See thread title, because you can't really do much to break immobilization when being immobilized by an EDAR, so the auto-turn will often just get you killed. However, auto-turning to a clot that grabs you does a LOT of favours to help you break free of the clot grabbing you without having to wildly fire your weapon or swing your melee.
EDAR immobilization should never auto-turn regardless of auto-turn on clot grab setting
- Thread starter flashn00b
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Or EDARs can be rolled back completely. They are unfun to fight against and dilute the initial high quality of the game by being garbage low quality content.
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Wouldn't make much of a difference since you're more likely to shoot the collision cylinder rather than the actual core
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This isn't true; flinching or stumbling the Trapper (at bare minimum) will break its grip on you. This can be done by spamming it, or breaking the armor, depending on how close in proximity you are to the trapper.
That being said:
This, please.
The problem isn't dying to the Trapper, per se; EDARs in general are a mess from a mechanical standpoint, frequently more annoying to kill than they have any right to be, and I'm not even talking about whether or not they fit with the rest of the game from a flavor standpoint.
Never forget:
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I'm personally fully on-board with them (outside of the fact they should be cyborgs more than robots).
I get your point about favoring headshots, and I believe this applies to most zeds really. But testing the reflexes of players by suddenly giving them another weak point to look for is part of the challenge really. The game is already considered too bloody easy by that point. Having opponents which are mostly ranged, and armored, make for something that breaks the mold. Also, they're free EMPs.
The only thing I dislike about EDARs is that they're a nightmare to deal with as a zerk.
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Good, because I'm never going to stop beating that drum, since it's what the game was originally designed around, and with good reason.
They're not even that challenging, per se; they're just designed in a way that makes them "obnoxious" rather than "hard." That unfortunately seeps into literally every aspect of their design, some of which I'm convinced was intentional rather than just being an accident of how these things counter preexisting game mechanics.
- The tiny weak point that they do have wasn't even a thing when they were first introduced; they were only killable by spamming the legs à la Rioters. Unlike the Rioters, you couldn't even blow through their health via an alternate weak point with certain classes; they were just spongy as hell and only had the weak point added after (justifiable) complaints of them being too spongy. So that was a
goodconcerning sign of things to come.- Remember when EDAR Trappers had no range limitation, did not give an indication that they were tasing the player, and could clip their shots through level geometry? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
- In practice, they are Rioters (body armor which adds shots to kill) that can flip like Stalkers, shoot like Husks, and have no head vulnerabilities.
- Decapitating them is functionally useless; their heads have 3x the health compared to their chest core. It is possible to overkill them by shooting them in the head so hard that their body dies anyway, but why would you do that in the first place?
- There is a quirk programmed in where the EDARs become "less accurate" when decapitated. Which is cute, as unless you literally cannot move from one spot, an EDAR should never nick you more than once with their projectiles even when they can actually see you since they cannot hitscan and the projectiles are slow.
- The only exception to this rule is the Trapper, because the Trapper doesn't miss anyway; it draws a delayed hitscan line that will only tag you if you have not broken line of sight with an object.
- The weak point is armored, meaning in practice, perks will almost always have to kill them at least twice over (that is, doing enough damage to eliminate the chest core) before being able to actually kill the EDAR. This is arguably tied with "no headshots" for the most obnoxious thing about them because armor screws with how damage is dealt to enemies. More on that below.
- Their weak point, while it technically is an independent spot that has a smaller health bar, doesn't function as a "weak point" in the same vein as a decapitation does from a mechanical standpoint. Which has the following implications for different perks:
- Gunslingers and Sharpshooters don't get Rack 'em Up stacks for doing the one thing they should be doing, which is hitting weak points on Zeds; you have to actually shoot the EDAR in the head to get ReU stacks. Hopefully I don't have to elaborate on why that's dumb.
- Gunslinger has no real built-in option to instakill the EDARs. At bare minimum that's 2 shots from a .500 Magnum because you have to go through the armor first.
- Sharpshooter must either use a Tier 4 shot or pick the Crossbow with at least 1 damage skill. Unfortunately for the Sharpshooter, that means running the Crossbow specifically for dealing with EDARs, which aren't dangerous enough to warrant running an otherwise bad weapon. Again: obnoxious.
- Demos are screwed because of how armor distributes explosive damage: all damage is applied to different pieces of armor before body health damage is dealt, meaning that without a weapon that hits so hard it overkills them in the first place, Demos have to deal with all of their individual health bars (as with Abomination, for example) before getting to the juicy bits inside them. Technically they are supposed to be weak to explosives; in practice, that's not true at all.
