In my opinion the turret counterplay is fine because Xenomorph has one of the threatening M2 in the game and that for free. She can outplay so many loops and it's very hard to react. So turrets are the real counterplay for it and it is fair that Xenomorph has to priorities the turret if she cannot down the survivor as a trait for losing the crawler mode.

However, I agree that Xenomorph has some issues. Currently the M2 on turrets counts as a missed attack which results in the awful slowdown and that feels not right. The attack should count as a successful hit. The cooldown for M2 should also be 2.7 seconds like nearly every other M2 attack. This would make the counterplay much more fairer and Xenomorph less Add-On depending.

Xenomorph also needs an Add-Ons pass because many of them feel rather useless, and one or two could become basekit, but this is a different story. The Controlstrations should also spawn more reliable near the generators but this is also a different story and also effects Onryo too.

I really hope the developers will look at Xenomorph again because this is such a huge license but feels so clumsy.

Year, the Clone Skin sucks really hard due to it's thick tail but this is something the cosmetic team doesn't really care because there are so many other weapons with a similar issue. Nevertheless many killers can chose a different weapon Xenomorph Clone not :/

It's better to M1 the turrets because the cooldown is shorter and smoother. Hitting a turret with M2 counts as a missed attack and feels so awful. You should only M2 them if there is no other choice.

agreed

I think the chapters that followed Singularity -> Xenomorph are clearly failures. Having an object on the map as a counterplay to the killer's ability is fine, but the fact that it is so easy and unlimited in frequency is flawed.

The turrets are basically the only counterplay the tail attack has... The windup is like 0.2 seconds which makes it impossible to reaction dodge the thing, if not for the turrets there would be not much to do to avoid getting hit.

Maybe this is a hot take, but for that first couple of weeks when the miss cooldown movement speed was 2m/s (which was also relevant for destroying turrets with the tail), the turrets really didn’t feel impactful enough on the survivor side since a destroyed turret didn't give you as much distance and you didn’t have as much time to get somewhere safer. Having to lose a significant amount of distance tail attacking the turrets makes them do something even if the killer destroys them which made Xeno feel a lot more fair imo. Before that it often felt like a destroyed turret was just a survivor timewaste and wasn’t even worth setting up, which felt terrible because they are the main counterplay item and they weren’t reliable at all. You can pretty consistently avoid losing your power if your reaction time is fast enough (unless there are multiple turrets in 1 location which rarely happens), and I think that’s fine, I don’t think Xeno should lose their power more often. I don’t get knocked out of crawler mode very often and I don’t usually use the addons that help with that either. But the slower movement speed after tail attacking a turret basically made the turrets more effective without actually increasing the frequency that they successfully remove crawler mode, which I think was a good thing.

I agree with improving the control station spawn logic though, sometimes you get one that is just much further away from a gen than the rest and it’s annoying especially since it’s not something you can control.

Xeno was already proven to be mathematically undodgeable (only predictions), but even with correct predictions the Xeno could have simply held power and M1'd the Surv instead. Also Xeno was mathematically proven to consistently disable flame turrets on reaction M2 (without add-ons) as long as you aren't 50% slower than the average human (and as gamers we are typically faster than the average). Ping doesn't even matter because it is client sided.

The weather forecast is not a blind guess? Meteorologist measure certain data and base the forecast on that... A blind guess would be flipping a coin whether it will rain tomorrow or not... They take information into account which makes it basically the opposite of a blind guess.

However you don't have incomplete information, you have no information, because you cannot know whether or not the player will use his ability, you have no hints when it will happen, you can only randomly assume, which makes it by definition a blind guess. The killer being behind you and there being a tile... Wow that is indeed a lot of information and it will help you out a lot, at any given point while he is in range of you he can press the button and hit you, and there is no way for you to know when, there will be certain assumption as to when it is more likely or not, but at the end it is a complete blind guess.

And the standard reaction time for humans is above 0.2 seconds... So it does not really matter how much below it is, if you are not one of the very few people that have a faster reaction time it does not matter.

It is basically similar to Spirit before she had the sound queue during phasing... Everybody was blind guessing whether she was doing the standstill mind game or not and really good players still came out on top, and even those players said that they are not really out playing the Spirit, they are just making her guess as well...

On a side note given that you thought the weather forecast is a blind guess, I guess we should clear the definition: "An attempt to guess something when you have no information or knowledge about the subject and therefore cannot possibly know what the answer is."

The subject in our case is the internal information about the xeno player when he will press the m2 button to use the tail attack, which is something nobody can possibly know. You can try to make an educated guess based on how the player played before or how other players played in certain situations, but that does not fully apply either because you typically will not face the same player more often in a short span of time and because in many situations the xeno can just wait for animation lock to realise the tail or wait for you to mindgame yourself, because he does not really suffer consequences from not using the tail right away.

On the Spirit topic there was this whole Scott Jund vs Tru3talent debate on whether or not you can read the Spirit and tell by that if she is phasing or not... And even the comp players agreed that there is not really a reading happening, because you are just guessing, the best thing they could do was make the spirit guess as well and that was a really inconsistant method to increase chances. Some chases lasted a few minutes, others were done within seconds because the player guess wrong a few times in a row.