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Thread: Fleshing Out Mutators

  1. #1
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    Post Fleshing Out Mutators

    As of right now, mutators are mostly flat out stat bonuses, this thread was made to discuss and suggest changes to xenos mutators that are more unique. I'll try to edit all of the suggestions under their relevant castes. keystones and unique mutators will be included in the list, and most of my information is from the wiki.

    24 Points per xenos in total, 30 with flaw, 6 per level - Young, Mature, Elder, Ancient.

    (?) - Don't know if the caste is able to get the mutator.
    (H) - Hive Mutator.
    (K) - Keystone, can take only one.

    All Xenos

    (K) Regenerate off weeds - It allows a xeno to heal and regenerate plasma as if they were on weeds even if they aren't.

    (K) Siege Claws - this keystone allows any xeno to increase their damage against structures like barricades or Sentries, but trades off damage done against lifeforms like humans. While it would work best for xenos that don't often slash at humans, any xeno can use it effectively, although they will sacrifice killing power as a result, meaning you have to decide if you want to be more support-focused or combat-focused when considering this keystone.

    (K) Hunting Claws - This Keystone increases the damage done to lifeforms like humans, but results in reduced damage against structures. The mirror opposite of Siege Claws, this keystone is capable of making xenos deadlier in combat against marines and Yautja alike, but also makes breaching defenses much more difficult due to the reduction in damage to structures. Such a keystone can make a drone a tad more deadlier to face off against, but without siege-focused xenos on your side, damaging barricades will be a hassle.

    (K) Reinforced Armor - A keystone that gives xenos a decent boost to their general armor, as well as making them more resistant to explosives, allowing them to endure damage they couldn't before and then some. The tradeoff is a loss in speed and a reduction in pounce range due to their weight. When choosing this, a xeno has to decide if they value agility or durability.

    (K) Heightened Telepathy - Allows xeno to send and receive hive mind messages to other xenos with this ability even if the queen dies, as well as use the psychic whisper ability.


    T1 Xenos

    Drone -

    (K) Faster Weeds - Boosts weed growth speed and spread radius.

    (K) Acid Tipped Claws - Reduces your brute damage and applies the reduction amount as burn damage. With this keystone you do brute and burn damage on each slash.

    (K) Plasma Network - This unit is capable of transmitting plasma to her sisters that are in her sight and on weeds.
    15X15 range for tranferring plasma, increased plasma cost for transferring? unable to spam plasma transfer? non-keystone?


    Defender -

    Sentinel -

    (K) Acid Tipped Claws - Reduces your brute damage and applies the reduction amount as burn damage. With this keystone you do brute and burn damage on each slash.

    Spread Shot - Replaces the standard spit with a tight spread tri-burst, which pretty much is like giving a xeno an acid/neruo shotgun that is effective when dealing with crowds. However, choosing this keystone not only makes spits cost 3X as much plasma per shot, but also reduces the range of stun spit by 1 tile, and acid spits suffer a MASSIVE range reduction (to the point that it shares the same range of stun spit). Pretty much transformed a ranged caste into a close quarters fighter


    Runner -

    (K) Longer Pounce - Increases the pounce range by two tiles.


    T2 Xenos

    Burrower -

    (K) Faster Weeds - Boosts weed growth speed and spread radius.

    Seismic Sense - Your senses sharpen and you can feel the tremors of your surrondings.
    The burrower and friendly xenos in a 20x20 radius gains a function indentical to a Motion Detector (because hivemind), and increases his vision by five while he is burrowed (20x20).

    (K) Hunter Glands - You burrow to your location quicker, and can ensnare your prey for longer.
    Burrower burrows quicker (50%?) and has less cooldown, and stuns from burrowing underneath a human are longer (2-3 seconds?)

    (K) Earthbound - You dig in on your surface.
    Gain stun resistance/immunity, cannot be pushed around.


    Carrier -

    (K) Faster Weeds - Boosts weed growth speed and spread radius.

    (K) Increased Storage Capacity - Increases Carrier storage capacity by 3 for facehuggers and 2 for eggs.


    Hivelord -

    (K) Faster Weeds - Boosts weed growth speed and spread radius.

