That would be the most awesome addition to RS2. Loadouts.

The zoanthrope is unimpressive when compared to the heavy even if the heavy got a 50% damage reduction. Low health with slow reload and limited range as well as constantly crouching about makes the zoanthrope unable to fend for itself in most situations.

I'm not quite sure what the right click does on the zoanthrope as its apparently not a ranged weapon but if it is some kind of close ranged weapon, I'd have to say that it's not too useful as the zoan's health is so low that a few bolter shots could kill it.

So I was thinking, what if the rightclick was changed into a "Warp Field shield thingy" that grants a temporary invulnerability of some kind.
While on, it will drain the "ammo" pool steadily granting like a 5 second or so time of invincible-ness.
The catch is that the main warp blast-like weapon will also drain from that same pool such that the pool can only store enough "ammo" for 1.25 blasts or something so once you use up more than 0.25 shots equivalent due to shielding, you can't shoot. Simultaneously if you turn the shield on and fire, you'll only have 1-2 seconds worth of shielding.


Now, as a disclaimer, I have no idea how the source engine coding works so I don't know if this is even possible or not.

Don't give up on mapping so fast 
I just started to learn how to use hammer and made my first map today so horrah for fellow noobs 

Have you tried to follow this guide?
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Getting_Started

I found it to be extremely helpful. Sure, I don't know everything yet like how to make surf maps and how to do objectives but that's all part of the fun, no? 

I agree that the game feels very slow but I disagree that speeds need to increase for 2 reasons:

If speeds were increased, then the tyranids' speed must also be increased proportionally or else you'll have a bad case of nids never being able to reach clawing distance. Sprint speed could use a boost but the same problem arises as marines would then be able to outrun running tyranids. Then if you boost tyranid sprinting speed to equalize it, marines wouldn't even be able to get a shot off before being clawed to death due to the running backward penalty. But if you remove the running backward penalty, then marines would be able to shoot too much and blah blah blah... it'd be a giant balancing mess.
Personally, I believe that the games feel too slow because of the initial running you have to do in order to get into the fight which leads to my 2nd reason:

Much of the slowness that is present in RS2 seems to be due to the way maps are structured. While I respect the creativity and work that's been put into the maps, they all have the problem of being too big.
In most maps, it takes around 15 seconds just to get into action which, in my opinion, is 10 seconds too long. If we were playing in 2fort or something, game speed would be exponentially faster and you'd be able to get into the thick of the action a lot faster without the need to sprint the first 15 seconds or so.

Small maps, however, would not immediately solve the problem as it would be too easy to camp the spawn area of either race unless there is some kind of spawn area protection like in TF2 where you can't go into your opponent's spawning area but this would be the duty of the map-makers and not of the RS2 devs.

In conclusion, I think speeds are fine overall for the flow of gameplay. The problem just comes from the fact that most if not every map that we can play in, atm, feel like they were meant for TT game of 1000 points instead of a small online skirmish of 6v6 or similar.

(For those that don't play tabletop, a 1000 points army battle would be like 62 marines against 33 warriors [warriors are alot more resilient in TT])

Well, I wasn't quite sure what "Full Uninstall" meant so I just went to my source mods folder and deleted EX and EX_unknown followed by running the installer I got from Moddb. Works fine now, I can even see the servers!

HoorrahhH!

The biggest problem atm that I've noticed isn't so much the need for a heavy to deploy (though that would be nice) its the fact that on some maps, theres that one botttle neck that marines camp with heavies until everyone's got a heavy (which a setup wont affect). This, however, is very situational and will probably be less of an issue when more maps become playable.
Still, the heavy definitely needs a setup time or damage nerf. It's more like a rapid fire lascannon than a heavy bolter at the moment. I was able to gun down a carnifex and 3 warriors just by moving backwards and dakkkkkkaaaadakadaka. Granted it was on the open plains but a corner wouldn't do that much better as the HB's damage at point blank is insane.

Ever since I updated my RS2, I keep getting this "Could not establish connection to VAC server" issue. Anyone else getting this?
I tried disabling my firewall but nothing changed. The strange part is that RS2 worked perfectly before 

So far, I haven't managed to get any servers to show up via the ingame server browser. There was one time when I got lucky and around 5 servers showed up and tried to join one but the game crashed as I tried to join and I never saw the servers ever again 
Now, I'm sure that I'm not the only one with this problem (especially after reading some of the comments on ModDB) so I'd like to start a list of servers for people who also can't get any servers to show up.


Name: COZWORLD.com[S1]RTV,FST-DL,MI,USA
Address: 208.86.251.35:27015
Description: Pretty fast server (for a north eastern US client anyway)


Yeah this is the only server I've been able to connect to (and see) thanks to steam having saved it in the "History" tab.

I, and possibly a few others, would be very appreciative if anyone could help contribute to the server list or at least until they start to show up via ingame browser.