Sunderer Deployment Shield - a bit over the top?

generally i'm running a sunderer or a Galaxy for spawn points, the new sundy shield is terrible, all it does is reward the people who pull a sundy drop it in a ****** spot and then abandon it.

for those of us who actually secure the area or find good hidden spot this is a slap in the face, as now those poorly placed sunderers are now next to invincible, there is no reason to even bother guarding them now that the sappers can't even kill it when they do manage to get to them

this change massively dumbed down sunderer placement (also the Walker change was totally un-needed its so OP now its not funny and i run dual walkers on my sundy by default)

the shield by its nature is just a bad idea and should be removed

By the same logic, in very small engagements you can't spare players to sit in the sundie to guard either. Besides, one lightning or MAX is enough to take it out.

Side note, a deployed shield sundie is the only vehicle you can sit in the gun and not fear C4 fairies. ( unless there are lots, but you should be ripping them apart with kobalts and bulldogs.

The viper also makes short work of anyone trying to spawn there. it is probably the best way to solo a shield sundie actually.

Before the patch, the problem was not that the Sundy was underpowered, the problem was that it was unmanned. I've seen countless lone Sunderers without anyone in the gunner seat. This shield just makes it anti-teamwork, and in a teamwork oriented game, that's really bad. People are not clever enough to put a infiltrator radar outside next to the Sundy and the Sundy's Radar means unequipping other things.

My solution, take scout radar completely out of the game as it is now, and make it perk exclusive, so as long as you have it in your perk slot, the scout radar will show up in any vehicle you enter. That would reinforce the safety of the Sundy, just as long as there is someone in Sundy with the perk. The same could be done for the Zoom and Night vision, make them into perks, i'm sick of getting into a sunderer with no zoom function.

Right, now you have to develop an entire strategy in these circumstances to fight an item- not a person or player mind you, an item.

Ive killed them with a max reload AP Lightning, but it really is a little bit too much. Not all fights are 184 vs 184 guys. When you're in a 1-12 battle, you only have one or two guys that can go to deal with the Sunderer. Many times Im defending a base alone. I have to have time to 1st go take out their means of respawn, then have enough time left to clear the point and retake it. Im an avid Sundy Hunter too.

Now, seeing both sides: It seems like it only takes the amount of time that it does to kill a Blockade 4 Sunderer - but thats using different methods. Im talking using a LA with 2 bricks of C4 and a Crossbow with explosive darts taking just as long as a max reload AP Tank to kill each respective Sunderer. I just feel like its a little bit too much; not a lot, but a little.

Ive used that tactic myself in small fights. I only put one level of shield on and its extremely effective just with that. In larger fights, more levels wouldnt matter anyway as it would take continuous damage and not recharge. In small fights, extra levels dont matter because one or two guys probably wont be able to deal with it alone anyway.

To add, solo AV maxes still melt sundies very effectively. Especially, if you time your AV spam to be continuous. Works like magic and second AV hand is only 250 certs

My sundy feels naked without the motion spotter outside my door. It honestly feels like I'm streaking when I switch out to put my 3 claymores down. I see fairies EVERYWHERE! Can't do it fast enough and get back to the protective warmth of the infiltrator class and that magic motion spotter.

This just in, physical indicator added to the sunderer for deployment shield in the patch today.

Yupp, they are adding shield sundy graphics to game as we speak...

Yay, whiners win again. Good job guys.

Just pull an AV MAX unit or a single engie with AV turret - all tthis works quickly against single unwatched vehicles.

Sorry, but it is a team game. One HA should not be able to take down a Sunderer single handedly without having to rearm at some point. It really is that simple. You cannot, and should not, balance a game based on off peak experiences however imbalanced they turn out to be.

Shield appears to be working as intended. Horrible thing to say, but it is true in this case.

Hmmm, I agree with this.

Sunderers are AMAZING, especially given their price they can even fight well outside of their "weightclass" but they have 2 main problems as I see it:

- It is (was?) too easy to cheeze the destruction of a sunderer. If you really wanted one dead you could ejectionseat right on top of one with an engineer loaded with explosives. Same thing with a beacon somewhere close-ish to it. You still can do much the same thing now except you just need 2 guys to coordinate. That does cut down on how often it happens but it doesn't alleviate the fact that the sunderer needs protection from surprise-bursts of damage more than anything. I think the idea is that a sunderer shoudl get destroyed either from pushing the enemy back in force, or with vehicle support such as tanks shelling it down - not to have it "assassinated" as that often ends otherwise fairly balanced battles prematurely.