    (K) Acid Tipped Claws - Reduces your brute damage and applies the reduction amount as burn damage. With this keystone you do brute and burn damage on each slash.

    (K) Plasma Network - This unit is capable of transmitting plasma to her sisters that are in her sight and on weeds.
    15X15 range for tranferring plasma, increased plasma cost for transferring? unable to spam plasma transfer? non-keystone?


    Lurker -

    (K) Longer Pounce - Increases the pounce range by two tiles.


    Spitter -

    (K) Acid Tipped Claws - Reduces your brute damage and applies the reduction amount as burn damage. With this keystone you do brute and burn damage on each slash.

    Spread Shot - Replaces the standard spit with a tight spread tri-burst, which pretty much is like giving a xeno an acid/neruo shotgun that is effective when dealing with crowds. However, choosing this keystone not only makes spits cost 3X as much plasma per shot, but also reduces the range of stun spit by 1 tile, and acid spits suffer a MASSIVE range reduction (to the point that it shares the same range of stun spit). Pretty much transformed a ranged caste into a close quarters fighter


    Warrior -


    T3 Xenos

    Boiler -

    (K) Acid Tipped Claws - Reduces your brute damage and applies the reduction amount as burn damage. With this keystone you do brute and burn damage on each slash.

    (K) Wider Gas - Increases Boiler gas radius by 1 tile.

    (K) Bio-Mortar - The boiler can fire over over walls and buildings. Less accurate than traditional direct fire, the target zone is indicated by acid drops appearing on the target tile to give fair warning. Boiler must be under open sky to use this.

    (K) Acid Rain - The boilers gas clouds no longer land on the ground but instead disperse in the sky above the target area and rain the choose gas down below, deals far less damage/chemical buildup per tick but is more persistent. Doesn't block LoS.

    Crusher -

    (K) Faster charge buildup - Crusher's charge will start building up 1 tile sooner and will build up a bit faster.


    Praetorian -

    (K) Acid Tipped Claws - Reduces your brute damage and applies the reduction amount as burn damage. With this keystone you do brute and burn damage on each slash.


    Ravager -

    (K) Longer Pounce - Increases the pounce range by two tiles.


    Queen -

    (K) Faster Weeds - Boosts weed growth speed and spread radius.

    Increased Egg Production - Faster egg production.

    (H) Infusion of Larva - Gives the hive an additonal 5 stored larva, hive mutator, one-time purchase.

    (H) More Leaders - Adds additional xeno leader slot(s), hive mutator.

    (K)(H) Faster Maturation - The hive matures at a faster rate, hive mutator.

    (K)(H) Resilient Larva - Larva gestate faster and there's a small chance of getting an additional larva, hive mutator.

    (K) Acid Tipped Claws - Reduces your brute damage and applies the reduction amount as burn damage. With this keystone you do brute and burn damage on each slash.

    (K) Plasma Network - This unit is capable of transmitting plasma to her sisters that are in her sight and on weeds.
    15X15 range for tranferring plasma, increased plasma cost for transferring? unable to spam plasma transfer? non-keystone?
    Last edited by prophetb1; 01-31-2019 at 11:48 AM. Reason: added one additional mutator to drone/hivelord/queen.

  2. #2
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    Now, for the first contribution to the burrower -

    Seismic Sense - Your senses sharpen and you can feel the tremors of your surrondings.
    The burrower and friendly xenos in a 20x20 radius gains a function indentical to a Motion Detector (because hivemind), and increases his vision by five while he is burrowed (20x20).

    (K) Hunter Glands - You burrow to your location quicker, and can ensnare your prey for longer.
    Burrower burrows quicker (50%?) and has less cooldown, and stuns from burrowing underneath a human are longer (2-3 seconds?)

    (K) Earthbound - You dig in on your surface.
    Gain stun resistance/immunity, cannot be pushed around.

    -

    Didn't think of any flaw mutators yet, but this should be enough to give the Burrower more stuff to play with, both with utility AND combat.

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    Quote Originally Posted by prophetb1 View Post
    (K) Increased Storage Capacity - Increases Carrier storage capacity by 2 for facehuggers and 2 for eggs.

    (K)(?) Acid Tipped Claws - Reduces your brute damage and applies the reduction amount as burn damage. With this keystone you do brute and burn damage on each slash.

