Tank/Liberator Changes Update

You can't have both or you'll end up faster than prowlers.

The -5 without a strafe speed buff doesn't make sense though.

What? yes, it's an ESF sniper weapon... have you tried it? many Dalton pros have stated, if they hit you with a Dalton, you're in the wrong place and/or they're really good. I'm a lib gunner and with over 1500 kills in it and I'll tell you, getting a Dalton - ESF kill is still thrilling because you lob so many airballs and finally one sticks when the ESF pilot makes a wrong move. If you they manage to make a Dalton that couldn't his an ESF, you'd also make it not hit anything else. I've said it a million times, do you, the ESF pilot (or skyguard gunner) think it's right to be able to easily take down 3 guys by yourself? because that expectation is terribly unbalanced.
aren't ESFs vehicles? also, you're right but the dang Shredder is no Walker, it has the spread and range of a close range AV gun, but it would have been nice if they made it more like the Walker with the blast nerf.

sadly, with the update that just went live - even though it's toned down from what was planned - 1 max, 1 skygaurd, one lockon-jocky can take out 3 guys in a Lib. yay? but at least they kept the Air Hammer from one clipping us - sigh.

so, these changes are on live.

what do we think about these Liberator changes in practice?

things I don't understand and that are in the realm of over-correction:

• they increased the amount of shots the Dalton and Zepher take to kill things and also decrease the ammo. isn't that a double reduction?
• even with the Duster increases, it's completely un-aim-able. it just sort of pukes out slow shells in the general direction of stuff. the blast damage will help that but god forbid there are a bunch of infantry that need to be bombed and there's just one Skyguard or AA turret around (or two hexes away) the Duster and any tail gun is useless - which is always the case. on paper the roles for gun loadouts are great but the way the game is actually played EVERYTHING is shooting at aircraft and the only way to get to the intended targets is to take out the stuff protecting them. that and you can't predict what's going to be on the other side of the map when you get there, which is fine except that when I brought the "knife to a gun fight" because of the stupid timers, I can't go back to get the correct gun.by the time the timer is up, the battle has completely changed.
• if "proper risk vs reward" has been achieved with this, and you intend a Liberator to only last 1 to 3 kills (seems fair, 3 dudes get one kill each - yay?) then maybe remove the timer so we can go back and get another. otherwise, what's the point of pulling a Lib at all if it's not intended to last?

lastly, what's the point at all? I haven't played the update yet, because Lib flying is a coordinated team sport and I have to wait until pilots and gunners are in the mood, but what's the point SOE, of aircraft if they're always messing up the ground game - why have them at all? if the answer is that "it's cool to have them" or "because they're fun" why are you "nerfing fun". I mean, what if flying was so great everybody starting flying and no one was on the ground and subscriptions went up? would this be bad?

now a more nuanced "what's the point of it all?", if you continue to make Liberators and aircraft in general less effective, less fun then the old subscribers are going to get bored and leave, which I have seen happen. meanwhile, now they're even harder for new pilots to get into because now they're less effective and new pilots die even faster - time to kill is even longer. is that the end goal, make it so bad no body flies so that they're removed. if not, why the heck make these changes?

I and my air crew just recently got good enough at ESFs and Liberators to be a major threat, all after BR70. it was sooo hard to get good because better pilots owned you so quickly. but we didn't quit because we saw the reward, the reward of being one of those better crews and owning it up and we flew a lot of hours and died a lot - A LOT! and FINALLY I can down an ESF with a Dalton reliably or take down a few tanks on one run. but there are still days where we pull a LIb or a bunch of Mossies and we die instantly because the population is bad and it's 3 v 1 all the time and we quit for a few days and play the ground game for a while....
Imagine new players getting in one of these new nerfed hunks of junk and dying over and over because it's ineffective and doesn't get better - what will inspire them to keep working on it if there's no tangible reward and no old timers around to show them it's worth it?

I love the game in it's current state. I love the randomness, I love that you don't know what's coming out of the sky or around the corner at you, I even love the buggy physics. I loved learning the game and understanding what threats are coming at me, how to farm and how to not get farmed. this game doesn't have missions and levels to get through like other games, the only sense of accomplishment and reward you get out of it is getting better and beating the pants off hundreds of other challengers. if you make it too easy, you remove the only incentive to play. I'm going to give this latest patch the benefit of the doubt but I'm really concerned about the trend.

Soo... now something really strange!

We have four bellyguns: Dalton, Zepher, Shredder and Duster.

Dalton hast been antitank with a good splash in the past. Shredder had also a splash that made i really good against inf and we had the dedicated anti Inf weapon zepher.

So.. the best and easiest targets for the weapons were tanks, inf, inf.

with one of the last updates u made the shredder splash more visible because u want people to see that there is some splash.

and u came up with another dedicated anti infantry weapon. 1 anti tank 3 anti inf. And ofcourse we have the bulldog...

all over we have:
Tankbuster: Strong against tanks with some very big disadvantages but high dps.
vektor: works only against libs for me.
spur: cannot get any use out of it.

