fake edit: Holy shit I wrote a wall of text. Granted, this is my primary game right now
Beta sadly ends on the 16th (friday) and there will be three days of horrible withdrawal before the game launches on the 20th (tuesday).
Thoughts on the above discussion: the heavy SAM launcher has no resource cost, meaning you can cheaply spam them for quick anti air. Have your squad swap into heavies, fill the skies with missiles, swap back to whatever else - or don't, because you're already in the best anti-infantry class
A quick nerf to those launchers makes sense, they used to 2-shot fighters.
AA in general will continue to be screwed up until SOE fixes the render distances. The fact that a dual-burster max can take down aircraft that can't actually see it yet is stupid. And libs can't defend themselves by shooting back at the tracers (if they're visible) because of retarded client-side hit detection: If you don't have it rendered, you can bomb the shit out of it, scare it to death (screen shaking, etc), but not do any damage. We tested this - flashes render at greater distance than infantry. Stand infantry next to flash, have lib fly up until infantry disappears, bomb flash. Flash explodes, infantry takes no damage. :psySOE:
They do seem to be swapping back and forth between "Air owns everything!" and "Air takes it up the exhaust pipe!" with their tweaks to armor and AA and what not. Right now they seem to have made a stalemate between air not being able to see the AA shooting at it and the AA not doing enough damage to kill anyways.
Visibility in aircraft is pretty awful (although not as bad as the flash - the quad that doesnt' allow you to turn your head?), free look is too limited and can't be used at all in 3rd person view. Most of the pilots I know fly in 3rd person and only swap to 1st when finally lining up a shot. I think 3rd person makes it easier to tell where shots are coming from, but I could be wrong. I almost never fly in first.
Re: different factions dominating: There's a lot of testing back and forth regarding who has the best/worse infantry weapons, atm I think the balance is in favor of the Vanu. In theory, NC have the highest hitting power but worst recoil, while the TR have the best sustained DPS but lowest damage per bullet, and the VS have minimal recoil and bullet drop. In practice, sustained DPS is meaningless when you die in 2-3 shots, but they're getting a little better at the weapon balance. They were supposed to take away the infiltrator shotgun, but failed, which is hilarious/pathetic/annoying.
As for ground vehicles, some small buffs are slowly maknig the prowler less shit, but it's still just a bad design when compared to the advantages of the vanguard (tank and gank) and the mag (uber mobility, strafing while shooting). The mag's mobility (climbing hills and moutains) bugs me most given the lack of hill-climbing torque on the other tanks.
Anyhow, aside from Indar still being designed to screw the TR over, faction dominance depends a lot on population - while server pop remains mostly balaned, look at the continent population and you'll see huge swings one way or another.
PS - currently playing NC on US East.
I always knew you were a closet Minnie! Anyhow, I'm TR on US East, name is Stecker. I'm going to find you, and I'm going to kill you (if you'll be nice enough to tell me your name). And then I'm going to recruit you to BWC to come kick ass and take names with me.
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Topic: Planetside 2 (Read 3103 times)