Infantry assaults are more fun without splash damage

I and many others enjoy small to medium sized fights more than the large zerg battles. Pilots can cause havoc in those fights. Lots of times to deal with one pilot will require multiple people and if that pilot is good then he will not die, he will go and repair then come back and start farming again. I have raged at friendly pilots and even once decimated a friendly pilot out of anger, he destroyed the friendly spawn beacon which ended our fight and pretty much frightened them away. I had no right to do so but you can't expect everyone to be capable of dealing with hostile air, especially if it is not their base or if they don't have a sunderer. Also if the fight is relatively even, a lone ESF can turn the tide if too many are required to deal with one guy looking to farm so imagine multiple ESFs in medium sized fights, and most aren't trying to be useful, just selfish play.

Just because your bored don't ruin other people's fun by f*gging up their fight with your ESF is the moral of this post.

Splash damage is not a huge thing for veicgles IMO.

You should be doing most of your damage with direct hits, The splash always seemed pretty crap too me. I didn't even notice this while I was farming the hell out of infantry in my harasser last night

Why?
WTF is the relationship between AoE and vehicle effectiveness, even more so "combined arms"?
There is NONE.

A vehicle is :
* sufficiently armored to sustain damage far better than non armored entity. Currently in PS2, it's not enough of a case because of the prevalance of vehicles and their impact on gameplay during early days of PS2
* able to dish out significantly more damage than what a non armored entity can do. Now, fasten your belt because it may be quite a shocker : this does not require splash damage to dish out significant damage. The way the damage is dealt is totally unrelated. AoE is one way. Direct hit another. A fast firing direct hit chest OSK gun is going to be significantly more damaging than anything an infantry can wield. Insane! If you're going to be able to eliminate quickly one by one a group of infantry, while they cannot deal enough damage to you to kill you, that's quite a powerfull vehicle!
* present in small and reasonable quantity compared to infantry (ie, is going to face a threatening amount of infantry). Currently not implemented the best way as you noted.

On top of it, you'll notice many if not all the people happy about the non AoE "experiment" also loved the fact UBGL and HA rockets were becoming less of a factor? Does that mean they want to remove infantry form fights? NO.

AoE and Combined Arms / Vehicles are 2 unrelated topics.

hopefully one day a similar bug gets put on infantry where their rocketlaunchers stop working
it would be great to have some good vehicle on vehicle warfare for once

Okay so basically you're advocating all tanks get are AP rounds while the infantry continue to gain more and more anti vehicle weaponry (doesnt matter if its not splash, we dont get lock on tank rounds) and continue to crush tanks even worse than they are now.

Great idea man.

You don't want to read for whatever reason.
I explicitely wrote that currently the vehicles are not armored enough to sustain damage from infantry and should be buffed.
AI rounds working "kind of" like AP with less damage to vehicles (making AP really worth) and better refire rate could do it.
Or MG type.
Point being : you don't NEED AoE.

But keep reading what you wish and put thought in the mind of others ....

1. No I wasn't playing yesterday, and I was doing scrimmage practice with my outfit and afterwards I did homework. Other than that no, why would I play if I primarily am a Tanker and use HEAT Rounds. I typically only play on Tuesdays and Fridays so even if splash was working I wouldn't be on. So really most of your questions I can't answer. I can however dispute your idea that the game without tanks having splash damage being a good idea so I am.

2. Our armor task force has multiple skyguards up at most times, so ESF's aren't a big issue to begin with and ESF's need to direct hit tanks with rocketpods to begin with so why would splash make a difference?

Here's my question to you. Since it is hard to direct hit moving infantry with AP rounds, thus I usually use HEAT, why would my experience be more fun with splash damage reduced? It's basically taking away the reward of a near miss by having no splash and you're not always rewarded with direct hits with AP rounds to begin with. I typically only use AP rounds when I know there will be a good amount of armor present or else you're putting yourself at a disadvantage against infantry which are a bigger threat to you then tanks will ever be right now.