    (H) More Leaders - Adds an additional xeno leader slot, hive mutator.
    The rule of thumb is any caste able to melt things has Acid-Tipped Claws as a mutator option: Drones, Praetorians, Sentinels, Spitters, Boilers, and the Queen.

    From experience (unless they were changed recently) The information on Increased Storage Capacity and More Leaders is inaccurate.

    From playing a Carrier, I'm 100% certain that Increased Storage Capacity allows you to carry three additional huggers and two more eggs.

    As an Elder Queen (so mature) I've picked More Leaders in the past and found that it gave me three additional leader slots, doubling my leader pool at the time. Whether the mutator is just "gives three leader slots" or "doubles max number of leaders" I have no idea since serious connection issues at the time forced me to ask to have the Queen given to someone else before I could reach Elder Empress.
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    I myself think that xenos should be focused more heavily around keystones than flatout buffs, because it would allow for the creation of interesting sub-classes. With that, I have quite a few ideas for possible keystones that I admit I been wanting to share.

    Note: all the traits I'm suggesting are a bit vague in their numbers due to the fact that I don't know the measurement of a xeno's stats when getting keystones/upgrades, so leave it up to your imagination for the most part.

    [ALL PERSONAL:]

    Siege Claws: this keystone allows any xeno to increase their damage against structures like barricades or Sentries, but trades off damage done against lifeforms like humans. While it would work best for xenos that don't often slash at humans, any xeno can use it effectively, although they will sacrifice killing power as a result, meaning you have to decide if you want to be more support-focused or combat-focused when considering this keystone.

    Hunting Claws: This Keystone increases the damage done to lifeforms like humans, but results in reduced damage against structures. The mirror opposite of Siege Claws, this keystone is capable of making xenos deadlier in combat against marines and Yautja alike, but also makes breaching defenses much more difficult due to the reduction in damage to structures. Such a keystone can make a drone a tad more deadlier to face off against, but without seige-focused xenos on your side, damaging barricades will be a hassle.

    Reinforced Armor: A keystone that gives xenos a decent boost to their general armor, as well as making them more resistant to explosives, allowing them to endure damage they couldn't before and then some. The tradeoff is a loss in speed and a reduction in pounce range due to their weight. When choosing this, a xeno has to decide if they value agility or durability.

    [Sentinel/Spitter]

    Spread Shot: Replaces the standard spit with a tight spread tri-burst, which pretty much is like giving a xeno an acid/neruo shotgun that is effective when dealing with crowds. However, choosing this keystone not only makes spits cost 3X as much plasma per shot, but also reduces the range of stun spit by 1 tile, and acid spits suffer a MASSIVE range reduction (to the point that it shares the same range of stun spit). Pretty much transformed a ranged caste into a close quarters fighter

    That... Is kinda what I could come up with at the moment.

  5. #5
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    As a rule, lets just say that you can only ever take 1 keystone mutator and with that in mind I'm going to try and think of something for boilers.

    Keystone Bio-Mortar: The boiler can fire over over walls and buildings. Less accurate than traditional direct fire, the target zone is indicated by acid drops appearing on the target tile to give fair warning. Boiler must be under open sky to use this.

    Keystone Acid Rain: The boilers gas clouds no longer land on the ground but instead disperse in the sky above the target area and rain the choose gas down below, deals far less damage/chemical buildup per tick but is more persistent. Doesn't block LoS.

    Note that I'm not a fan of wider gas, but I can see why you'd want to give all xenos unique mutators specific to them so these are my alternatives of the top of my head.

    And an additional Keystone mutator for all xenos: heightened telepathy, allows xeno to send and receive hive mind messages to other xenos with this ability even if the queen dies, as well as use the psychic whisper ability.

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    Alrighty, I've updated the original post to accomodate the changes in this thread so far.
    Keystones are indeed only able to be chosen once, so we'd need a fair bit more non-keystone mutators too - 24 points per xenos in total, 30 with flaw, 6 per level - young, mature, elder, ancient.

    As for the suggested mutators...

    Siege Claws: this keystone allows any xeno to increase their damage against structures like barricades or Sentries, but trades off damage done against lifeforms like humans. While it would work best for xenos that don't often slash at humans, any xeno can use it effectively, although they will sacrifice killing power as a result, meaning you have to decide if you want to be more support-focused or combat-focused when considering this keystone.

