WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THE PPA ?

hi guys i'm here to share my rage with you as (at least on woodman) we happen to see proton II PPA (PPA for short) spam all the time..

first, let's compare the stats of the gun with the others faction specific ani-inf vehicles weapons: the Marauder for TR and the cannister for NC..

i'm going to talk about the MBT's weapons, not the harasser one (but the problem is the same)

• fire rate : Marauder 171 RPM, PPA 150 RPM, Cannister 180 RPM

pretty much balanced.

• muzzle velocity: Marauder 125m/s, PPA 300m/s, Cannister 400m/s

balanced? more or less

• effective range: Marauder short , PPA long because no bullet drop, Cannister short (bleh)

in reality Marauder effective range up to 20-30 meters if the ground is flat, because of the drop, PPA from 0 To infinity and beyond! cannister: none

Balanced? nope.

• damages: direct+indirect (distance if the indirect damages), total

Marauder 350+334 (1m) so 684, PPA 235(<10m) or 167(>75m) +300 (1m) so 535 (<10m) or 467 (>75m), Cannister 125*12 (<10m)+0 or 80*12 (>42m)+0 so 1500 (<10m) or 960 (>42m)

that's a Marauder 2 direct hits kill, PPA 2 direct hit kill <10m, 3 >75m, Cannister 1 hit kill <10m supposing all bullet hits (which never happens) or 2 hits kills >42m, which never happens too..

Balanced ? nope

• TTK: marauder ~0.7s, PPA 0.8s to 1.5s, Cannister 0 to 0.67s.

Balanced ? yes

• reload speed: Marauder 3s , PPA 4s, Cannister 3s

Balanced? Yes

Here comes the fun part :

• magazine size: Marauder 10, PPA 50 (LOL), Cannister 10

ok this is already a joke: what's the trait of TR? big magazines!!!! what's the rait of VS?? short reload speed.... this is f***ed up

this becomes even more fun with extanded mags: Marauder up to 16?, PPA up to 75?, Cannister ??? (not sure of these numbers,please correct me if i'm wrong)

yeah VS have bigger mags and faster RPM than TR everyone know that right? (don't worry the TR don't have the VS accuracy: they kept it)

Balanced? NOPE

please keep in mind all these numbers came from the planetside 2 wikia (except for the extanded mags) links:
http://planetside.wikia.com/wiki/P525_Marauder
http://planetside.wikia.com/wiki/Proton_II_PPA
http://planetside.wikia.com/wiki/C85_Canister

now let's talk about my thoughs: First don't get me wrong: the marauder is great! (really it's a fury but 4 times cheaper), the cannister??? i don't know , never saw anyone using it, maybe because it's a sh*t.

now, my favourite:THE Proton II PPA, it's NOT op at all, i think you should buff the firing speed to 10000RPM, to have it works like a laser, of course increase the mags size to something close to 5000 , like that you can fire without reloading for 30 secs! and if you could add 3 or 4 meters to he explosion radius it would be more fair...
but to balance it, let's put a reload speed of 5 secs...

a bit more seriously: the weapon needs to change: 2 harassers can lock down the entrances of a tech plant (2 front doors) against 40+ people, just because they never stop shooting! (i saw that in a VS zerg on woodman during an alert, really smart from the VS though), i heard from people that got the auraxium on it in less than 8 hours with the gun (auraxium is 1160 kills for those who weren't aware of that).
this weapon has actually NO drawbacks... while the marauder is weak at medium to long ranges and the cannister is unused, the PPA is just powerful a all ranges, with the same TTK at close range...

ok that were my (angry ) thoughts about this weapon, i would like to apologize for my english (there is probably a few "t"s missing as my t key is broken because of me going to thirdperson all the time, sorry about that). i'm not the only one thinking that gun is OP:

i hope i did the math right, if you saw any mistake please tell it to me i'll correct them if i can.
thanks for reading

Nothing should be done about the PPA. It fills its intended role perfectly. And I play NC and I still have to admit, it's a beautiful weapon. And I'm stuck with the canister.

Am I mad? No.

Instead of dragging a good weapon down, what should be done is give the other AI vehicle secondarys some love and serious overhauls. I'm so sick and tired of people thinking that a weapon should be just nerfed to oblivion to make it equally sh*tty to everyone elses sh*tty weapon.

Also, if you're making a suggestion by "sharing your rage", you shouldn't be making a suggestion in the first place.

well you're right i should have said "what should we do to balance the anti infantry empire specific Main battle tanks second gun" instead of "what should we do wih the PPA", but i was to lazy.

and i agree that nerfing the PPA is not the best option but i think buffing the marauder for it to match the PPA will make fury/bulldog useless. But the cannister really need something more?? some sort of slug ammunition maybe ?

the PPA doesn't need any changes.

the canister and marauder are the ones that need changing

the PPA only seems overpowered because the TR and NC equivalents are pure garbage

NERF IT INTO THE GROUND! NERF EVERYTHING!

now that we've seen the power of nerf cries and had the ultimate offender the LOLberator brought to it's knees, lets get on the next campaign and NERF IT ALL. i want to see NOTHING left in this game! i want to see infantry armed with rolled up newspapers and wet gym towels, with 5 -10 minute TTKs. tanks should fire rose petals and rainbows, ESFs should sail on fluffy pink clouds and distribute hugs and kisses! every day will be a holiday, once we have JUSTICE.