- Firebugs are arguably the least affected perk because microwave damage is the most effective damage type against EDARs, but despite their official profile saying they're weak against fire, that is functionally useless because you still have to burn through their armor and body health before they die.
- Berserkers have VLAD to deal with them, but again, you have to burn through their armor first, meaning that Zerks, like other perks, must take extra time with them because no instakills, as opposed to Rioters which you can just dome with a well-timed and well-placed Crovel smack. Obviously this is less fun if you're trying to Crovel them to death, because their weak point is obnoxious to hit with melee weapons due to collision shenanigans.
- Technically they are weak against shotguns compared to other ballistic weapons, except shotguns get screwed by armor damage calculation, so Support still has to deal with them in the same vein as anyone else.
- Commando and SWAT get hit the worst because of how their evasive techniques combined with their chest armor hurts lower-damage-but-higher-rate-of-fire perks, as you are simply forced to hit them more times before they fall over, meaning more chances in early-game for them to keep flipping over and over again before they finally die.
- Commando gets doubly annoyed because EMP; more on that below.
- Medic...is Medic. No notes. Ditto for Survivalist.
- Gunslingers and Sharpshooters don't get Rack 'em Up stacks for doing the one thing they should be doing, which is hitting weak points on Zeds; you have to actually shoot the EDAR in the head to get ReU stacks. Hopefully I don't have to elaborate on why that's dumb.
- Instead of having their own dedicated spawn pool, they simply spawn in by having a chance to replace Stalkers or Husks (probably because this was easier to implement instead of taking the time to come up with dedicated spawn pools).
- This is weird, because they aren't even elite versions of enemies like albino Crawlers or Rioters.
- Because implementing them in this way broke certain things like the Cranium Cracker weekly, this resulted in the team just completely taking out Stalkers and Husks from those modes entirely (where Stalkers and Husks were really good at forcing players to change targets accordingly). So there's that.
But not in a good way, because that's not what the game was designed with in mind. They are speedy trash tanks in a game where the base roster is designed around either numerous glass cannon trash enemies or otherwise slow, beefy hard-hitters that must be dealt with in a precise manner lest you get hit.
There's a reason that Husks--the only shooting enemy in the game up until the EDARs--hit hard, but have 3 different means of disposal, and punish the players extremely badly for misplaying against them.
Which isn't always a good thing.
To give an example of why that is, let's go back to the Husks: Husks are unique in that they have multiple viable kill options to offset their nature as a ranged unit.
If you want to kill them by spamming body damage, that's viable, but it takes a while (as it should) to do so. This is to encourage players to shoot weak points.
The Husk has two weak points: the head and the tank.
The tank is a separate weak point that players have to go out of their way to hit (since the Husk does not always expose it for an easy hit), is an even faster kill than shooting the head in most cases, and produces an explosion when the Husk is killed in this manner.
This is an option that can benefit the players by removing trash Zeds, but if used poorly, it can rage Scrakes and Fleshpounds. So it's on the player killing the Husk to decide which is more appropriate to use, while subtly encouraging the player to always keep the headshotting skills in their back pocket (like, y'know, the thing you're supposed to do with all the other Zeds).
The EDAR was an attempt to imitate this, but without the understanding of why it works in the context of the game's mechanics.
If a player wants to kill the EDAR without spending tons of ammo, their only option is to shoot the core, which is guaranteed to produce an EMP. Which sounds good on paper: reward the player for hitting the weak spot.
However, players may not always want the EMP to go off, as EMPs can be a visual flashbang, especially in Zed-Time (they produce vibrant particle effects and, in close proximity to a player, will also rock the screen like an explosive going off).
Let's say a Commando wants to extend their Zed-Time via kills, but the main threat in front is an EDAR rushing them down to do the Richard-Simmons-melee-slap. If the Commando doesn't want to eat hefty damage while getting extensions, then they have to shoot the EDAR in the core to kill it before the Zed-Time goes off. When they do, the flashbang goes off and can obscure anything behind it, making the Commando guess at where other targets might be.
While it's true that the Commando has life-bar-vision to help mitigate this, that doesn't change the fact that the Commando has to deal with the EMP effects.
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The Trapper is the best of them in the current state of things because it actually punishes the players substantially for not prioritizing them while otherwise not being a threat of their own accord and being limited to medium range at absolute best, but that doesn't change the fact that EDARs are not well designed in the slightest.
