One of the biggest mistakes I think they did is giving anti vehicle options to everyone bar engineers for c4/mines and heavies for launchers.
Anti-material (i.e. anti-vehicle) ammunition was a cert for sniper rifles in Closed Beta. Along with anything that could be construed as semi-useful for an Infiltrator it was never unlocked for testing in CB and removed on launch. When ever single other class got a plethora of goodies and abilities, Infs got bupkis and a slap in the mouth...oh wait...and 20 different sniper rifles, each of which has stats identical to at least 5 other sniper rifles.
I think we need some vehicle hacking, hijacking, disabling and spotting abilities. But let me show you something:
True - some people are just idiots. Don't think it is a good idea to balance around these people though. However, being able to move and use third-person view is a far more basic tactic than staying near AA, remaining with the group, etc. It is quite instinctive to move your tank if you notice someone is hacking it, as well as to use third-person view when not trying to aim at something. Getting a gunner is also fairly obvious for tanks that have that available; it often happens anyway unless you lock the tank as people will just jump in. The point of Astraka's post though is that people will argue against infiltrator getting something even if it is burdened with so many drawbacks that it would be nigh-impossible to do in most cases - simply because it would be giving infiltrators something. I don't think that detracts anything from the argument. It is a nice bonus when things line up perfectly to allow you to do this - but it is simply not reliable. "Just because something is possible, does not mean it is probable". It would be like arguing poverty-striken people do not need help because they could win the lottery instead. There is also the argument with turrets that they don't scale - there are a limited number of turrets within any arc of fire (with some locations having no turret cover at all). Usually it is one turret (of a particular type) for one direction. Distance and obstructions are also major problems - although that particular tower does have a nice turret position. Lastly, although the video was editted, the turrets are often unavailable either because of enemy attention (they are easy to destroy and infiltrators are defenceless while hacking), or because the turret has already been destroyed. Only the enemy can repair hackable turrets, so if no enemy engineer decides to give you a nice opportunity to shoot his teammates... They are nice when the opportunity pops up and you can do some temporary damage. However, notice in the video that the infiltrator had a negligible effect on the enemy - they were still there, just as strong, when it turned day! The issue here is that it is simply not repeatable in a small timeframe, so the small amount of damage done is patched back up by the time he is able to do it again. That is not to say that via a lot of co-ordination that he could not have had some use for his team - but it again shows a problem with scaling since the other 30 or so people that would be in that co-ordination would not be infiltrators if they were to be of any use against the enemy tanks. Even then, an extra heavy with rocket launchers would have been just as useful and far more reliable.
No, just no. Vehicle hacking maybe, but the ability for a cloaking class to carry AV Explosives would be a bad idea.
i play a sniper exclusively and its getting pretty boring When i "team up" with Outfits (aka zerg) like ppl think im supposed to, i just sit there in a sea of tanks, as far as the eye can see.. And as i try to not get run over, i say to myself, "im sitting with all this armor around me, as soon as something with flesh pops its head, im going to annihilate it. protect all my armored tank buddies" And then one finnaly does, all the tanks go POOOOM POOOOOM POOOOOM. The smoke obscures my target, the camera shakes, the tanks kill it before me. Nice an engi ducking to repair a turret! just need to scope in and... ROCKET POD ROCKET POD ROCKET POD ooooh a HA fighting my teammate waaaay in the distance, ill cover my buddy, sooon as the smoke settles, settles, settles, ughh. Sure wish i could see through smoke, since my class requires a little finesse to kill things.. i end up staring down a scope (FREE KILL) most of the time hoping i can hit a moving target (which takes 2 bolts) before a vehicle does it in 1 shot minus the finesse. There really isnt a whole hell of a lot for me to do most of the time... 90% of the targets in this game are vehicles. and then when i DO find an infantry, the tanks and planes do just as good of a job as me at killing them. maybe even better. i seriously argue LMG's are better at sniping. (Time how long it takes to fire 2 bolt shots to kill someone, god forbid u miss a shot) LMG's liquify you in 1/4th the time. Theres so many vehicles, that when im using my 9s of stealth to run away from one, that ill run into another one... Rant rant rant i know... but when you have ZERO ability to affect a target , that target should NOT 1 shot you. That isnt how u make a pvp game! Theres a reason ppl dont pay to see a boxing match with Mike Tyson vs a 10 yr old girl with her arms tied behind her back.. So let me affect vehicles for gods sake... let me do something!
And its a bad idea because....? I've been killed many times by tanks and aircraft while cloaked. Seems they didn't have any difficulty spotting me. I'm also the squishiest target on the battlefield in comparison to everything else out there. You can also cert into radar if you're paranoid. Cloak only lasts 12 seconds, after all, and I'd have to uncloak to put down any explosives. I really don't care if its something less powerful than C4, I just want to be able to do something that at least leaves a dent. I think that's reasonable, balanced, and not asking too much.