The marauder is not garbage... but if i follow your thoughts about not nerfing the PPA,but bufing the others, we'll have, to match empire's characteristics, a cannister with 50 bulets in the mag, and a marauder with 70 shells?? no that's not the good thing

PPA should be unnerfed.

There are only two nerfs to the PPA that would be sort of acceptable, and that would be messing with bloom or projectile velocity. I love the power of disco and would not want to see anything more than that, and even then I would rather just keep the PPA as is. Disco baby, Disco.


As for the marauder and the canister,
I havnt done math on the marauder recently, but It conceptualy suffers from the same issue as the striker, but in reference to the fury instead of in reference to the annihilator. It will almost always either be a superior or inferior version of the fury. I would honestly promote a radical rework, similar to what happened to the enforcer and Sarron HRB back when it was a halberd clone. Mayhap make it similar to the thumper, firing timed grenades with a lot of gravity (high drop). Larger damage and radius, but without detonating on impact.

For the canister, it comes down to a concept thing, as it will be competing with the kobalt. and it will basicly always be worse than the kobalt. The devs have been progressively increasing the mag size and effective range of the canister but going that direction will just make it more obvious that its trying to be a worse kobalt. In my opinion they should go the other direction, one round magazine with a MASSIVE amount of pellets, like triple digit pellet count with a massive spread, saturate an area with shotgun pellets, followed by longish reload. That seams very NC to me, and the shear volume of pellets will work like a pseudo splash damage.

I think the first thing that needs to happen is a C85 Canister buff. Not a major one, more of a sidegrade buff. I have some ideas about it:

Currently it deals 125x12 damage, which equals 1500 total. Beyond 42 metres it drops to 80x12 at dealing 960 damage per shot.

Some ideas I've had to buff it:

Change damage to 100x15 / 64x15. This would still deal 1500 max 960 min, but the damage would be more even,meaning that taking followup shots should work better. The only problem with this idea that I can think of is that it might cause performance problems because of the increased number of projectiles.

A new ammunition type:

Beehive round: This fires canisters of flechettes, which deal less damage at close range, but have a tighter cone of fire and less gravity, making them have a flatter trajectory. As such it's easier to use at range. I'd maybe make the damage 105x12 before 12 metres, after 80x12 after 60 metres. (total 1260 max 960 min).

Alternatively 85x15 and 64x15. Same damage, more flechettes.



I've thought through two other ammunition types but don't like either of them:

Grenade round: Because of the bore size this makes sense from a realism point of view. Of course from a gameplay point of view it tramps all over the Marauders niche. Which I think is bad.

Slug rounds: Gameplay is a huge issue here, because if it dealt the same damage as default but all in a single round round it'd deal 1500 max 960 min, while a halberd deals 1450 at all ranges. And while the halberd has a little splash, the C85 would have a 10 round magazine, higher rof and of course if it has it's default speed it'd outclass the halberd even there at 400 m/s instead of 275 m/s.

As such it'd be hilariously OP unless it got a large secondary nerf, such as lower damage, or bad accuracy. Both of which I doubt people would like as in normal shotguns slugs are normally used for sniping, which specifically wants damage and accuracy.

If you have any idea of the tank realms you'll realize the PPA is fine, The Marauder and Enforcer Modified are just terribad because their ranges are pathetically short. Buff the ranges and the problem goes away as the PPA is the only AI ES secondary that actually does what it's supposed to.

Won't happen. Higby has already said that he'd like to see guns with more than 1000 rpm in the game, but performance won't allow it.

Many, many pellets would do the same thing.

As such it's not that the idea is bad (I actually like it a lot, if you see my post above you'll see that I was already working in that direction) it's just that unless the SOE programmers can work some magic the game system won't allow it without lagging everybody to death and causing the hit detection to get even worse on every battlefield the thing would fight in.

I say leave it alone and help out the canister and marauder.

We should revert it to this.

Nothing.

Make the Canister and Marauder worth using, again.

PPA is fine.
Increase Marauder range.
Turn the Canister into a super death-cannon at close range.

lol they haven't even implemented the current nerfs that they are planning and already forumside is crusading for another nerf. Well played forumside....

-1 for incorrect use of FORUMS

marauder hurts armor, PPA doesn't.

the canister has needed some major love for a long time, if anything in this game ever needed a buff it would be the gimpy NC vehicle shotgun. if you need a quick fix then just pop the mustang AH into that slot.

PPA is by far the best anti infantry weapon in the game, but it does 0.00 damage to any sort of armored vehicle and has a low shot velocity and rate of fire making it incredibly hard to use against the light vehicles that it can hurt. in short the PPA is exceptionally good at what it does and horrible to entirely useless for anything else. with the nerf recently applied to the saron (which also makes them substantially more specialized) vanu tanks need some way to fight infantry and they trade almost all of their secondary AV ability for this.

if you find a PPA magrider pull any sort of other tank and feel comfortable in the fact that his top gun is completely incapable of harming you.

WE SHOULD BUFF THE **** OUT OF MARAUDER AND CANISTER!!!

And fix that bug with PPA's projectiles passing through spawn shields.