Dalton: Tanks and good against bad pilots or sometimes against good pilots if u are very lucky.
Zepher: Inf
Duster: Inf
Shredder: very good against inf and ok against some of other targets.

Drake: whatever..
Walker: good against bad pilots.
heyena: average against bad pilots.
bulldog: good against inf and against some vehicles and bad pilots.

So.. in my opinion the most weapons are designed to kill infantry... and now u say the lib is killing too much infantry!?!? that sounds like a joke for me!


finally.... i have more than 30days flying time with my tr char and atleast another 5 days with my vs and nc char. and i even spent more time on the ground! In my opinion the liberator can be very strong aslong as nobody is firing back or knows what he is doing. but if they try to counter u... u cannot do anything in a lib!

next is that i do far more kills in a tank, max or even as infantry.. and that at lower risks!

btw. shot down 5 libs in my prowler last week while they tried to tankbust me. (no anchored mode) If u know how to do it the lib is nothing more than freecerts for a tank.

I was talking about the Lib changes. I don't have as many issues with the tank changes. I can see the logic in what they are trying to do there, make the tanks nippier but shorter range to encourage more mobile offensive tanks and less parking on hills. I'm reserving judgement on how well that works out.

Libs on the other hand aren't being changed to make them more interesting, or more fun, or add new mechanics...they are being changed to make them less useful, weaker, more boring, so that less people get killed by them. They are decreasing the amount of things you can shoot at and increasing the time you spend flying around with nothing to do because you have the wrong gun

The problem with Liberators is not that they are too strong, it's that there's nothing you can do about them, because new players don't have access to any kind of mobile AA, and the AA that IS available is boring to play with. It requires no skill to use. A terrible player with Flak or lock on G2A missiles is virtually as effective as an expert, all you can do is stand around and wait for your target to make a mistake, if they don't they won't die and there's nothing you can do about it. So what ends up happening is half the players aren't capable and the other half can't be bothered to deal with Libs, so Libs farm people at will and people complain that they are overpowered.

As I've said, the solution isn't to make Libs ****, it's to make fighting them fun.

Honestly, I didn't find the nerfs to the weaponry themselves so out of line, but I heard a lot of complaining from people I fly with about the puny reserve ammo libs have now. The tailgun makes up for the deficiencies of the main weapons pretty well anyways- pulling a dalton? Camplement with a walker. Pulling a shredder? Compliment with a bulldog. This is especailly true since gunners can just switch seats. As far as libs go, buffs to reserve ammo, duster, and maybe the zephr (I don't know, I don't play of gun for zephrs) sould go a long way to putting the lib back where it needs to be. Afterwards, the craft can be rounded out with some nosegun balancing to make TB slightly worse and vector/spur counciderably better.

Regardless, I can just wait for the valkyrie to come out. Either its OP at release and I can farm with it, or they're UP and I can farm them with my ESF.

It's not really about how big the nerf was, it's more the general ethos of how SOE balances the game. It's like they want nothing to feel powerful...any situation where you might think "Wow this is great, I'm a killing machine" seems to be a bad thing according to them. They seem to want to make sure everything in the game feels just the right level of mediocre.

Lib tail guns are the perfect example. None of them are useless but there isn't a single one that is actually fun to use. I challenge you to come up with an example of less satisfying gameplay that firing a walker at a following ESF and watching the RNG spray of bullets slowly plink away at it's health while it empties magazine after magazine into your Lib, flying half way across the map only to have the ESF fly away when it starts to smoke a bit.

Ive been flying with the lib for a few hours today and honestly the ammo on all the belly guns that got nerfed is atrocious.
Dalton with 40 bullets and shredder with 1000 bullets (fully upgraded).
For ground its still playable but once you meet some enemy ESFs you just need to spew out a lot of bullets only to know where your aim is at, doing this leaves you with no ammo in only a 3-4 minute air battle and then you just die unless you can pull off an escape.

So my consensus: Libs are terrible for air combat now and by the time you are out of ammo the ESFs are not even through half of their ammo, shooting to get aim on your bullet trajectory is punishing new-average gunners awfully and having to get new ammo every 5 minutes is just asking for an enemy tank or lib to snipe you in one go.
Utterly boring playstyle now, can't shoot too much, can't fight for too long, its like a harasser in the air that needs to run away in every nice battle thats going on.

The error of the lib being to completely ignore any danger and engage the tank with the highest DPS, both with and without anchor.

Not bad from you, but really, that's down to the Lib pilot being ... well, bad.

I've farmed pretty hard with bulldog before.

Wow this patch blows. I'm not sure how many people actually use the zephyr but my friend and I have been using that for anti infantry over the Dalton because its a faster paced way to fight. It was great for hit and run bomb raids on a base in a BOMBER aircraft and most people do not expect it. If the Duster gets buffed to become effective then I'm perfectly fine with changing up our build, but as it currently stands its horrible in every way.

Meanwhile, and keep in mind I'm the pilot, the Tankbuster is still completely overpowered in almost every situation. You see more and more people flying with no gunner at all just to use the Tankbuster. I'm completely confused by this update, whats their aim in the end other then to make flying liberators worthless.

Wait, are you complaining about the zepher? Or praising it?