Ya okay, that's why I have hundreds of kills with my Mercy Max and play in outfit scrims in my Max suit getting 20-40 kill streaks? I don't play normal infantry classes because I get 15-25 FPS, which is pretty darn hard to play as infantry with especially when the server is stuttering making my FPS go down to 5 at times. That being said I normally get 40-60 Kill streaks in my tank going against the toughest Mattherson outfits and staying away from the zerg so I tend to specialize in being a Tanker because I'm good at it.

Wow okay, so if there is no difference in effectiveness between AOE and vehicle effectiveness than HE rounds should get more AOE since it doesn't impact the effectivenes of the tank using it either right? Grenade effectiveness and C4 effectiveness must not matter either based on AOE because you direct hit all your targets right with those too right?

1. A vehicle can sustain damage better than a non armored entity because it has more health, but at the same time it is also a far bigger target making it easier to hit and it can also be locked onto among other things that makes being in a vehicle more damage prone so the advantage in big battles is negated.

2. False because if you put an AP tank against a group of infantry and HEAT tank against a group of infantry and see which one does better what will happen? The HEAT tank will come out on top because of the AOE from the splash of Shells will eliminate some infantry from the splash of near misses while the AP tank will have to take additional shots to make up for it. C4 doesn't require AOE to be effective in theory either but it sure makes it way more effective now doesn't it?

3. How are HA rockets less of a factor for their intended purpose of AV when they can directly lock onto or basically hit scan you as is the case of the Lancer or be laser guided as is the case of the AV turret. The UGBL was the very spammy and and engineer could farm certs with it by sitting ontop of an ammo pack, and they still can do that just not to the previous extent. Here's a hint, AV weapons are ideally not supposed to be used against infantry so the fact they were made less of a factor makes little different since you always have an AI weapon on your infantry character. Furthermore a tank driver gets one primary weapon to use, you remove the splash of that weapon it becomes less useful against the biggest threat which is infantry.

I know. I just get a kick out of hearing a tanker admit that tanks are easy-mode.

I'm not talking about how SOE devs implemented the whole AV / AI weapons OBVIOUSLY, since the thread is about toning down / removing AoE, ie : CHANGING THE WEAPONS.
And dev could easily make a set of AI, general purpose, and AV weapons without having to rely on AoE spam.

Ofc in the current implementation AoE is more efficient, you think I'm dumb enough to not notice, seriously?


We're talking about changes to AoE here. Only this.
Coming in with arguments about vehicles and combined arms is completely out of scope, it's not the intent.
You could, OTOH, try to come up with solutions on how to build effective vehicle warfare, AI, AV, without relying on AoE. That'd be constructive, and again (this is my point since the beginning) perfectly possible.
But people keep coming back with how the whole thing is done now ....

Are some people that afraid to have to actually hit their target?

Play on Mattherson, play in a large battle with some of the better outfits at the present battle, keep your tank up without shelling at the edge of a battle, and then come talk to me and post a screen shot of your kill streak. Tanks are forgiving if you have low FPS, thus I play in tanks and in Maxes, it has nothing to do with them being easy-mode. 0/10

The way your past post was worded and your use of Hyperbole would suggest otherwise..... unless you were attempting to be clever and failed.

IMO make Tanks more expensive to buy but much harder to kill.

Make AV Rocket Launchers knock out systems such as make the main gun unusable for 10 seconds with a direct hit or cause the engine to stall out so it cant move for a few seconds. Once you get a system crit then you can do damage to the vehicle proper.

Reduce engineers repairing as its just such a breeze easily out-repairing any damage infantry can do.

Stop vehicles exploding if they collide with a butterfly or tip up slightly or catch a slight breeze. I've seen more aircraft wipe out by flying into a tree branch than with strikers or any other infantry weapon.