The best thing for the team to do w/r/t needing to mix up targeting while still keeping the main flow of the game going is to make Zeds of differing heights that still maintain the head as the weak spot.
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G
I also would like to add to this great speech which no doubt ends up in the library of KF2 congress one day from the aesthetical standpoint.
It often gets overlooked, but aesthetics are directly related to why people don't like fighting EDARs. The problem with them is they are robots. It's not fun to fight robots.
I've been pondering for a while why is that and have a pretty good answer so you don't have to dig it yourselves. Basically, human behavior is shaped by evolutionary forces and for 3M years the homo genus, especially males (which collaterally explains why KF2 is overwhelmingly male game), were busy hunting prey and fighting competing tribes 24/7. In a modern industrialized reality, barring wars and hunting, humans can't engage in that, but nature still calls. That's the #1 reason behind shooter games being popular -- they allow to recreate the scenario for which humans evolved in virtual reality.
From that perspective it is absolutely crucial that adversaries are human-like and fleshy. This is a case where KF2 clearly trumps KF1 by having motion-captured human-like fleshy monsters, especially the pinnacle of this game's monster design, which is alpha clot. People want to shoot human-like targets, even if they don't consciously recognize that.
But after release TWI was no longer in position to do expensive motion capture. That's why all post-release monsters, including bosses, either reuse existing animations, OR their animations do not have to be realistic, because they aren't humans!
It was just a lazy man's shortcut to introduce enemies, when TWI really wanted to, but avoid the expensive motion capture step.
But too bad, the post-release TWI's team never studied evolutionary biology/psychology and they had no idea why would players prefer human-like fleshy monsters over robots. So naturally they diluted the initial higher quality of the game by introducing low quality content, which naturally became universally hated by players.
A good share of EDAR hate has nothing to do with how they are designed mechanically, it's just THEY ARE NOT HUMAN LIKE. They don't bleed!
Great speech, senator.
I also would like to add to this great speech which no doubt ends up in the library of KF2 congress one day from the aesthetical standpoint.
It often gets overlooked, but aesthetics are directly related to why people don't like fighting EDARs. The problem with them is they are robots. It's not fun to fight robots.
I've been pondering for a while why is that and have a pretty good answer so you don't have to dig it yourselves. Basically, human behavior is shaped by evolutionary forces and for 3M years the homo genus, especially males (which collaterally explains why KF2 is overwhelmingly male game), were busy hunting prey and fighting competing tribes 24/7. In a modern industrialized reality, barring wars and hunting, humans can't engage in that, but nature still calls. That's the #1 reason behind shooter games being popular -- they allow to recreate the scenario for which humans evolved in virtual reality.
From that perspective it is absolutely crucial that adversaries are human-like and fleshy. This is a case where KF2 clearly trumps KF1 by having motion-captured human-like fleshy monsters, especially the pinnacle of this game's monster design, which is alpha clot. People want to shoot human-like targets, even if they don't consciously recognize that.
But after release TWI was no longer in position to do expensive motion capture. That's why all post-release monsters, including bosses, either reuse existing animations, OR their animations do not have to be realistic, because they aren't humans!
It was just a lazy man's shortcut to introduce enemies, when TWI really wanted to, but avoid the expensive motion capture step.
But too bad, the post-release TWI's team never studied evolutionary biology/psychology and they had no idea why would players prefer human-like fleshy monsters over robots. So naturally they diluted the initial higher quality of the game by introducing low quality content, which naturally became universally hated by players.
A good share of EDAR hate has nothing to do with how they are designed mechanically, it's just THEY ARE NOT HUMAN LIKE. They don't bleed!
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That's definitely kinda true. It can be done right; you just need to meet some of the game on remaining aesthetics w/r/t shooting the targets. Which this game didn't quite do.
And you know what's even more frustrating? Unreal Tournament 2003 had this figured out, well, nearly 20 years ago:
The robot PCs in that one talk trash exactly like the human PCs, gib like human PCs (complete with independent sparking gibs that have wires sticking out and such), and bleed purple oil. They don't just kinda fall over when shot unless other PCs would as well (from weaker weapons and so forth).
One and a half out of three is present here.
You can even get away with using the current animations; I don't know if it's exactly fair to call out the robotic, stiff animations because, well, robots; it makes enough sense if they don't behave like mocapped humans (even if DAR himself does).
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