- The sunderer needs a little bit of protection for the people spawning in. They need a couple of seconds to load in and get their bearing before they get fired upon. The solution is definitely NOT having them have spawn-invunerability like they do now as it just results in frustrating shooting at targets that are invincible. Instead people should spawn into the sunderer (and automatically get ejected after maybe 5 seconds after loading in fully if they don't have permission to be in the vehicle). You solve the problem of mass-spawning or full seats by just having lots of invisible "spawn seats" in the sunderer that only exist as temporary seats for those spawning in. People with access that choose to stay past those 5 seconds just get moved to unoccupied "real" seats as proper passengers. Short of the sunderer itself being destroyed the instant you load in this would cut away a lot of frustrating deaths as you'd be able to look around quick and see what's happening before hopping out. It would still be viable to supress or "camp" a sunderer but kills would be a lot less frustrating for both parties since those killed would be more ready to fight and the attackers don't have to deal with any "unkillable until loaded in" nonsense.

I agree that the current shield deign scales poorly, and that's an issue. It makes sense in a fairly large fight and seems balanced for that, but when the numbers and low (and there are LOADS of sunderers, as there often are now given their cost) it often becomes difficult to deliver the sort of mass-damage that you need in order to remove them even when they are poorly defended or not at all.

-Stigma

Perhaps the solution would be to make the shield a tiered damage blocker. Let's say for example that it has 4 visual stages of shielding (green, yellow, red) and that each level of shield doesn't absorb all that much damage (maybe about 1 HEAT shell / HA rocket worth) but they have a minimum time to expire. Let's just say 4 seconds pr shield level for the same of argument. (perhaps flickering shield culd indicate that it has absorbed its max damage and is about to fail so you can time shots).

That would essentially mean that the sunderer would be protected from any amount of burst-damage for 3x4 seconds before becoming really vulnerable. So you can drop 20 mines on it and detonate all at once and it would only take of a single shield level, but just 2 HAs spamming rockets at it would drop those shields very fast.

Basically this would give some reasonable time to react to danger and protect the sunderer without just adding a gazillion hitpoints to it. All numbers here are purely for illustration. Balance those as needed. Just an idea... seems like this would scale better to small battles while providing maybe even better protection in the biggest battles (like you can't just be focused down in seconds by a handful of people attempting to focus-fire it down)

-Stigma

The shield would've been better than the existing sunderer armors if all it did was protect against being one-shot by both mines and C4. Meaning all it would do is mitigate damage.

But on top of being outright superior to those other two armor types, it absorbs the entire two-C4 or three-Mine attack. (Not 100% sure about the three-mine attack failing to scratch the sunderer, so if someone could confirm either way that'd be informative -- though keep in mind either way it's not going to be balanced.)

And then on top of that, it regenerates that damage automatically.

It's ridiculously overpowered compared with the other options. No sunderer designed to be an AMS should take anything except sunderer shield currently.

Balance is a complete mess right now. They'd need to dramatically change things up to get back towards an interesting balance mix:

• Anti-C4 Shield
  • C4 damage is absorbed by a shield, preventing one-shots.
  • Regenerates that damage, but not other types.
• Anti-Mine Shield
  • Mine damage is absorbed by a shield, preventing one-shots.
  • Regenerates that damage, but not other types.
• Generalist armor
  • Reduces both mine and C4 damage, preventing one-shots from both.
  • Does not regenerate -- it just reduces damage.

I still see more ammo/repair sundies than shield sundies.

2 main reasons we have the silly shield.
1) People whined when their unprotected sundy got blown up
2) to many attacks were getting repelled because their sundy got blown up. SOE wants attackers to win, push forward, attackers whined, got their wish. Can't have that.

The shield is a little much, add a few engineers repairing and infantry spawning at it its practically indestructible unless you send squads after it. Literally parked mine on a hill visible from amp station and survived infantry rockets, and tower spam with 2 engies repairing. Took 3 ESF suicide bombing in a coordinated attack to get rid of it on top of the other hits.

Maybe a slight reduction to resistance to certain types of attacks.