Fixing the tyrant
There's something that's been bugging me for a while now, and I'll put it quite bluntly: the tyrant is lame. It just isn't fun to play as, and it doesn't live up to the price you have to pay for it. Once humans hit the end-game, they get access to plasma cannons capable of blowing up nearly every alien, and giant robot suits that protect them from almost all damage. Why does the tyrant have to suck so much in comparison?
I would say that a large contributing factor to the tyrant being boring was the nerfing of trample. A while ago on GPP, the tyrant used to have a very high-damage trample that utterly creamed any humans that came between a tyrant and a wall, making it very useful in tight corridors and hallways. Now, this was hilariously imbalanced, but it made the tyrant feel like a huge beast. The changes to trample have made it turn into little more than a glorified sprint. You might as well use the advanced dragoon, because it's superior in every way. Why would anyone want to pay so many points and wait until the end of the game just to get +100 health, +20 damage, and slightly increased movement speed while turning into a gigantic, easy target?
Here, I'd like to solicit ideas on how to stop making the tyrant so lame. I'll contribute my own idea first. Why not rework the trample into something that is sort of like a horizontal pounce? You charge it up, and then you run at a high speed in that single direction without being able to turn or stop unless you collide with a human or map geometry. When you hit a human with it, you deal a single, powerful blow and cause a large amount of knock-back. This way, you can't just keep running a human into a wall, and it actually requires some skill to use because you can no longer maneuver yourself in crazy ways.
Another thing that sucks is the hit detection for the melee attack. You have this huge, hulking alien with gigantic claws, and somehow the game makes it feel like you're stabbing a tiny knife, because it's nearly impossible to hit a running human with it. A large contributor to this is the way that the view height fucks with your perspective. I definitely think that the claws need to have some wider hit detection, especially considering how slow the attacks are. Using a tyrant is extremely unforgiving because it requires you to time everything perfectly. Meanwhile, any random idiot can just join the human team and spam the lucifer cannon and get endless dretch kills with it. This just stinks, and it's a problem that has persisted since Tremulous.