    -

    Seems pretty fine to me, even though I doubt alot of xeno players will use it.

    -
    Hunting Claws: This Keystone increases the damage done to lifeforms like humans, but results in reduced damage against structures. The mirror opposite of Siege Claws, this keystone is capable of making xenos deadlier in combat against marines and Yautja alike, but also makes breaching defenses much more difficult due to the reduction in damage to structures. Such a keystone can make a drone a tad more deadlier to face off against, but without seige-focused xenos on your side, damaging barricades will be a hassle.

    -

    I can see this working if we didn't have the flat out damager mutator, but otherwise I don't see anything wrong with this so far.

    -
    Reinforced Armor: A keystone that gives xenos a decent boost to their general armor, as well as making them more resistant to explosives, allowing them to endure damage they couldn't before and then some. The tradeoff is a loss in speed and a reduction in pounce range due to their weight. When choosing this, a xeno has to decide if they value agility or durability.

    -

    As far as I know, armor is kind of under-powered in the way that regular ammo does 10% less damage on armoured xenos, so might be abit under-powered or harmful even.

    -
    Spread Shot: Replaces the standard spit with a tight spread tri-burst, which pretty much is like giving a xeno an acid/neruo shotgun that is effective when dealing with crowds. However, choosing this keystone not only makes spits cost 3X as much plasma per shot, but also reduces the range of stun spit by 1 tile, and acid spits suffer a MASSIVE range reduction (to the point that it shares the same range of stun spit). Pretty much transformed a ranged caste into a close quarters fighter

    -

    Solid idea, I don't know enough about sentinel/spitter base stats to comment on how powerful this is going to be, even with 3X plasma cost.

    -
    Keystone Bio-Mortar: The boiler can fire over over walls and buildings. Less accurate than traditional direct fire, the target zone is indicated by acid drops appearing on the target tile to give fair warning. Boiler must be under open sky to use this.

    -

    I really don't think this is a good idea when marines already have problems with cades and FOBs in general, along with dropships techincally being under no roof.

    -
    Keystone Acid Rain: The boilers gas clouds no longer land on the ground but instead disperse in the sky above the target area and rain the chosen gas down below, deals far less damage/chemical buildup per tick but is more persistent. Doesn't block LoS.

    -

    Can be a good idea, but can run into the same problem I mentioned with bio-mortar.

    -

    Heightened Telepathy, Allows xeno to send and receive hive mind messages to other xenos with this ability even if the queen dies, as well as use the psychic whisper ability.

    -
    Not much gameplay value, but it can be fun to watch drones bicker with eachother regarding who's going queen, and xenos in general making in-appriopiate comments on marines with psychic whispers.

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    Thinking more in line with Heightened Telepathy and mutators that serve little direct combat application (like heal off weeds), another one comes to mind.

    Kyestone: Xenolinguistics

    Xeno can understand human speech far better than before and even be better understood by humans.

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    I like some of the ideas that have downsides or penalties to it, and not just pure upgrades.

    This is what mutations should've been in the first place. Wild changes to gameplay with interesting downsides and penalties. Not just boring placeholder stat mutations that just upgrades your normal gameplay even more.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Heraclitus View Post
    Thinking more in line with Heightened Telepathy and mutators that serve little direct combat application (like heal off weeds), another one comes to mind.

    Kyestone: Xenolinguistics

    Xeno can understand human speech far better than before and even be better understood by humans.
    This would only work if there were ic reasons for the Marines and hive to negotiate. As it stands, it's one of the things they aren't actually allowed to do, so unless you plan to use it to trash-talk the talls, there's no real reason for that Keystone.
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    As a general rule of thumb anything that lowers speed will never be taken except maybe for a runner that is already insanely fast. So putting any mutator that lowers speed for something else is pointless.

    Like imagine if I am playing lurker and I take super duper armor mutator that lowers my speed to the point where marines can chase me around. I better have like double the armor (which wont even matter cause AP rounds have ridiculous penetration now just look how bad preds get rekt) to survive at all.
    Last edited by MasterShakeEZ; 01-29-2019 at 05:46 AM.

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