinder tests just now)
I guess that qualifies as QTE now, unlike doge where you can force push it or mutie you simply side step.
The giant glowing cigar is pretty easy to spot out of audible range and you know, when not obscured where she ran off to reload and take a puff.
The main issue I’ve got with Trapper lately is that their sound frequently does not correspond to where they are.
I play with headphones (which work great), yet sometimes the Trapper’s giggling can be heard way behind me, but when I spin around, she appears in front of me.
I always instinctively dodge (unless I’m tired and unfocused) when I hear her firing, so it’s usually fine, but it’s tough at stairs with levels because her sound gets all messed up and I can’t tell if she’s close to me, far up the stairs, or ready to drop down on top of the steps. It’s also strange that Ogryn’s aren’t fixed yet. A big man jogging.
It’s also strange that Ogryn’s aren’t fixed yet. A massive man walking around in full armor would create a lot of noise, but in Darktide, they are as silent on their feet as Ryu Hayabusa.
Combine that with the strange way specials have been shifting between spawn doors in Auric Maelstrom for me recently: it’s as if the game itself (A.I. Director) is unsure/gets confused which door the special should spawn from, so it keeps moving them around.
well said.
I learned of this from a Youtube video about the Trapper. I still don’t hear it in the actual game.
Pretty sure it’s culled or bugged or whatever, outside the grinder.
3D sound on? And which?
Yeah interestingly all those “constant” noises are completely in the gutter in Darktide. They’ve had a lot of technical issues surrounding sound in Darktide but I remember distinctly there was one patch near P13 that actually had all the stuff you can’t hear normally tuned up to the proper sound levels. Like you could hear crusher footsteps the exact same way you heard CWs in VT2, and you could even hear them direct their lines at you if you were their target. It was the first time I actually heard their lines and they weren’t totally drowned out. The trapper also made the static noise audibly at that time.
It was unfortunately also the patch that had ENTIRELY silent specials ~20% of the time, so they quickly reverted it. I still wonder why VT2 managed to strike the sound balance properly but not Darktide.
Man this studio has some real Rockstar developers.
Explain why my ogryn’s phat auric storm survivor gets netted all the time.
And I raaaan, I ran so far awyyy - aw netted again?
It took years.
I wasn’t being very clear but I was talking more sound mixing in specific. Sound mixing was pretty okay on launch for VT2 other than sometimes a special screaming into your ear. Chaos warriors just worked, whispering into your ear when they aggro on you and their footsteps and the stormvermin movement noises were extremely notable and good. Hookrats also jingled at the appropriate volume level. It did have bugs that made dialogue between heroes not happen and specials were occasionally silent and weird, and backstab noises were wonky, but it is what it is.
Just surprised that it’s been 2 years since launch and I still can’t make out a single thing a crusher says because the sound balance is unfinished and the one patch that seemingly finished it was reverted. Wonder if we’ll ever see the finished product in this regard
skill issue.
Allow trapper to drag you after caught, tie the player up away from the team and/or throw them over a ledge.
gameplay mechanic issue actually, but go off.
kenji508 16 years ago#35
Smoker does his job just fine. He is to split the group. And yes, there are area’s where that doesn’t really work, but there are also area’s where the boomer doesn’t work either. Play No Mercy VS in the sewers, with the lift and you will see the true power of the smoker. I once pulled a guy off the roof, then pulled a guy out of the window, then off the roof and so on. The smoker deals crap damage for a reason, its because he has more time to kill people if he pulls right. Never pull someone just directly from the ground, and even better, pull them back far enough so they have to take a detour, like off the stairs in No Mercy chapter 4. And never ever pull if your the only one who has spawned. NO infected class works well alone.
The Inadequacies of the Smoker - Left 4 Dead
your mechanics are the issue
L4D could pull players into areas that the team could not rescue them and the forums here are crying about being caught. Its a skill issue.
being pulled through something like an ogryn enemy or a monstrosity is different, They are cover to every ranged unit except trappers which is just a bad mechanic.
like I said a while ago I’d expect better mechanics in a game thats 15 years younger than L4D.
Reading comprehension issue
See I can just throw inane insults without actually thinking too.
but baring that. making them like the hook rat would also fix them feeling absolutely terrible. Making them push into melee range but then punish you even further as described would make all the other points moot, as now you have a much greater chance at seeing them or can easily hit stun them out of their attack in the midst of the rest of the chaos, making them feel much more like a dog than a gunner/shotgunner (since you’d have multiple ways of dealing with them, like how you can push a dog out of their lung OR dodge it with right timing, depending upon what state you are in).