Complaining, most likely. It takes an extra shot to kill infantry with max-blast, and it has far less bullets in reserve.

yeah, less ammo combined with more shells to kill = a double nerf for all the belly guns besides Duster.

I've been ok with a lot of unpopular changes, you know, hoping the devs are wise and are guiding the ship better than the passengers. but this one. I'm sad, almost sick about it. we flew with the Shredder, with half the ammo, I was 88 kills away from Auraxium - in two hours I got 13 kills - 13 KILLS IN TWO HOURS with a Lib. yeah sure I can still kill armor with it but when the pilots get out and run I literally can't kill them with two clips. it's so bad, it's comical. I have video of us hanging 50m over a Heavy while he's lobbing rockets at us and my crosshairs are showing red but he's not dying. this isn't farming, this is trying to get an armor kill like SOE wants, but can't because unless the guy stops moving, he can't be killed. also not farming, killing an engineer before he runs and gets in the AA turret - can't be done now. when Heavies pop out from doorways with lockons, these guys can't be killed now because the time to kill is forever with the Shredder. I haven't tried the other belly guns (you know 88 from Auraxium) but they were all nerfed to protect precious infantry that are too dumb to run for cover. TOO FAR, I understand tweaking, I understand reducing farming, but adjusting so many things at once just sucks. it's another Harasser now where even the gameplay you want us to do can't be done.

the balance is just all wrong now, one burster max, one heavy, etc runs the Lib away.

why the weapons I love SOE, why? I'm starting to think that you have it out for me personally. first the Striker just stops getting kills and being fun, then the Fractures, then the Harasser and the Vulcan on it. these were all fun. now they are not fun. I don't even bother using them anymore it's just frustrating.

it's double XP weekend and I don't even want to play. please, SOE, look up my characters, note that I'm not playing this weekend. I'm a dad of two who also play this game and one just cancelled his membership. none of us want to play, it's depressing. do you want to loose all three of us? how many more people are you just driving away with your constant need to mess with stuff?

why don't they make it so you can de-spawn vehicles and swap loadouts after pulling a vehicle before making guns have such specific roles?

anyway, I'm a grown *** man, I don't rage quit - ever. I mean, I have taxes and car payments, health problems and work to worry about.

but tonight after trying to gun in the Liberator, I rage-quit. not because someone killed me or it wasn't fair or whatever, but because it was just so frustrating to use, when it was so much fun the night before.

gaming is blow-off-steam time, fun time and this just crushed something I was looking forward to. I am not allowed to enjoy it, SOE says I have to change how I have fun... buy a Duster, that's how you're supposed to have fun, wait 10 minutes before you can pull one with a Dalton to kill tanks and so on. god forbid we try to kill tanks and infantry - no, that's wrong and bad and we're horrible people for having these bad bad thoughts.

I feel yucky for caring at all about this. after all, in the grand scheme of things, this is not important (see above, job and taxes) but this was my mental vacation time and I don't want to feel yucky on vacation - so I think I'll just avoid this game for a while. that'll be one less hated Liberator to worry about.

(while you're at it, take the Liberator off the splash graphic and promotional material since it's so hated by the Devs and most certainly does not rain death from the sky as depicted)

Meanwhile, and keep in mind I'm the pilot, the Tankbuster is still completely overpowered in almost every situation. You see more and more people flying with no gunner at all just to use the Tankbuster. I'm completely confused by this update, whats their aim in the end other then to make flying liberators worthless. [/QUOTE]
Its because all the belly guns got nerfed into the ground and utterly useless, the only reason liberators can still do "something" is because of the tank buster, once SOE nerfs this weapon as well you won't even see 1 manned libs in the air anymore either.

I feel the exact same way, I started unlocking lib once I hit BR 90 and ive been playing and learning how to become good at it for a long time now, this latest patch killed my game-play and if they keep nerfing it I might just stop playing this game all together.
Its like every time I try to perfect a certain play-style SOE decides to turn everything upside down and I need to re-learn things all over again, its so frustrating to have no solid ground in this game.

Instead if tweeking things in tiny amounts so we can easily handle the changes they insist on going overboard with either nerfing/buffing things, one patch they buff it, next patch they tripple nerf it...

Based on the feedback I heard on TS today, the zepher is fine.
Not good at AA (nor should it be), ok at AV (not great, but that's a good thing), decent at AI(as it should).

All in all it seems to fit the idea of a "HEAT" gun in this game.

+ you still get a decent bulldog in the tail for the time being.

That was before the lib nerf. So u needed 7 AP rounds to kill a lib and this did not happen in one week or so. That happend in ~10 minutes. btw 3 of the 5 pilots are well known lib pilots on miller and definitly no noobs or whatever.

the point is that i kill more libs with my tank than i got killed by libs. FAR MORE!

ah.. and high dps or whatever.. i'm playing all three factions and in my opinion the prowler is the easiest tank to kill in the game.

what i want to say is that libs are not that strong if u pay atleast a little attention while driving a tank or playing infantry.

Well when i have enough time for waiting until the COF bloom decreases after each shot i just can use the Zepher/Bulldog aswell and at least get some kills