HIVE feedback made with help of diiodide/deadlyweiss/MacDB/beast maggot/Beyx1/ycd/kkj/Nin’Mug and other members of the community.
MAJOR CONCERNS/IDEAS:
• Hive’s biggest problem is her lack of options. She is powerful in CQC but sacrifices everything else. Weak range damage, almost all other characters and grunts can gun her down with ease. She is extremely weak on bosses. Her excess health is not enough to tank or survive in PvP and high MMR missions. Being visible through walls gives enemies a huge advantage, regeneration is weak. She has fundamental flaws that can’t be fixed by neither skill nor cards.
• Even if she is considered a monster in CQC, leech and excess health can be countered with cards builds rely on a passive gain of bonuses, such as Patient, Mystical Concentration, etc. While other characters have good options, like Locals and their cards, Hive doesn’t have the same luxury.
• She needs to have more options available, weapons like Raceme or Wasp for example give her different approach but aren’t powerful enough or just too high risk-low reward on high difficulty. 500 excess health as default could make her better tank with survivability and better on higher difficulty. Cards that increase her range damage and decrease her swarm damage could be a good option.
• Plague was the main reason why players did not like HIVE. It allowed her to do what her kit needed without any real effort. The update to Plague adjusted how Plague was meant to be played, it was meant to shoot through walls and apply the infection to open up opportunities for HIVE to get close to players through corridors and behind a wall. The alternative of emptying the clip made it easier to play HIVE because it would deal damage instantly while also dealing swarm damage.
• If there is a next update to modify HIVE, a good route of action would be to keep Plague as it is now, but return the original swarm range to her other guns. Since Plague can shoot through walls and empty the clip which can also infect enemies, it would make sense for the range to be as small as it is. But for guns like Shy, Infected, and Wasp stopped being effective, which is why most HIVE players ran to Plague, making it so popular.
• Hive’s life essence is not taken over when map stage changes , making her a sitting duck in many situations. Allowing her to take it over would be good "quality of life" change for making her better.
• Ping affects all her projectile based weapons and CQC effectiveness. Since she is pure CQC oriented character , bad ping hurt her more than other characters because her weapons are not effective at range.
Increasing speed of projectiles also can be good "quality of life" change.