Also stop letting every class just about have some form of AV such as C4 or anti-vehicle mines. My HA's own rocket takes a full 5 round magazine to kill one sunderer - assuming nobody is repairing it. I cant actually destroy one if there is a single engineer repairing. Whereas one bloke with a bunch of C4 or A/T mines can one shot any ground vehicle. I no longer bother targeting vehicles (apart from Sunderers obviously) with my RL. I just use it vs Max's and Air.

Depends how it's looked at IMO.

If you tone down or remove Splash dmg and hence making vehicles less effective vs Infantry, THEN things like buffing said vehicles or removing AV weapons could also be considered.

If MBT's for example are not overly effectiving the infantry gameplay then infantry could be nerfed to not overly effect vehicle gameplay. While still retaining the combined arms aspect of vehicles being needed to counter other vehicles.

Yes, yes. You play on easy-mode because your computer can't handle anything harder. You covered this point already.

Interesting read, but you do have to consider that this is in fact a combined arms game and dealing with air and ground vehicle threats is par for the course. I understand how some people could see it as a nuisance but then I am not here for there personal enjoyment just as they aren't for mine.

Sometimes people just need to learn there limits and either improve or work together to deal with a threat and yes a good pilot is not going to go down easy unless he actually gets shot down by another pilot but the use of say a skyguard or a burster or even lock on launchers can at least deter them.

If you are at a stalemate in a battle and the other side calls in air support or it just happens to show up that's part of the game and it may suck but air superiority means air superiority after all. Best bet in this case is go for indoor installations if you can such as a biolab.

Now obviously doing all of these things is not always feasible but in the end somebody has to lose and it just so happens to be the guys without air support.

しょうがない ~ It can't be helped.

If vehicles didn't have splash, they wouldn't be the infantry killing monsters that they are now, and would instead focus on killing other vehicles, therefore infantry wouldn't need so many AV weapons to defend themselves with.

i dont think so
if anything infantry would just find it easier to farm vehicles all day without fearing death

im all for taking away HE actually but the main problem with vehicle warfare atm is that infantry are so powerful that vehicles have to concentrate on infantry more than vehicles because infantry are a greater threat than other vehicles

so yeah i shoot infantry with my tanks but only because they are so powerful that if i ignore them they wtfpwn you

Just keep splash damage and reduce ammo pool size significantly. This way vehicles need proper support (which can be cut off) or have to think about shelling at every red chevron.

Okay I have to specify my former post. I checked the ammo amounts and MBTs and Liberators do have an appropiate amount of ammo compared to RL tanks. ( I took the 40 main gun shells an M1A1 has a reference) The Prowler main gun has 50 shots available. Which sound reasonable as well compared to size and cot of the vehicle.

What the bigger spam problem seems to be are the single-manned vehicles like Fury Flashes (75 shots of 40mm grenades which need at least an ammo volume of 13 litres - can't see that on the fury), Viper Lightning (120 tank shells in a one man vehicle the size of a Cadillac) and the worst of the worst ESF with pods (which are RELOADING Pods ... instead of 12 rockets in pods it has a magazine of 36 .. )

Another solution to spam could be, that every ammo reload effectively decreases the corresponding resource counter by one for infantry, 2 for air and 3 for tanks (size of ammo and mags taken into account.)

If splash was removed we'd have to change some things around, of course. RL's could be nerfed, vehicles could be buffed, and eventually the mindset could be "I don't really need an RL except for sundies, since that's where the infantry is coming from". Whether or not that could be changed now though, hard to say.

There are many ways to approach this issue, i personally dislike splash quite a bit and think there are ways around the issues we are having currently. Tanks should be a threat against infantry just as well as infantry should be a threat against tanks but splash damage is not the only solution.

If i could have my way i would do the following things

1. Remove HE rounds
2. Add coaxial mg's to all tanks
3. Make HEAT rounds only splash with direct hits
4. Make weapons such as marauder and fury to require direct hits to splash but increase the projectile velocity
5. Remove all lockon weapons

I'm not going to list all weapons but you get the idea. This way we could get rid of the cheap "shoot a wall to get kills" issues, keep tanks a threat against infantry while greatly improving infantry gameplay inside bases.