Renomaki wrote: ↑19 Mar 2018, 12:11
Honestly, while I agree that Crushers seem to have aged poorly over the months, I certainly don't want to go back to the time when crushers were THE caste to employ.
I remember a time when praes and ravagers were considered wasted slots due to crushers being superior in every way. Praes were just bigger, slower spitters that marines laughed at, and ravagers were nothing more than giant hunters with the health pool of a runner. Crushers, meanwhile, were fast, capable of taking a considerable beating due to their shield, immune to explosives, rarely got stunned, had a mini-queen screech, and also has a mean tackle, to name a few things at the top of the head.
Besides boilers, Crushers were the only really viable caste to deploy on the field, to the point that crusher spam was a common issue and marines often had little fun engaging the xenos when they felt like their guns had no effect on them. Hell, I myself grew to LOATHE crushers, to the point that I often am quick to banzi charge one with knife in hand when I am able, and as a predator they are a popular hunting target for me. Those days, Crushers were HORRIBLY BROKEN.
Nowadays, however, times have changed. Praes are now much better support castes due to their enhanced AoE buffs, Ravagers are more reliable killing machines that instill true terror in marines, and Crushers? Well, they are ok. They are still intimidating at times, but they gotten a lot softer over the months. Sure, their new stomp makes them deadly in a 1V1 situation, but other than that, they don't seem to have the same oomph they used to have.
I don't want crushers to have their AoE stomp back by any means, but I do think that crushers need a bit of an armor buff. It kinda defeats the purpose of being a living shield when said shield can't really stop bullets all that well until higher levels, and even then it doesn't always do a good job at it.
The main issues I see currently with crushers in descending order of priority are:
1) Charge is too slow to be used either for offense or repositioning. Given that you can’t change direction it’s become near useless in combat unless the queen sets you up. At that point you might as well be any other offensive caste.
2) Stomp was worth about 3 slashes with a strong tackle to set it up and the weakest active ability of the t3. With a weak tackle crushers rely on other castes to set up their ability which has a 30 second cooldown. It’s not hard to see how a prae/rav are far more dangerous offensively (not to mention crushers don’t have a tail attack)
3) Crushers have lost almost all their non-combat utility as well. Weak tackles and low mobility makes them poor nest guards. They can’t break rock anymore to reshape the walls of the hive. They can’t even transfer plasma to help drones build. Stomp no longer provides CC and AP ammo tears them up fast enough that bodyblocking for a downed xeno has become a lot less reliable.
I perhaps know better than most how horribly OP crushers used to be. I avoided using hugger combat long before it was removed, and I wasn’t a fan of crushers no longer being able to self-stun if they didn’t manage their momentum or were ramming something that didn’t break in one hit. For a while crushers were considered to be a noob caste, and I worked hard to try to dispel that myth.
Right now, crushers are exclusively a noob caste and their primary ability is to stomp other noobs after the queen knocks them down.
They used to have the ability to make big plays. Cracking marine defenses, initiating fights for xenos, hit and run attacks in narrow hallways, defending downed allies. A crusher who was clever and robust could be dangerous to a small squad of marines and there really wasn’t any hope for an effective 1v1 at equal skill levels. Literally none of what I said is still true and any reasonably robust marine with any fire weapon should be able to easily kill a crusher in the open 1v1.
They’re doubly not intimidating right now because not only are they mechanically inferior to their counterparts, robust xenos learned not to waste their time. Prae are good at blocking for boilers too, and can sticky resin a hallway and provide pheromones as they do so.
Given the direction of xeno changes I would be pleasantly surprised if crushers again become a caste with a significant skill ceiling, they’ve recieved a ton of dumbing down.
I’ve played crushers when they were OP, and I played them when robust hunters and ravagers (Halinder being the legendary example of this) were the main workhorses of the hive. Before t3s were capped crushers were fast and relatively fragile, dying in as few as 6 shots with unlucky rng. However, they were still exciting to play because of their situational speed, utility, and playmaking ability. I can stick with a weak caste, but not a boring one.
"Crush your enemies. See them driven before you..."
Xenos Vult
x 20 
