Idea: Give Tick a small cloakfield when burrowed

Yes, it's a silly Neonstorm thread. Insert "leveler sidearm" joke here.

Basically, there are a few smallish problems I'm looking at here:

1) Cloakfields are completely unheard of in the early-game and uncommon in the mid. This is kind of sad in for the "cloakbots" (where rockos, glaives, and warriors will never ever cloak). We have many shielded units but functionally only one cloakfield.

2) Ticks are rarely seen except as desperation defense, but the Tick nerf happened for good reasons.

3) It would be nice to be able to remove the Conjuror's confusing and non-obvious jammer without losing the cloakybots' ability to stealthily build. A tick guarding a Con would be more expensive, but would still allow this.

You can imagine some interesting uses - for example, autohealing units could use this as a hiding spot to retreat into. A player could deploy a forward one out early similar to Spider's initial rush of spotting-fleas to establish a forward cloakfield. A place to build up an assault force before attacking so the enemy would not see the built-up mob of Zeuses or Warriors.

Of course, the downside is that it might interfere with the Tick's decloak/attack tuning - that could be a challenge in implementing such a thing if it were desired.

Small, low-cost, static deployable cloakfields could be fun, and the Tick would be a good place to put them.

ElTorero, or instead reduce decloak range / increase (un)burrow speed to buff it as a mine and keep the nerf to the "mobile version".

Pxtl, did you intentionally create a second Tick thread just for the Neonstorming? (first thread)

small static cloak fields sounds pretty interesting

can imagine hiding a dante or a gang of roaches ontop of a tick just outside enemy vision then enemy army walks by and gets rekt

could also be used to hide certain radar blobs from enemy artillery at your front line

ticks are mostly seen in cloaky 1v1 glaive wars, could be fun to hide pockets of glaive/tick combos around map to defend against incoming forces

Only issue i have with significantly reducing weight and radius of mobile area cloaker is that the crossgrade cycle between Eraser and Sneaky Pate' would start eating significant amounts of metal.

self-cluster-empwnage is most annoying thing. i demand tick being immune to itself.

when was its cost nerfed?

the biggest nerf is not listed - the introduction of a short uncloaked delay before movement when a cloaked tick is told to move.

quote: Jan 30, 2014 Experimental Tick nerf (to see what happens). [...] It should still be decent against raiders but less so at stunning larger things. Remember, it has edge effectiveness 0 so its damage falls off linearly from the centre of the explosion.

and this is why it seems less useful now

quote: ticks were nerfed after PRO_rANDY lost a couple of 1v1 to them and decided they were too OP even though nobody else thought so

ftfy, from what I remember it was rANDY who made GF nurf them

Formerly (before damage nerf) one Tick was enough to lolpwn a commander, which compared way too favorably to more expensive Roach, of which you needed at least two.

I wouldn't mind a bigger range with the new lower damage making them no longer antiheavy. Death-stunning commanders should be Infiltrator's thing.

Just give them twice range but half of DMG... IT will still lolwpn bandits, glaveis fleas and so on easly..