I think it is all about risk vs reward. Vehicle hacking is very difficult, would require a lot of skill, no small amount of luck, and has a proportional reward for your effort - one less vehicle for your enemy and one more for yourself. Conversely, it would be very easy for an Infiltrator to toss a few bricks of C4 and receives a wildly disproportionate reward for doing so in my opinion. This isn't to say that I am completely against Infiltrators having C4 as I do think we need some reliable means to combat vehicles, but I would much prefer the subtlety of hacking them to the indiscreet explosions of C4.
You mean like an Engineer sitting on the back of a Wraith? Or HA on the back of a Wraith? So basically, the Infiltrator should be renamed to "InfilTaxidriver".
And its a bad idea because...the Infiltrator class was meant to be an assassin, a menace to enemy infantry. Giving every class the ability to do everything kind of ruins the combined arms aspect of this game. I would much rather SOE give the Infiltrators more specialied methods to harrass hostile infantry and sabatoge base structures, than have the Infiltrator class become another jack-of-trades-master-of-none class. It is called cooperative play. Did I say that? No. I would be more interested in vehicle hacking because I think it could be more easily implemented as a high risk, high reward type of tactic. AV explosives on a cloaking class would be inherently hard to balance.
That argument might have merit if the Combat Medic didn't have C4, but they do. There's a class meant to be a healer, rez your boys and get them back in the fight. Even they have the ability to blow up a vehicle. Also, any class can be a menace to infantry so that's nothing specific to the Infiltrator.
The Combat Medic also lacks the ability to cloak (or fly like LAs)....making getting near a manned vehicle practically impossible. Yes any class can kill infantry, but not every class the potential to flank enemy positions and pick of key targets (medics, heavies) from a distance like the Infiltrator Class. SMGs have also added a viable CQC role for them in combat.
Infiltrator is my most played class. Giving them C4 would be just op....since most tank drivers dont pay enough attention to their surroundings, but making the emp grenade stun vehicles for a brief time would be fun.
That's tank drivers' problem, and "stunning" a vehicle is pointless. And idk what this argument is about. All classes have c4, infiltrator doesn't, it's not a class defining ability (BUT MEDIX CANT SNYPE YO is an argument of a mentally disabled fuel for a bioreactor, not a thinking human being), infiltrator's cloak don't grant full invisibility and is easily seen (blind idiots must suffer), you can cert in vehicle radar. Therefore giving infiltrators c4s is justified and not imbalanced, end of story.
You do realize that in real life people who specialize in infiltration have 1 knife and 1 silenced sidearm most of the times right ? The word Infiltrator demands that. Now if we were talking about Saboteurs that would be different since they also carry high explosives, but then again a saboteur has no Sniper Rifle. Snipers do have rifles but they are not infiltrators. Their job is to snipe the enemy from far away AND in order to be succesful they almost always go in pairs. Bottom line Infiltrators in PS2 are lucky to even have a sniper rifle and now you want to have high explosives as well ?
hmm, pointless you say? It's still a teamgame and someone else might destroy it.........or my wraith with full certed fury.
Against un-manned vehicles, I could go for this. I am often quite thankful infils don't have any way to attack them, as it would be stupid-easy for them to take out vehicles if they could. Alternately, could make EMP nades have a modest effect on vehicles to allow infils to at least contribute to taking out a hostile vehicle.
Such an awful post. 1. Every class in the game other than infiltrators have the ability to heavily, if not outright, destroy vehicles. There is no defined role when it comes to infantry vs. vehicles - only styles of play. 2. When a game has every class (apart from infiltrators) capable of easily and heavily damaging vehicles you best bet that said game is balanced around such a fact. Leaving one class out of this makes said class underpowered. Now I agree, I myself would love if the game had the classes have more unique roles (like vehicle destruction) - but it is simply sticking your head in the sand in denial to say that the game is this way. I had an engineer friend (he quit playing when I did) that used the flash with turbo to easily get to vehicles and spam AV-mines, and/or C4 - the result was always spectacular, and always quite sudden. He certainly had no trouble getting to vehicles quickly and often before they even noticed him. He also occasionally tried out LA with C4 and similarly had great results, often remaining completely unnoticed. That said, I would prefer hacking (with the fact that this is non-instant and reveals you) to AV explosives. However, should that be disregarded, then AV explosives would be very welcome. As people have mentioned, there is radars available on vehicles that would detect an infiltrator - so it is not like we would necessary have any better chance than anyone else. If people choose not to use radars then we deserve to be able to take advantage of that.
