Being a taxi is... okay? But being the APC a sunderer is supposed to be would be amazing. Simple buff to sunderers, when exiting a Sunderer, Galaxy, Valkyrie, or ANT, for the next 15 seconds, you get 250 overshield on all classes. More people would use GSD sunderers the way they were intended, transportation assists for directives wouldn't be anywhere near as forced, and APC carriers in open fields might be used more often. It's a buff that would incentivize more cooperative play
Sunderers are already quite powerful, and there seems to be no shortage of players willing to pull them. I don't think your suggestion would break anything, but I also don't see it as needed. I would however shorten the time GSD lasts so that a sundy can't breach both walls of an Amp Station in one charge. That way control of the court yard would matter.
If you do want to buff it, make it something active rather than passive. Simply parking a Sunderer and having players enter&exit to achieve your buff would not be much cooperative play. I would rather look into for example a top-mounted artillery weapon fired using a target designator as a support weapon. Main ammo would be ammo that buffs or nerfs players, like giving all allies in the zone a 250 overshield, healing them, deploying a shield regenerator etc. That way the Sunderer doesn't become some passive "let's get in and out for a buff" vehicle.
I like this kind of idea. It also gives more of an excuse to those people who kill sunderers, thus "killing the fight". Killing Sundys is kind of necessary to move on from a fight, but if the Sundy was actively contributing beyond being a mobile spawn and a couple turrets thats easily brought down by almost any vehicle? Then people wouldn't be so mad. It also gives vehicles more of a reason to show up and fight each other rather than farm players. If the fate of a base relies on the sundy supports, both sides are going to bring them down and back up more often, which means vehicles need to fight each other more than the infantry to prevent that. It adds a layer of supportive strategy that is lacking aside from "more ways to shoot people".
If there was a cooldown of roughly 30 seconds, it would discourage players from jumping in and out, and if the only time the shields functioned was when there was a driver, it would encourage the driving role of vehicles in/around bases.
A top gun that buffs/heals instead of dealing damage would be a great addition, as long as they made it so you needed a medic in the vehicle/triage to be active in vehicles. Giving every class the ability to heal others wouldn't make sense
It would still be a passive, only useful close to the Sunderer, forces the driver to sit there and do virtually nothing while trying to avoid running over the very infantry he wants to protect and by adding a cooldown players have to time using it much more, meaning players will not be using it much. This forced gating "because class X exists!" Is what doesn't make sense. Should a repair/ammo sunderer only be driven by an Engineer? Why would a healing ability mounted on a Sunderer suddenly require a Medic to operate it? Should we force any gunner of a vehicle AV weapon to be a Heavy at all times? Or a proxyradar/scoutradar to only work when infiltrators are inside?
But they encourage drivers sitting in the driver's seat with how they updated squad spawns in vehicles, transport assist missions/directives, squad spawn missions/directives, and gunner kills while driving directives. The only problem is, team mates don't help anybody get them because there's absolutely no benefit to them, only time lost from redeployment and running into battle
It's very hard to get even 2 people to help with directives when they have zero benefit to helping you, speaking from 6 years in game experience.
Adding a cooldown would prevent people spamming the buff, and 30 seconds isn't a game breaking time limit if half of that time is spent with a buff to begin with... actually that would be too short... 45 seconds would be better to prevent people from running back to the sunderer once their buff to their shield ran out. But think of how often GSD sunderers are undervalued to players outside of Amp stations, and armored sunderers are never used as the APCs they were designed for, (especially since the 20% damage reduction was removed). Occasionally it feels good to know you were the driving (ha) force behind an effective push because people used a strategy that was actually meant to be in the game. The sunderer isn't as fast as the other driver only vehicles, but it doesn't mean it can't be fun to use, it's just that the APC aspect has no respect because players have zero incentive to do it. On that note, WHY THE HELL THE DEVS MAKE IT SO YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR VEHICLE TO KICK PEOPLE OUT??? When you pick up a troll waiting to shoot at nothing and waste ammo, you have to let them waste ALLLL those shots before landing a gal and coming to a complete vulnerable stop to kick them out
